American ideals

Front matter

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Preface

Elihu Root, speaking not long since before the Union League Club of Philadelphia, said : "The tendencies of a nation are all that count."

Tendencies in a nation as in an individual are but the shadows of ideals, consciously or unconsciously held in the mind and giving direction and dynamic to the forces of the will. The diflFerence between men and nations depends upon their answer to the question, "What makes life worth living? " Find out a country's ideals, and with some certainty you can predict her destiny. Is her ideal the song of the sword ? Weltmacht oder Niedergang ? Then her rewards will be in the terms of the sword, or in brute force. Is her chief and all-absorbing ideal money? Then she must give up hope of reaching the highest culture of mind and spirit. The things we imagine and admire in the germ cells of our brain inevitably mould us; they become our masters. Ideals are things to be chosen with some care, for whether we know it or not they are the gods before whom we pour out our

X PREFACE

costliest libations, the idols the light of whose faces colors by reflection or refraction all our worship.

It is not altogether the attainment or the non-attainment of our ideals that indicates our progress or our power. Dreams are like ocean horizons — they recede at our approach. But if we, like true sailors, keep our ships ever trained toward those high retreating skies regardless of wind and bad weather, we, like they, are pretty sure to sail "beyond the sunset."

It has been with the effort to catch some of the inner colors from which the efficient artist hand of the American is painting his national and individual portrait, that I have written the following pages. By looking into the energetic faces of our streaming crowds, as well as by drawing some distinguishing contrasts between ourselves and other nations, I have tried to point out some of the strongest currents in our present idealism, and I have also ventured to indicate here and there an embankment that must be strengthened to restrain the flooding tides threatening our dearest hopes.

If I have succeeded in any measure in fixing upon the moving ideal forces that rise so fleetingly to the surface in our varied and vast Kfe

PREFACE xi

and enterprises, it has been largely due to a wide circle of men and women who have afforded me the inestimable opportunity to view our contemporary modern activities through their eyes.

The testimony of certain of these people, chosen with some care and representing twenty different states in the Union, I have given in the chapter entitled "An American Symposium."

c. s. c.

The Red House hy the Lake, W estcolangy Pa., August, igiS'

Contents

CHAPTER PAGB

Preface ix

I. What is an American? 3

Chapter I What Is An American?

The bigger the work, the greater the joy in doing it. The whole-hearted striving and wrestHng with difficulties, the laying hold with firm grip and level head in calm resolution of the monster and tugging and toiling and wrestling at it, to-day, to-morrow, and the next day, until it is done — it is the soldier's creed of forward, ever forward; it is the man's creed that for this task he has been born.

Henry M. Stanley.

CHAPTER I

WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?

America, like Africa, is a land of surprises. To a foreigner. Uncle Sam's citizens have been difficult to analyze, not because they are so many and various, but by reason of their rapidly changing moods. Like the Oriental, who, just as you think you have at last discerned his true nature, does something to upset entirely all your calculations, the American has the habit of disarranging the customary characterizations of the foreigner by unlooked-for manifestations of traits as puzzling as they are complex.

The perplexity and paradox of the American character has been summarized by two French collaborators, who wrote some years since under the title: "L'Oncle Sam Chez Lui** —

Formed out of an aggregation of different races, the American people forms a race by itself — individual, and from many points of view very superior.

It is as ridiculous to say that it is solely Anglo-Saxon as that it is Latin. The American has neither the egotism of the Englishman nor the arrogance of the German, but he possesses their practical sense; he has not the light-heartedness of the Frenchman, but his suppleness; he has not the obsequious politeness of the Italian or the Spaniard, but a profound respect for established institutions. He is a man of surprises. One appreciates and esteems him, one does not judge him.

In a sense the problem of disentangling from the intricately woven web of a new and rapidly evolving civilization the inner threads of motive and ideal, is not mitigated by the fact that the attempt is made by an American and not a stranger. The tendency to overlook the obvious, and the ever-present impediment of narrow perspective and lack of detachment, are the almost inevitable accompaniments of an interpretation, ever so desirously fair, made by one who writes of his own and not an alien land. It may be a solacing compensation to the native expounder to believe that what he loses in landscape he makes up in light, in that illuminating and intuitive understanding rising out of common participation and traditions, almost a prerequisite in the endeavor to pierce below the external signs of national changes to the elemental nature and vital aims of a race.

What is an American? The question is saved from ineptitude by our present need to know well its answer. With the guns of Europe reverberating almost in our very ears, with America omnipresent in the hopes and hearts of wellnigh every nation beneath the circHng stars, with our forty-eight closely united commonwealths opulent beyond even their fairest dreams, with our great cities struggling in the gestation of millions of as yet unformed alien populations, with scientific and industrial achievements staggering the imagination, with possibilities exceeded by nothing save our problems, it is a fit time to know ourselves and our ideals.

In the light of our responsibilities, it is encouraging to be able to say that the American is first of all a man of action. He is the personification of the hfe dynamic. Activity is the basic law of his being. He is the lover of huge and hard tasks, for these furnish resistance to his energetic will. Obstacles to him, as to Napoleon, are just things to be overcome. Dr. Bowring once wrote to a tyrannous French minister: "Sir, I am calm but energetic." The

American is seldom calm, but he is invariably energetic. Every active adjective is the epitome of him — enthusiastic — inquisitive — eager — earnest — affectionate — vivacious — loquacious — sprightly — adaptable — acquisitive — extravagant — busy — hurried — zestful. He is the highly vitaUzed embodiment of the moving life principle, always livingly creative, never static.

The citizen of the United States is by nature and by training a business man, and business to him spells busyness. His first and foremost ideal is to work; "immersed in business" is the colloquial phrase. A sickroom to him is a prison, and there is nothing more forlorn beneath the sun than an American business man on an extended holiday. Mr. S. S. McClure in his autobiography has drawn a composite picture of a business man in these Western lands: "At college," he writes, "everything went well with me until Friday night, and then a blank stretched before me. It always seemed a hard pull until Monday. I was never able to lay aside the interests and occupations of my Hfe with any pleasure, and I have always experienced a sense of dreariness on going into houses where one was supposed to leave them outside. I have never been able to have one set of interests to work with and another to play with. This is my misfortune but it is true."

Work to the American is more welcome than the flowers in May. Many a man will tell you that he has never stopped working long enough to consider or to formulate his ideals. The American exemplifies Oscar Wilde's epigram that it's easier to do things than to talk about them. The late president of Chicago University, Dr. William R. Harper, when dying said that he looked forward to the next world as a place where he would have more work to do. The American plans many times the amount of work he can perform and as a consequence he frequently resembles the old jockey's horse — "all action and no go" — but he is seldom an idler. Even the rich get nervous prostration and the sanitarium habit in their ceaseless efforts to spend their money for social betterment and in "uplift" activities. The days are not long enough for the American to accompHsh; he therefore steams ahead under forced draft, and usually at the top notch of his physical reserve. His play even takes the form of fighting contests, and he has coined the phrase, "speeding up," to express the tightening of the bands on his machines and the ever-increasing pressure upon his workmen to keep pace with his engines. The significance of Hfe to him is doing something and doing it strong. He is explosive often, staccato and shrill of speech, since his pace is too fast to cultivate the low notes. His tones are consistent with the crashing noise of industrial and commercial and cityfilled battle that is music in his ears. To live *'Diogenically" would be a sheep's paradise, and idle leisure is flat degeneration. In America the non-producer and the idler are brotherly terms, and both are far more damning epithets than the sobriquet, "beachcomber," to the colonizing Britisher. Action with enthusiasm is a biological necessity in this land, and the typical denizen of these United States (as Europeans say we like to call our country) possesses rather generally what Wordsworth called : "The self-applauding sincerity of a heated mind."

It is because of this active, intense, and closely concentrated note to which the American pitches his song, that he becomes vulnerable to the charge of provinciaHsm and a bored spectator of the historic and the far-away. The man whose slogan is to "act, act in the living present," cannot be expected to linger long over such headlines as the "Ruins of Timgad," or the "Memoirs of Potiphar"; these belong to the Past, and he is distinctly a disciple of the Present. Was it not Dr. OHver Wendell Holmes who said that "an American finds it as hard to call back anything over two or three centuries old as a sucking pump to draw up water from the depth of over 33 feet and a fraction!"

The point not to be overlooked is that the man who will look blank at the suggestion of neo-Platonism, and wake up when you begin to talk about building a fifty-story skyscraper in nine months, has a marvellous capacity and a striking avidity for present-day motivity. One would not think of characterizing the American as Carlyle pictured Novalis — "he sits" — but rather in that more moving phrase in which the Scotch apostle of action once wrote to his friend, Henry Inglis: "DiHgence, unwearied, steadfast Endeavor: Kke the stars unhasting, unresting! This is the sceptre with which man rules his Destiny; and though fragile as a reed, removes mountains, spiritual as well as physical." Into every exertion and essay, into every discussion and every dream, the American presses this inherent active impulse; without it he would be a simulacrum merely of his national or his racial type. It is at lo American Ideals

times his weakness; it is more often a magic key unlocking for him every storehouse of power and opening doors of deliverance from every dilemma.

Closely mixed with the active currents of his blood is the American's penchant for saving time. It is almost a mania in this country where specialists for organizing and eliminating and systematizing have created in these latter days a full-grown profession — Efficiency Engineering, a new vocation of timesaving, a brandnew germ working as methodically and fatally as natural law against the national octopus of waste and extravagance. The idea is popular since it fits the nature of a people who are always striving to get ahead, even ahead of themselves. In a world eminent for its beforehandedness and anticipation, where the people read the evening edition of their newspapers at noon, where the Saturday Evening Post is issued on the previous Wednesday, where the September numbers of the monthly magazines appear early in August, the lines of Seneca are appropriate:

Who murders Time, He crushes in the bud a power ethereal, Only not adored.

What Is an American ii

The American free translation of these Hnes reads somewhat more practically than the Roman original in Benjamin Franklin's working room: "Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."

The "Yankee notions" of our father's days were in the majority of cases time or material saving notions. The inventions of the Yankee sons have enlarged these ideals of time preservation until now we sow and reap and gather into barns at the tune of timesaving machinery; we print, we sew, we wash our clothes, we write our letters, we clean our cotton, we Hght our homes, we talk to our distant friends, we annihilate space in our subways and on our Hmited trains, all by timesavers made in America. We have carried our individuality in these inventions around the world. Not long since I received a letter from a Bedouin chief from the edge of the Lybian desert asking me to buy and send to him five hundred tons of coal for use in his American-made steam machinery now employed on thousands of acreage in the Fayoum district of the Nile country. With my own eyes I have seen our country's steam plows and threshers and familiar American harvesters not only in the valleys of the Upper Nile, but in the millet fields of India and in the distant islands of the Southern Seas. Any traveller, indeed, can feel the touch of home in the Orient, with the buzz of the Singer sewing machine in his ears — always a wonder of time-preserving Yankee genius, as omnipresent in these antipodal lands as is the typewriter, the telephone, the cotton gin, and the Edison incandescent lights.

This almost affectionate regard for time, while it may be a secondary aim, is linked intimately with his work and the things he most earnestly desires. The business man wants more time to do business, but he also wishes his saved time to spend on the particular occupations at home or abroad that are nearest his heart. The American is by no means the blind and benighted hustler he is so frequently painted by the transient stranger; he has as a rule a method in the madness of his plunging, importunate life. He works on the very sensible principle that if a man is ever to get any time for himself, or his family or friends in the swift competitive struggle of American modernity, he must move quickly and withal save every false motion. He is not made up fundamentally on a pattern so different from that of the rest of the world of men. The dimatic conditions and the prodigahty of nature have something to do with his ideas and his ideals. He happens to be born in that section of the universe where clothes are in vogue and where bananas and cocoanuts upon which some people subsist grow sparingly. He has learned, moreover, that the person who is not careful about saving his time is like the man who preserves the like attitude to his money — he never has any. In other words, he is determined, however much he may enjoy his work, to get it done and be moving on, and to that worthy end he is eager to employ every friction-removing and time-husbanding device known to the contriving and talented Yankee brain. I It is intelligible to the keen observer that quality of work and service are sacrificed at times on this altar of expedition and dispatch — • idols looming large in the American's eyes. / American ideals also gather about big things; they flourish in the atmosphere of immensities. The man in America has discovered that in this Land of Promise it is easier to do the big thing than the small thing.\ A business man came to me not long ago with the lament that he failed in his undertaking because he had attempted too small a proposition — it only involved a million dollars — "If I had only made it a five-million-dollar scheme," said he ruefully, "I could have reached the attention of the big financiers.'*

America is a quarter section, not a square foot country. It is the land of the biggest lakes, the longest rivers, the fastest trains, the tallest buildings, the land of the huge corporation, and the spacious farm, and the prodigious industrial enterprise. The inhabitant of this country of bigness feels the urge of these immeasurable interests; therefore his fascination for large figures and enormous scales of measurement. He feels that he must keep up to the pace of business, or get out of the game, or be run over. One advance step necessitates a longer stride to follow. He must always have his "next." A story is told of an American humorist who stammered. He removed from Baltimore to New York, where he was asked by a friend if he made as many jokes as he used to do in Baltimore.

" M-m-more ! " he replied. " B-b-bigger town !" It is not altogether edifying to the foreigner to hear the American drifting easily into conversation about his country that produces more cotton and more corn than all the rest of the earth combined, a wheat crop doubling that of any other nation, or coal mining a million tons yearly in advance of any land under the sun. There are occasions when modesty should restrain even the arithmetic-loving citizen from telHng the Englishman that his country trebles the Britisher^s production of steel and iron, or confronting the made-in-Germany subject with the particularly unpalatable fact that the United States doubles the Teuton's output in the same commodity; or, for example, when he regales his guest from across the seas by telling him of the factory that turns out 1,500 locomotives yearly, or the Chicago Harvester plant that covers nearly a hundred and fifty acres, and employs upward of twenty-five thousand workers. Big and swift business always fascinates the American mind. The automobile company at the Panama Exposition in San Francisco, assembhng and putting together an automobile every six minutes, never fails of an attentive audience. It is small wonder that the bigness obsessed Yankee gives the impression of having assimilated the contents of a world almanac, and one understands why as a tourist in other climes his questions naturally take the form of ** How big is it? How many? How high? How long? How many inhabitants?" or "What did she cost?"

This spirit of bigness is contagious. It gets into the blood of the foreigner as truly as it intoxicates the native-born American in the great machine shops and throbbing mills of the Middle West and East, where the whirring of the spindle glands, and the grinding of the steam shovels, and the rattle of the drills upon the skyscrapers, are more enthralling music than the pipes of a great organ of a European cathedral. There is a sense in the American heart of realizing his ideals, and this sense makes the dreamer and the worker one. There IS so little space between his visions and his realities that he rarely gets time to become a visionary. As he works in his factory and welds iron to iron, there is something in the air that tells him that the hammers of other tens of thousands like him are ringing on the new anvils of his own land, and though the thought is inarticulate, it is never quite absent from him that the clanging of his machinery is heard around the world. The American has been called provincial, he is noted for the fact that he believes his country can produce and can do whatever can be produced or accomplished in any land upon the globe. Is he so much deluded in his thinking?

Certainly the nation's wealth recently reported by the Bureau of the Census is not intended to discourage his quenchless optimism regarding materialities. These figures show that the rate of increase from 1904 to 191 2 reveals the fact that in the former year the estimated wealth of the country, exclusive of tax-exempted real property, was $100,000,000,000, and in 191 2 this wealth had mounted to $175,000,000,000, or an advance of 75 per cent, for eight years, an increase at the rate of 95 per cent, in a decade. This is a progress of material increase surpassing anything heretofore recorded in this country, as it distances any like comparison in any nation beneath the sun.

The manufacturer of machinery, as well as the worker with tools and implements, finds a decided stimulus to speeding up his brain and his hand in the realization that the value of manufacturing machinery, tools, and implements, increased from two and one half billion dollars in 1900 to three and one third billion dollars in 1904, and to six and one tenth billion dollars in 191 2, thus surpassing the rate of increase in real estate or in the value of general wealth. The electrical engineer, moreover, and every one of his myriad workers, who never cease to revere the name of Edison, will tell you, with a pride of being a real part of it, that the value of telephone systems increased from four hundred million dollars in 1900 to a figure far above the billion dollar mark in 191 2. The manufacturer or the resident who shows you through his electric-light plant will feel something not upon the program as he tells you that the privately owned central electric-light and power stations grew in volume in America between the years 1900 and 191 2 from four hundred million dollars to more than two bilHon, representing one of the most striking developments in this scientific age.

Why does this invigorate the American or the newly naturalized citizen? It is not simply that he may be able to gloat over his less fortunate brothers in other lands, though at times he reveals an unchastened eagerness to play up his country's material progress. It is because he feels that he is an integral part of this opportunity, that he can have a share in this ever more abundant increase. He realizes, in fact, that his share only waits upon his renewed efforts, his enlarging aim, and his more persistent patience. He reads the figures of the per capita wealth of his country, which amounted in 1850 to ^308 for each inhabitant, and he compares this with the fact that in 191 2 this per capita wealth rose to ^1,836 for each inhabitant, or an increase in the eight years from 1904 to 191 2 of nearly 50 per cent., or at the rate of about 63 per cent, in a single decade. The whole effect upon him is one of stimulation, and a sense of being in a country that has not stopped, but rather is just crossing the threshold into its real maturity; it impresses him with the sense of youth and limitless resource. It makes him believe not only that what man has done he can do, but as he judges from the achievements before his eyes, he comes to the conclusion that he can do what no man has ever done before by reason of the enlarged opportunities stretching before him. If he has been called a "smiling braggart," it is because of his confident belief in seeming impossibilities. His visions are of deeds that only the bold can conceive.

He not only sees the future painted in the terms of a prosperity whose boundaries have not yet been limited, but also in the terms of personalities as rich and as miraculous as his country's progress. His contemporary Hfe all about him "shines in the sudden making of splendid names." His association is with men, to use Lowell's phrase, with empires in their brains, crownless empires of social and industrial progress. He dares with an abandon that includes, not simply the past, but also the cooperation of his children and his children's children. He is far less the creature of the moment than is the Britisher who has sighted the limitation of opportunity. He feels the mariner's instinct that

" Leagues beyond these leagues there is more sea.'*

There must come a time, perforce, when this irresistible, youthful confidence in great material achievement will be tempered by closer confines. At present, however, the tide is running strong out to the sea of unbordered bigness.

Because of his devotion to big activities and innumerable timesaving devices, which may be explained by the consideration of his environing geography and his success in the scientific subjugation of the universe, the American has been called of all men everywhere the most \ thoroughly devoted apostle to the almighty dollar. This has been called the "post-card view'' of Americans. It is true and it is not i true. Taken alone it is like all such statements, lacking both background, perspective, and atmosphere.

To be sure the American likes money, for it is the means toward the accomplishment of his huge desires. If he is peculiar in this respect of wanting money to the Englishman, to the Frenchman, to Germans, Egyptians, Japanese, and Chinese, it is only because he has outstripped certain of these people in the success and rapidity with which he has acquired it; and also because, possibly, of his habit of not being so carefully guarded in the revelation of his ideals in this direction. ' As a matter of fact, the economic ideal in some form or other, and for some purpose or other, is the underlying aim in every nation, unless we have failed to judge rightly national tendencies as they exist to-day. The "full dinner pail'' may not be a cultural phrase, but it is exceedingly elemental in the Hfe of nations; as the old Ettrick shepherd, James Hogg, once remarked, "I defy the utmost power of language to disgust me wi' a gude denner."

That one nation wants money for military and manufacturing purposes, another for commerce, another for artistic or pleasurable satisfactions, or still others for making of their people a world power, or for the chance to worship their ancestors more elaborately, is a matter irrelevant to the common initial aim to get wealth. Outside of a few ignorant fellaheen in the Nile valley and certain East Indian ryots who secrete or bury or melt up English gold for their wives' ornaments, by reason of the long memories of Turkish tax oppression, or the natural suspicion of the British Raj whom their isolation and their superstition have prevented them from understanding, I fail to find many hoarders of money for money's sake. To call any people on earth a dollar-worshipping nation, save as dollars signify opportunity to follow their particular ideals, is to bandy words meaninglessly.

Of no people on earth is the reputation of worshipping gold per se further from the fact than the Americans. The enormous material expansion of the country and the consequent amassing of wealth and the free spending of the same has thrown out of balance at times the proper ratio between wealth and the purposes for which it has been consciously acquired. People at home and abroad have not been slow to raise the danger signals, and a sensitive people have occasionally exhibited signs, outward chiefly, of disparaging the means by which the nation's ideals have been advanced. Mr. Carnegie, for example, has talked and written considerably about the disgrace of dying rich, and Mr. Rockefeller has shown his diary of systematic giving for the edification of young men — both withal after the event of great riches. As a proof of the inconsequence of money, it is about as influential in changing private, pubUc, or world opinion on these matters as the wideeyed wonder of Great Britain that Germany should see the value or necessity of colonies.

The average American goes on beheving that money is power, power to get more money, yes, and also power to secure the comforts and the necessities of homes and happy families, travel, and enough of leisure to take the grind out of work. In America, as throughout the world, the economic urge is powerful and omnipresent. The citizen sees that the vast majority of family troubles trace their beginnings, if the records of the divorce courts are dependable, to financial struggles and misunderstandings regarding money. He finds himself in the relentless grip of the high cost of living in the great cities; he feels the necessity, never before so obligatory, of sending his children to personally supervised private schools which will mitigate in some measure the everdecreasing attention he has been able to give their moral and social training at home. The rapidly expanding interest in art, music, books, and country life, is a sword of Damocles over his head, whose edge is sharpened by the words, **Get money or I fall!" The well-nigh prohibitory price of eating and feeing in the first-class city restaurants in order that dancers and fiddlers may live; the price of being sick, the fashion of getting well, the support of the changing season in clothes, the sovereignty of the automobile, and the calamitous fear of being written down to American oblivion under the title of not "looking prosperous" — these with many another reason, as strong and as specious, make niggardliness a sin more difficult to find in America than cocoanuts in Iceland. It is partially, not wholly, for causes such as these that the rank and file of Americans, unlike the middle-class Englishman or Continentals in their satisfied resignation to caste or autocratic fixities, feel in their democratic training that they have a right to have, and indeed must have, everything or nearly everything that any one else possesses, thus atoning in part for early disadvantages of birth and education. In other words, money is the hand of America's achievement. It is the grade up to her higher mountain. It is not her head nor her heart, but it is one of the mighty means toward her individual and her national strength. Americans are ideaHsts engaged in a practical task, and wealth is one of the rungs in the ladder by which they mount. At times,looking at things superficially, it would seem that Americans, like Emerson's sea shells washed clear of the sea.