The validity of American ideals

Contents

Paob

Introduction 7

Preface 9

Introduction

George Slocum Bennett^ a graduate of Wesleyan University in the class of 1864, showed his hfelong interest in the training of youth for the privileges and duties of citizenship by long periods of service as a member of the Board of Education of his home city, and as member of the boards of trustees of Wyoming Seminary and Wesleyan University.

It was fitting, therefore, that, when the gifts made by himself and family to Wesleyan University were combined to form a fund whose income should be used "in defraying the expenses of providing for visiting lecturers, preachers, and other speakers supplemental to the college faculty," it should have been decided that the primary purpose should be to provide each year a course of lectures, by a distinguished speaker, "for the promotion of a better understanding of national problems and of a more perfect realization of the responsibilities of citizenship," and to provide for the publication of such lectures so that they

8 INTRODUCTION

might reach a larger public than the audience to which they should, in the first instance, be addressed.

To give the third course of lectures on this Foundation, the joint committee for its administration appointed by the board of trustees and by the faculty, selected Shailer Mathews, Dean of the Divinity School in the University of Chicago. The varied and brilliant career of this teacher, administrator, editor, author, and lecturer, has brought him into contact with the people of almost every part of this country. His extensive studies in the fields of religion, history, economics, and sociology have peculiarly fitted him for the task of correlating and interpreting his impressions of American life and character in such a way as to bring out the real significance of those national ideals which have become a part of the American tradition, and in which we are accustomed to find the justification for our type of democracy.

William Arnold Shanklin.

David George Downey.

Albert Wheeler Johnston.

Henry Merritt Wriston.

Frank Edgar Farley.

Preface

Any brief discussion of the history and significance of America is exposed to the danger of falling into theoretical criticism or nebulous generalization. I am not sure that I have escaped either danger. The validity of American ideals deserves a much fuller treatment than these lectures permit.

Yet I feel that an understanding of the constructive ideals of our nation is indispensable to an intelHgent citizenship. Especially in an age like ours, which is suffering from the chaotic conditions that have always followed great wars, is there need to see American Hfe in its perspective and to realize its inner spiritual forces.

There is no lack of men who are eager to point out the shortcomings of America. There are all too many who can see in our social order only an opportunity for arousing the spirit of conflict which a war demands for its success. But the psychology of peace is radically different from that of war. While we are fighting even for the noblest ideals our unity must rest largely upon a common enmity. But in times of peace we must aban-

10 PREFACE

don hatred as a basis of social unity unless we can perform the almost miraculous feat of making it serve as a basis of united assault upon social injustice and other evils which are a part of our human lot.

A nation in peace has seldom been able to utilize the attitudes developed in war. Even the common hatred which has united us in the face of an enemy becomes a source of internal misunderstandings and conflicts. Now that we have ceased to fight, we must learn to cooperate. The position of our nation as the final arbiter in the great war is being duplicated in the more difficult field of the reestablishment of civihzation and the making of a better world. The problem of the citizen is more complicated and difficult than that of a soldier.

In these lectures I have tried to help the generation that bore the brunt of the war to take up the course of development interrupted by that great tragedy. If, despite the obvious insufficiency of presentation, I have in any way succeeded in my effort, I shall feel that I have to some degree fulfilled the purposes of the founders of the lectureship under whose auspices I spoke.

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

GEORGE SLOCUM BENNETT FOUNDATION

LECTURES

For the Promotion of a Better Understanding of National Problems and of a More Perfect Realization of the Responsibilities of Citizenship.

THIRD SERIES— 1920-21

LECTURE I

THE TEST OF IDEALS

An ideal is a working hypothesis of betterment. Its validity is a question of morals, to be established by its ability to draw men toward itself. In morals abstract tests are worthless. An ideal with only theoretical beauty is a bit of social algebra. We are all tempted to drift off into such algebra whenever we discuss social affairs. Accustomed as we are in mathematics to arrive at exact proof by the elimination of concrete realities, we almost instinctively adopt the same method in dealing with human affairs. But even in algebra a formula is true only according to what its letters represent. We say complacently x-\- y = z. But if ^r = a Bolshevist and y = 2i capitahst, how shall we describe s? Similarly in the discussion of social ideals. Innumerable discussions make the word "democracy" a sort of intellectual X which can be thrown into various combinations, each like itself a disembodied reality. We forget that a society is really composed 13 of folks with their passions and prejudices and ambitions. The vahdity of an ideal under such conditions cannot be determined until we consider the actual forces which gave it birth and with which it is concerned. An ideal in one society might be reaction in another.

Failure to realize this commonpladF truth lies beneath much of the discontent of wellmeaning persons who cannot understand why their description of an ideal is so far out of line with actual affairs. A radical invariably neglects the human element. He wants things done immediately. He is impatient with process. Once having convinced himself that a proposal is good in itself he wants everybody to adopt it at once. Yet to urge ideals while oblivious to folks and folk-ways may be as fatal as it would be to give water in unUmited quantities to a man dying from thirst.

The vahdity of an ideal can be judged by two standards — its origin and its effects. Negatively such judgment is easy. If it springs from socially repudiated motives, reaction, and willful disregard of contemporary human rights ; if it is so inappKcable to a given social order as to produce social anarchy, selfishness, and disregard of personal rights, an ideal is invalid. Such origins we often find proposed as the justification of the actions of privileged classes in periods of reaction Uke that of the post-Napoleonic era, and as the support of demagogues and terrorists in almost every revolution. Positively, however, valuation of an ideal is not so easy. Yet if an ideal originates in desires to improve the best conditions known to its champions, in forward-reaching rehgions and governments, in intelligence and strong personalities ; if with full recognition of the achievements and actual possibilities of conditions to which it is applied, it makes toward wider opportunity for giving as well as getting justice, and is capable of effective embodiment in social institutions, it certainly has every reason for being judged valid. And unless social conditions have radically changed, its efficiency in the past warrants hope for its validity in the future.

All this is particularly true when we speak about national ideals. It is not uncommon to find political philosophers and literary reformers setting forth contrasting pictures of America as it is and as it ought to be. Having organized an ideal in disregard of the citizens who must express it, they at once grow discouraged because they see such a difference between it and the reahties of American hfe. A very considerable literature of this sort is at your disposal. But you cannot judge a nation so easily. Our poets, our philosophers, our statesmen, may interpret our national life as expressing certain ideals but such interpretations are by no means infallible. Recall, for example, the interpretation given America by De Tocqueville. The real ideals of America are immanent within its historical tendencies. Their value is pragmatically to be known in the effects of the process of national growth. I

There are, of course, abstract and philosophical considerations with which we may properly estimate the validity of American ideals, but they are only secondary. They do not furnish the ideals. They must not be searched for them any more than you would search More's Utopia for the pohcy of j Lloyd George. The only ideals with ' which we are now concerned are those which are found by a study of American history and its tendencies. Having found them, we shall have simultaneously discovered their vahdity, for they were in the social minds which have made America. The only serious question remaining will be not whether they can be justified by abstract ethical considerations, but whether conditions have so changed that the ideals which have been a part of our history can have equal influence in the future.

I do not pretend in these lectures to take a neutral attitude. In an exclusively historical study neutrality is imperative, but when it comes to a valuation of one's own nation one has a right to be swayed by the history he studies. For my part, I do not dissemble pride in America despite its faults. Six years ago I found myself before audiences in Japan endeavoring to set forth the real meaning of American history. The haze of the Pacific is distorting not only when one looks from the West, but when one looks from the East. There were few things, I found, of which we suspected the Japanese, of which the Japanese did not suspect us. It was an altogether new experience. In justification of our own attitudes I was led to plead our international relations. Without boasting I found it possible to say things of the United States which no other nation could say of itself. Every fair-minded critic of our country must see them. When with wider study I have tried to see the meaning of developments in the United States this patriotic conviction has been deepened. I realize that we have glaring faults. I have too many friends in other countries and I have read too many discussions of America to be left in ignorance in this regard. I am ready to admit that we dishke to catalogue these faults, preferring to give at least a conventional respectability to questionable men and deeds — as an old family not so far from Middletown still marks the empty grave of one of its members, "Lost at sea," although he really was rescued, but failed to report at home, married a new wife, and estabhshed a new family in distant New Hampshire! But the history of America is the history of cautious pioneering in social and political idealism. The American patriot as he pleads for his nation does not need to be a chauvinist or an apologist; he needs simply to tell the story of our development.

American history is more than the history of people in America. The annals of a nation may be of value as facts, but they may also be quite valueless. Supposing that some one should discover the full record of the life of an Esquimau tribe, who except anthropologists, would be interested? A nation to have a really significant history must have contributed something significant to social evolution. Other nations must have benefited by its experience. Other peoples must have been taught by it to avoid mistakes. Humanity must have found within its political and social experiments material for its betterment. True, there are peoples whose history we must study for other and more sinister reasons. There have been pirate nations who have left a wake of blood across history; contagiously decadent nations who have been the breeding spot of moral weakness and death; vast undeveloped but isolated peoples whose wild awakening may ruin civilization. But America belongs to none of these classes. Its history is a part of the world history. It has made its contribution to the forces which have transformed human life. It has never been a pirate nation ; and if only it remains true to its ideals, it will never be a decadent or an anarchic nation.

Yet we must face our moral liabilities if only to assure ourselves that our problem is not merely rhetorical.

This is a bad day for idealists. During the Great War we were told that all things were to be made new. It was a rare virtue that was not to find itself embodied in the world after the war. Our young men were to come back and remake the church, the state, the family, and even ourselves. Those of us who knew something about history and the effect of past wars upon human society indulged in no such millennial dreams. It is as difficult to make a historian enthusiastic as it is to make an old man hopeful. He knows too much about human life and its ever-recurring cycles.

But historians were comparatively few, and we were all desperately engaged in helping carry forward a struggle for the very life of existing society. Our hopes were nourished by oratory, sacred and profane, and the struggle of the day was regarded as a prophecy of the coming day. When the armistice came and the war closed, our optimists looked about for justification of their faith. Their search brought disappointment and lamentation. Army life had left the young men of America about where it found them. The church had found no uplift, industry no brotherhood, politics no new vision. An orgy of spending and a frenzied determination to enjoy oneself and forget the war deadened our consciences. No wonder disillusioned idealists grew cynical !

It is not difficult, you see, to point out conditions which very properly bid us pause in easy-going belief that ideahsm is regnant in America. But we have much farther to go before pessimism is exhausted. In 1916 the prevailing voice of the American people was for some sort of participation in a League of Nations. In 1920 we heard a general revival of the plans for isolation and the demand that America be prepared to defend herself against a world with which she has not undertaken to cooperate.

It may be argued that the war has left us with a great loyalty to the flag and a keen sensitiveness to our national honor. Our critics admit that such is the case, but aver that it is a long way from national honor to national ideals. They point out that at the very time when this nationalism has been developing there has been an exodus of intelUgent foreigners from America back to their homes. In a recent number of the Atlantic a writer reports that he questioned two hundred Norwegians who were on board a steamer saiKng to Norway and found that only about ten per cent ever expected to return to America. Inquiry brought the almost universal reply that America was all right "except for the people that run it," and that these returning emigrants, many of whom were naturalized Americans, had had enough of America. My own opinion is that such disillusioned folk will soon be seeking return passage — for there is nothing so deadly to an immigrant's homesickness as a visit to his homeland ! But none the less this disaffection must be counted among our Uabilities.

More serious are doubts as to what we have been taught to regard as our chief idealistic heritage. You will find in many colleges those "young intellectuals" who insist that American democracy is based upon an outgrown philosophy and is to be renounced as mid- Victorian. Individualism, nationaUsm, and the refusal to plunge altruistically into the maelstrom of Irish independence and international socialism, not to say Bolshevism, are held by such intellectuals as evidence of hopelessly bourgeois minds. As for individualism, there are indeed few among the intellectuals who would say a word in its favor. In their eyes it has disappeared beyond the iridescent haze of class consciousness, never to reappear — except when some class-conscious person undertakes to cooperate with some other class-conscious person! Then it is that the original stuff of which humanity is made reasserts itself, for, paradoxical as it may seem, some of the most individuahstic persons alive are those who plead most convincingly for social solidarity. Back of much of this criticism is suppressed jealousy expressing itself in rhetorical dreams. A friend of mine went to Russia just after the first revolution. As he came to the frontier he stepped up to the guard and extended to him his fehcitations for the success of the revolution by which the Czar had been deposed. He happened to have with him a picture of George Washington, and he showed it to the guard. The Russian looked at it indifferently, without any of the admiration which my friend had supposed one republican should show to the father of republics. But all the soldier remarked was, "He looks like a comfortable gentleman." The full meaning of this retort appeared later in Petrograd when my friend asked a cab driver what he meant by a bourgeois person. He rephed, "Someone who was comfortable under the old regime." Parlor socialists and revolutionary intellectuals with an income may well give serious thought to that answer of a man who was not a dilettante revolutionist!

There is in America a growing number of people who hate those who have been comfortable and those conditions which have made for their comfort. They respond no more than would the Russian soldier to the praise of our democracy. They believe our democracy is only another term for a capitalistic social order. They will have none of it. They believe in socialism and communism. And they are consistent. There is a very great difference between what we call democracy and their ideals. The bitterest denunciation of the United States we have heard lately has come from men of this sort. Kings have disappeared, but American democracy has new enemies in men and women who believe it is outgrown.

Even among those who are not champions of class-consciousness there is the suspicion that our institutions, however successful in the past, are incompetent to direct the progress of the future. Such suspicion is sometimes not frankly expressed, but even among some good Americans sincerely devoted to forwarding human interests and welfare, there is a frank avowal of doubt as to the capacity of American institutions to serve what they regard as democracy. Nor is it difficult for such critics to point out the basis of their apprehensions. American life is confessedly by no means perfect and the tension born of the interplay of economic groups in a vast population scattered over an immense area certainly grows no less. The enthusiasm for liberty in the eighteenth-century sense of the word has certainly waned, and the idea that the best government is one which interferes least with the individual citizen has been replaced by a prompt recourse to governmental activity whenever crises emerge. Political forms which were effective in a sparsely settled country and a nonindustrial civilization are said to be breaking down under our present conditions. Such critics of America do not despair of their country, but they swell the number of those who entertain the hope of a radical change from a representative government chosen by individuals to one of universal referendum.

Nor are political and economic conditions the sole object of attack. With the distrust of democracy as a system of government, goes a distrust of nearly everything that belongs to control set up by the past. Goodness is said to be a form of sham morality. Marriage, religion, law, all alike are treated by one or more groups of the "disillusioned" as debilitating survivals which are outgrown. If you venture a defense of experienced idealism, the response of these antidemocrats is apt to be increased vociferation, the shrug of superior shoulders, and the charge that you are bourgeois and mid- Victorian. With the radical there is no more awful anathema!

II

Are these strictures upon American life and its ideals legitimate? Are the ideals which have characterized the past of America's national hfe still valid? Are we to stand in terror of to-morrow because we have outgrown the virtues of yesterday ? Are our newly naturalized citizens capable intellectually of appropriating these ideals of the fathers? Have they experiences in which Americanism can root itself? It is to such questions as these that I would direct your attention. It may be that to some of you they may seem as academic as they did to me when first I heard them raised years ago, but no such opinion can be held by those who really study the tendencies in to-day's national life. Questions like these cannot be drowned in jazz music. America at the present time is passing through a crisis in morality which cannot be met wisely or effectively if a generation indifferently turns from idealistic ends, measures everything in terms of money, and substitutes amusement for self-control.

Nor am I thinking only of the foreignborn among us. We who constitute the parental generation may very likely be too concerned about the ways of young people who are to follow us upon the stage of American history, but we cannot overlook the fact that our own youth was spent under conditions our parents could understand. We may have been wayward, but we were wayward within the hmits of American conventions and political thinking. Parents and children had a history in common and spoke the same political language. We never questioned America. But is this as true to-day as it was a generation ago? Successive waves of continental immigration diluted our patriotic inheritance and unsettled our national habits, and unless one's observation is quite misleading, we need to educate the rising generation as well as immigrants in the genuine ideals of their country. We cannot suffer them to assume that one sort of social idealism is as good as another.

We all need to be Americanized; we all need to guard against being continentalized.

The continent of Europe never has had the same pohtical or social history, experience or ideals as England and America. The two divisions of European life have always found it hard to understand, much less appreciate, one another. Not merely political and economic rivalry but a different social structure and process have kept them apart. To-day these two ancient opponents are actually intermingled in America. Their opposition continues. Continental pohtical and social ideals have been and are being frankly heralded as superior to those developed in America. To an extent all but startling the war found American education filled with this distrust of American institutions and constructive hopes. The validity of our ideals must now be defended not only conventionally but aggressively before the bar of a generation of Americans who have been subjected to the influences of German and Russian class-idealism. The difficulty of one generation's being understood by its successor lends poignancy to one's efforts to share with young men and women our confidence in the outlook for a genuine America. Having had no share in the production of the American nation, taking their good fortunes as a matter of course, the patriotism of too many students has been darkened by the criticisms of those who at heart are champions of ideals, institutions, and a social organization developed in a different social order. Let us grant, if we must, that there are misunderstandings between the generation that caused the war and the generation that won the war ; but let us not concede that American ideals are any less valuable because men died for them. Once recognized, they will make their own way; once understood, they become the common divisor of generations. And there is no better way to make loyal Americans than to evoke spiritual unity through an understanding of American ideals embodied in American history and institutions. If we cannot "sell" American ideals to the new millions in America, we cannot hope to propagate them by force. If our ideals are not valid, the Republic is indeed in danger. Revolution is the invariable answer of one idealism to another that stubbornly persists after its institutions have become the privileges of its champions.

III

We have said that the vahdity of an ideal must be judged first by reference to its origin. How shall this test apply to our own ideals? Did they spring from materialistic ambition, from a longing for power? Or did they spring from the noblest experience of their time? Are they children of pride and comfort or of spirituality? Have the dominants in their pedigree been those of conquerors or of martyrs? The answer is one of facts. And facts are eloquent. The social movements which gave birth to our ideals were the noblest of their day. ^ To appreciate the origin of American ideals one must recall that they are not simply those which can be found in America. Time would fail if we were to catalogue ideals proposed and propagated on our continent. Many of them are fantastic, some of them are foolish, a few of them are dangerous. Some of them are the more or less illegitimate and sterile progeny of genuine American stock. But original American ideals are developments of English experience and morals. In their earhest forms they immigrated hither and grew up with the country.

It is sometimes said that the ideahsm of the American Constitution was derived from French philosophy. The opposite is more nearly true. French philosophy was born of English political and social experience. The French Revolution was inspired by the American Revolution. The rights of men were derived from the rights of Congregationalists and frontiersmen. They are the children of history, christened and registered by philosophy.

Anglo-Saxon idealism of the seventeenth century is the parent of American ideals. This historical fact is of first importance. German idealism is sentimental and singularly divorced from political and social institutions. French idealism becomes a pyrotechnic enthusiasm giving rise to a program like that of Napoleon or a defense like that of Verdun. But Anglo-American idealism is neither sentimental nor a matter of enthusiasm. It is matter-of-fact — the product of social practice, often born of tragic conflict with privileges men have sought to fasten upon progress. Such restraint has always failed. Just as the rights of Enghshmen long ago became the rights of foreigners in England, so have the rights of Englishmen in America become generahzed into rights which everybody ought to have — the rights of man.

Of course, our national history has abounded in impossible promises as to what would come to pass if some party or other should win at an election. But such iridescent promises have never been taken very seriously by a sophisticated electorate. A poUtical platform is not a program. It is rather something upon which a candidate may stand while he is deciding which way the people at large choose to go. This fact saves even the sometimes Munchausenlike optimism of our platforms from hypocrisy. For the hope of to-day if only it is born of justice has been the forecast of the reality of day after to-morrow. The people have been relentless arbiters. Selfishness and quackery have been sensed and discarded as an unworthy ancestry for sane hopes.

We have had every now and then dream-pictures of a better world which was to come when certain theories and dreams had been realized. But they have not long endured. They did not spring from the common struggle for justice and betterment. As the path of the explorer is strewn with impedimenta abandoned because found unusable, is the history of America strewn with cast-off ideals which have had momentary attention but have never seriously been put into life. Their origin has been in speculation rather than in groupmorality born of experience.

The validity of American ideals, I repeat, can be established first of all by the fact that they are the legitimate children of Anglo- Saxon history as it has preserved and extended human rights, both social and individual. They are ours because their development has both determined and been determined by the direction in which our history has proceeded. Springing from practical idealism they have made greater idealism practical. Not, of course, that all our history is ideahstic, but this at least is true : if you sight across the two centuries or more during which America has actually been in the process of organization, you can discover that despite variations in pace, despite struggles and even civil war, there are certain outstanding tendencies toward larger personal values in our national life. It is they which give character to American history. They are not superimposed upon American life. They did not, full-grown, antedate American institutions in the sense that they were simply appropriated by America as Japan has appropriated western culture. They are developed expressions of germinant hopes and faiths that gave our history inner selfdirection. They were born not of dreams but of experience. They are the outgrowth not of self complacency, but of the highest spiritual loyalties, joined with experience in making the good of to-morrow spring from the best of to-day.

In the second place, our ideals are vahd because they sprang from the practical experience of religious groups seeking political liberty.

I make no apology for such a recognition of the worth of rehgion. If one puts one's self at the beginning of our American history, say about 1600, he will see plainly that among the germinal forces which went to produce our modern world was the rise of religious liberty. I am aware that an effort is now being made to minimize the importance of this religious element in our origins in favor of an emphasis upon economic life. And certainly economic motives were not strangers to the men who organized the Virginia Company and its fellows. Far be it from the historian to undervalue the role which codfish and fur-bearing animals, tobacco and pines played in the seventeenth century. The Pilgrims and the Puritans, as truly as the Frenchmen, were not above such unspiritual goods. But to think of the colonists of New England as primarily or 1 predominantly exploiters of virgin resources is to confuse the Adventurers who stayed at | home and waited for their ships to come in, with those strong souls who undertook to found new states where they might follow their conscience and worship their God, as well as make their living. It is true that these pioneers may have been embryo capitalists, but their institutions and ideals were more than those of money makers. Any attempt to separate economic, political and religious forces in the history of colonial America will lead to misinterpretation of facts.