Under Dispute/Are Americans a Timid People?
AS the hare is timid—no! They have made good their fighting record in war. They have proved themselves over and over again to be tranquilly courageous in moments of acute peril. They have faced "their duty and their death" as composedly as Englishmen; and nobler comparison there is none. The sinking of the Titanic offered but one opportunity out of many for the display of a quality which is apt to be described in superlatives; but which is, nevertheless, an inherent principle of manhood. The protective instinct is strong in the native American. He does not prate about the sacredness of human life, because he knows, consciously or unconsciously, that the most sacred thing in life is the will to surrender it unfalteringly.
Of what then are Americans afraid, and what form does their timidity take? Mr. Harold Stearns puts the case coarsely and strongly when he affirms that our moral code resolves itself into fear of what people may say. With a profound and bitter distaste for things as they are, he bids us beware lest we confuse "the reformistic tendencies of our national life—Pollyanna optimism, prohibition, blue laws, clericalism, home and foreign missions, exaggerated reverence for women, with anything a civilized man can legitimately call moral idealism. . . . These manifestations are the fine flower of timidity, and fear, and ignorance."
Mr. Stearns is a robust writer. His antagonists, if he has any, need never fear the sharp thrust of an understatement. He recognizes the tyranny of opinion in the United States; but he does not do full justice to its serio-comic aspects, to the part it plays in trivial as well as in august affairs, to the nervousness of our regard, to the absurdities of our subordination. There are successful newspapers and periodicals whose editors and contributors walk a chalked path, shunning facts, ignoring issues, avoiding the two things which spell life for all of us—men and customs—and triumphantly presenting a non-existent world to unobservant readers. Henry Adams said that the magazine-made female has not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam; but our first father's experience, while intimate and conclusive, was necessarily narrow. We have evolved a magazine-made universe, unfamiliar to the eyes of the earth-dweller, and unrelated to his soul.
When this country was pronounced to be too democratic for liberty, the epigram came as close to the truth as epigrams are ever permitted to come. Democracies have been systematically praised because we stand committed to democratic tenets, and have no desire to foul our own roost. It is granted that equality, rather than freedom, is their animating principle. It is granted also that they are sometimes unfortunate in their representatives; that their legislative bodies are neither intelligent nor disinterested, and that their public service is apt to be distinguished for its incapacity. But with so much vigour and proficiency manifested every day in private ventures, we feel they can afford a fair share of departmental incompetence. The tremendous reserves of will and manhood, the incredible insufficiency of direction, which Mr. Wells remarked in democratic England when confronted by an overwhelming crisis, were equally apparent in the United States. It would seem as though a high average of individual force and intelligence failed to offer material for leadership.
The English, however, unlike Americans, refuse to survey with unconcern the spectacle of chaotic officialdom. They are a fault-finding people, and have expressed their dissatisfaction since the days of King John and the Magna Carta. They were no more encouraged to find fault than were other European commonalties that kept silence, or spoke in whispers. The Plantagenets were a high-handed race. The hot-tempered Tudors resented any opinions their subjects might form. Elizabeth had no more loyal servant than the unlucky John Stubbs, who lost his right hand for the doubtful pleasure of writing the "Gaping Gulf." Any other woman would have been touched when the culprit, raising his hat with his left hand which had been mercifully spared, cried aloud, "God save the Queen!" Not so the great Elizabeth. Stubbs had expressed his views upon her proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou, and it was no business of his to have views, much less to give them utterance; while his intimation that, at forty-six, she was unlikely to bear children was the most unpardonable truth he could have spoken.
The Stuarts, with the exception of the second Charles, were as resentful of candour as were the Tudors. "I hope," said James the First to his Commons, "that I shall hear no more about liberty of speech." The Hanoverians heartily disliked British frankness because they heartily disliked their unruly British subjects. George the Third had all Elizabeth's irascibility without her power to indulge it. And Victoria was not much behind either of them—witness her indignation at the "Greville Memoirs," "an insult to royalty," and her regret that the publishers were not open to prosecution.
It was no use. Nothing could keep the Englishman from speaking his mind. With him it was not only "What is there that a man dare not do?" but "What is there that a man dare not say?" Many a time he paid more for the privilege than it was worth; but he handed it down to his sons, who took care that it was not lost through disuse. When Sorbière visited England in 1663, he was amazed to find the "common people" discussing public affairs in taverns and inns, recalling the glories as well as the discomforts of Cromwell's day, and grumbling over the taxes. "They do not forbear saying what they think of the king himself." In the "Memoirs" of the publisher, John Murray, there is an amusing letter from the Persian envoy, Mirza Abul Hassan, dated 1824, and expressing his opinion of a government which permitted such unrestrained liberty. Englishmen "do what they like, say what they like, write what they like in their newspapers," comments the Oriental with bewildered but affectionate contempt. "How far do you think it safe to go in defying your sovereign?" asked Madame de Pompadour of John Wilkes, when that notorious plain-speaker had taken refuge in Paris from his incensed king and exasperated creditors. "That, Madame," said the member from Aylesbury, "is what I am trying to find out."
In our day the indifference of the British Government to what used to be called "treasonable utterances" has in it a galling element of contempt. Not that the utterances are invariably contemptible. Far from it. Blighting truths as well as extravagant senilities may still be heard in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square. But the orators might be addressing their audiences in classic Greek for any token the London bobby gives of listening or comprehending. "Words are the daughters of earth; deeds are the sons of Heaven." The bobby has never heard this grandiloquent definition; but he divides them as clearly in his own mind into hot air and disorderly conduct, and he takes his measures accordingly.
In the United States, as in all countries which enjoy a representative government, censure and praise run in familiar grooves. The party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out. This antagonism is duly reflected by the press; and the job of arriving at a correct conclusion is left to the future historian. As an instance of the fashion in which history can be sidetracked by politics, the reader is referred to the portraits of Andrew Jackson as drawn by Mr. Beveridge in his "Life of John Marshall," and by Mr. Bowers in his "Party Battles of the Jackson Period."
The first lesson taught us by the Great War was that we got nowhere in political leading-strings, and that none of our accustomed formulas covered this strange upheaval. It was like trying to make a correct survey of land which was being daily cracked by earthquakes. Our national timidity entrenched itself behind a wilful disregard of facts. It was content to view the conflict as a catastrophe for which nobody, or everybody, was to blame. Our national intrepidity manifested itself from the outset in a sense of human responsibility, in a bitter denial of our right to ignorance or indifference. The timidity was not an actual fear of getting hurt; the intrepidity was not insensitiveness to danger. What tore our Nation asunder was the question of accepting or evading a challenge which had—so we at first thought—only a spiritual significance.
In one of Birmingham's most genially nonsensical stories, "The Island Mystery," there is an American gentleman named Donovan. He is rich, elderly, good-tempered, brave, kind and humorous; as blameless in his private life as King Arthur, as corrupt politically and financially as Tweed or Fiske; a buyer of men's souls in the market-place, a gentle, profound and invulnerable cynic. To him a young Irishman sets forth the value of certain things well worth the surrender of life; but the old American smiles away such a primitive mode of reckoning. The salient article of his creed is that nothing should be paid for in blood that can be bought for money; and that, as every man has his price, money, if there is enough of it, will buy the world. He is never betrayed, however, into a callous word, being mindful always of the phraseology of the press and platform; and the reader is made to understand that long acquaintance with such phraseology has brought him close to believing his own pretences. "In the Middle West where I was raised," he observes mildly, "we don't think guns and shooting the proper way of settling national differences. We've advanced beyond those ideas. We're a civilized people, especially in the dry States, where university education is common, and the influence of women permeates elections. We've attained a nobler outlook upon life." It reads like a humorous illustration of Mr. Stearns's unhumorous invectives.
Sociologists are wont to point to the American public as a remarkable instance of the herd mind—a mind not to be utterly despised. It makes for solidity, if not for enlightenment. It is the most economical way of thinking; it saves trouble and it saves noise. So acute an observer as Lord Chesterfield set store by it as unlikely to disturb the peace of society; so practical a statesman as Sir Robert Walpole found it the best substratum upon which to rear the fabric of constitutional government. It is most satisfactory and most popular when void of all sentiment save such as can be expressed by a carnation on Mother's Day, or by the social activities of an Old Home Week. Strong emotions are as admittedly insubordinate as strong convictions. "A world full of patriots," sighs the peace-loving Honourable Bertrand Russell, "may be a world full of strife." This is true. A single patriot has been known to breed strife in plenty. Who can measure the blood poured out in the cause that Wallace led, the "sacred" human lives sacrificed at his behest, the devastations that marked his victories and defeats? And all that came of such regrettable disturbances were a gallows at Smithfield, a name that shines like a star in the murk of history, and a deathless impulse to freedom in the hearts of a brave people.
The herd mind is essentially and inevitably a timid mind. Mr. Sinclair Lewis has analyzed it with relentless acumen in his amazing novel, "Babbitt." The worthy citizen who gives his name to the story has reached middle age without any crying need to think for himself. His church and his newspaper have supplied his religious and political creeds. If there are any gaps left in his mind, they are filled up at his business club, or at his "lodge," that kindly institution designed to give "the swaddled American husband" a chance to escape from home one night in the week. Church, newspaper, club and lodge afford a supply of ready-made phrases which pass muster for principles as well as for conversation.
Yet stirring sluggishly in Babbitt's blood are a spirit of revolt, a regard for justice, and a love of freedom. He does not want to join the Good Citizens' League, and he refuses to be coerced into membership. He does not like the word "Vigilante," or the thing it represents. His own sane instinct rejects the tyranny of the conservative rich and of the anarchical poor. He dimly respects Seneca Doane and Professor Brockbank when he sees them marching in the strikers' parade. "Nothing in it for them, not a cent!" But his distaste for the strikers themselves, for any body of men who obstruct the pleasant ways of prosperity, remains unchanged. In the end—and it is an end which comes quickly—he finds that the one thing unendurable to his soul is isolation. Cut off from the thought currents of his group, he is chilled, lonely, and beset by a vague uneasiness. He yields, and he yields without a pang, glad to get back into the warm familiar atmosphere of class complacency, of smugness, of "safety first"; glad to sacrifice a wavering idealism and a purposeless independence for the solid substance of smooth living and conformity to his neighbours' point of view.
The curious thing about Mr. Lewis's analysis is that back of the contempt he strives to awaken in our souls is a suspicion that Babbitt's herd mind, the mind of many thousands of Americans, is, on the whole, a safe mind for the country. It will not raise us to any intellectual or spiritual heights, but neither will it plunge us into ruin. It is not making trouble for itself, or for the rest of the world. In its dull, imperfect way it represents the static forces of society. Sudden and violent change is hostile to its spirit. It may be trusted to create a certain measure of commercial prosperity, to provide work for workers, and safety for securities. It is not without regard for education, and it delights in practical science—the science which speeds transit, or which collects, preserves and distributes the noises of the world. It permits artists and authors to earn their daily bread, which is as much as artists and authors have any business to expect, and which is a very precious privilege. In revolutionary Russia, the intelligentsia were the first to starve, an unpleasant reminder of possibilities.
What Mr. Lewis implies is that, outside of the herd mind he is considering, may be found understanding and a sense of fair play. But this is an unwarranted assumption. The intelligence of the country—and of the world—is a limited quantity; and fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals. Katharine Fullerton Gerould, in an immensely discontented paper entitled "The Land of the Free," presents the reverse of Mr. Lewis's medal. She contends that, as a people, we have "learned fear," and that, while England has kept the traditions of freedom (a point on which Mr. Chesterton vehemently disagrees with her), we are content with its rhetoric. But she finds us terrorized by labour as well as by capital, by reformers and theorists as well as by the unbudging conservative. Fanatics, she says, are no longer negligible. They have learned how to control votes by organizing ignorance and hysteria. "In company with your most intimate friends you may lift amused eyebrows over the Fundamentalists, over the anti-cigarette organization, over the film censors, over the people who wish to shape our foreign policy in the interests of Methodism, over the people who wish to cut 'The Merchant of Venice' out of school editions of Shakespeare. But it is only in company with your most intimate friends that you can do this. If you do it in public, you are going to be persecuted. You are sure, at the very least, to be called 'un-American.'"
It is a bearable misfortune to be called un-American, because the phrase still waits analysis. The only sure way to escape it is by stepping warily—as in an egg-dance—among the complicated interests sacred to democracies. The agile egg-dancer, aware that there is nothing in the world so sensitive as a voter (Shelley's coddled plant was a hardy annual by comparison), discountenances plain speech on any subject, as liable to awaken antagonism. There is no telling whom it may hit, and there is no calculating the return blows. "To covet the truth is a very distinguished passion," observes Santayana. It has burned in the bosom of man, but not in the corporate bosoms of municipalities and legislative bodies. A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candour.
The plain-speaker may, for example, offend the Jews; and nothing can be more manifestly unwise than to give umbrage to a people, thin-skinned, powerful and clannish, who hold the purse-strings of the country. Look what happened to Sargent's fresco in the Boston Library, which angered the Synagogue it inadequately represented. Or he may offend the Irish, who control wards, and councils, and local elections; and who, being always prompt to retaliate, are best kept in a good humour. Or he may offend either the Methodists or the Roman Catholics, powerful factors in politics, both of them, and capable of dealing knock-down blows. A presidential election was once lost and won through an unpardonable affront to Catholicism; and are we not now drinking soda-fountain beverages in obedience to the mandates of religious bodies, of which the Methodists are the most closely organized and aggressive?
It is well to consider these things, and the American press does very soberly and seriously consider them. The Boston "Transcript" ventured, it is true, to protest against the ruling of the Navy Department which gave to Jewish seamen of the ancient faith three days' leave of absence, from the thirty-first of March, 1923, to the second of April, with such "additional time" as was practicable, that they might attend the rites of the Synagogue; while Gentile seamen of the Christian faith enjoyed no such religious privileges. The newspapers in general, however, discreetly avoided this issue. "Life" pointed out with a chuckle that the people who disapproved of President Lowell's decision to exclude negroes from the Harvard Freshman dormitories "rose up and slammed him"; while the people who approved were "less vocal." When Rear Admiral Sims said disconcertingly: "The Kentucky is not a battleship at all. She is the worst crime in naval construction ever perpetrated by the white race"; even those reviewers who admitted that the Admiral knew a battleship when he saw one, were more ready to soften his words than to uphold them.
The negro is a man and a brother. He is also a voter, and as such merits consideration. There is no more popular appeal throughout the length and breadth of the North than that of fairness to the coloured citizen. Volumes have been written about his rights; but who save President Roosevelt ever linked responsibilities with rights, duties with deliverance? Who, at least, save President Roosevelt ever paused in the midst of a scathing denunciation of the crime of lynching (a stain on the Nation's honour and a blight on the Nation's rectitude) to remind the black man that his part of the contract was to deliver up the felon to justice, that his duty to his country, his race, and his manhood was to refuse all sanctuary to crime? A few years ago an acute negro policeman in Philadelphia recognized and trapped a negro criminal. For this he received his full measure of commendation; but he also received threatening letters from other negroes whose simple conception of a policeman's part was the giving of shelter and protection to offenders of his own race.
The nastiest bit of hypocrisy ever put forward by wrong-doers was the cant of the early slave-dealers about Christianity and the negroes' souls. The slaves were Christianized by thousands, and took kindly to their new creed; but their spiritual welfare was not a controlling factor in the commerce which supplied the Southern States with labour. That four fifths of the labourers were better off in America than they would have been in Africa was a circumstance equally unfit to be offered as a palliative by civilized men. The inherent injustice of slavery lay too deep for vindication. But now that the great wrong has been righted (and that three hundred thousand white men laid down their lives in the righting is a fact which deserves to be remembered), now that the American negroes are free, Christian, educated, and privileged (like artists and authors) to earn their daily bread, they cannot candidly regret that their remote ancestors had not been left unmolested on the coast of Guinea. They have their grievances; but they are the most fortunate of their race. The debt the white men owed them has been paid. There is left a mutual dependence on the law, a mutual obligation of self-imposed decency of behaviour from which not even voters are exempt.
Timidity is superimposed upon certain classes of men who are either tied up with red tape, like teachers, soldiers and sailors, or unduly dependent upon other men, like legislators, and like clerics in those churches which are strong enough to control the insubordinations of the pulpit. Of all these classes, legislators are the worst off, because their dependence is the most ignoble and disastrous. So long as a future election is the controlling influence in their lives, they have no alternative but to truckle to any compact body of voters that bullies them into subjection. So long as they take for their slogan, "We aim to please," they must pay out their manhood for the privilege of pleasing. In 1923 Senator Borah charged Congress with "organized cowardice" in the matter of the soldiers' bonus. It was a borrowed phrase neatly refitted. The spectacle of a body of lawmakers doubling and turning like a hare in its efforts to satisfy the servicemen without annoying the taxpayer struck the Senator—and others—as the kind of exaggerated subjection which paves the way to anarchy.
Timidity was as alien to the soul of Henry Adams as it is alien to the soul of Admiral Sims. He was not a man who skirted the hard places on the road, or who was so busy keeping both feet on the ground that he feared to take a step. But he was conscious of the inquisitorial spirit which is part of the righteousness of America, and which keeps watch and ward over all the schooling of the country. "Education," he wrote, "like politics, is a rough affair, and every instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest."
The policy of shutting one's eyes and holding one's tongue is highly esteemed in all professions, and in all departments of public service. The man who can hear black called white without fussily suggesting that perhaps it is only grey; the man who evades responsibility, and eschews inside criticism (like the criticism of a battleship by an admiral); the man who never tells an unpalatable truth "at the wrong time" (the right time has yet to be discovered), is the man whose success in life is fairly well assured. There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness. The first belongs to brave and lonely men; the second is the endearing quality of men whose sagging energy and cautious content can be trusted to make no trouble for their kind.
The plain-speaking of soldiers and sailors is reprobated and punished, but their discretion is less conspicuously rewarded. They are expected to be undeviatingly brave in the field and at sea; but timorous and heedful when not engaged in fighting their country's enemies. They are at a disadvantage in times of peace, strait-jacketed by rules and regulations, regarded with suspicion by sociologists, with hostility by pacifists, with jealousy by politicians. A grateful Republic dismisses the men who fought for her, and cherishes her army of office-holders. When General Wood and Admiral Sims spoke some unpleasant truths, nobody ventured to call these truths lies; but everybody said that General Wood and Admiral Sims were not the proper persons to speak them. As the proper persons to speak them never would have spoken them, the country would have been spared the discomfort of listening, and the "common quiet," which is mankind's concern, would have been undisturbed.
So far, then, is Mr. Harold Stearns right in accusing us as a nation of timidity. So far, then, is Mrs. Gerould right in accusing us of exaggerated prudence. That something akin to timidity has crept into the hearts of Englishmen, who are fortified by a long tradition of freedom and common sense, is evidenced by the title given to two recent volumes of scholarly, and by no means revolutionary, papers, "Outspoken Essays." Frankness must be at a discount when it becomes self-conscious, and constitutes a claim to regard. The early essayists were fairly outspoken without calling anybody's attention to the fact. The contributors to those great and grim "Reviews" which so long held the public ear were outspoken to the verge of brutality. A comfortless candour was their long suit. Never before in the history of English letters has this quality been so rare as to be formally adopted and proclaimed.
Santayana, analyzing the essentials of independence, comes to the discouraging conclusion that liberty of speech and liberty to elect our lawmakers do not materially help us to live after our own minds. This he holds to be the only positive and worthwhile form of freedom. He aims high. Very few of us can live after our own minds, because the tyranny of opinion is reënforced by the tyranny of circumstance. But none of us can hope to live after our own minds unless we are free to speak our own minds; to speak them, not only in the company of friends (which is all Mrs. Gerould grants us), but openly in the market-place; and not with a blast of defiance, but calmly as in the exercise of an unquestioned prerogative. Under no other circumstance is it possible to say anything of value or of distinction. Under no other circumstance can we enjoy the luxury of self-respect. There is an occasional affectation of courage and candour on the part of those who know they are striking a popular note; but to dare to be unpopular, "in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble word," is to hold fast to the principles which speeded the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock, and Penn to the shores of the Delaware.