Chapter III

It is the same thing with service. The older generation has attempted an insidious compromise with the new social democracy by combining the words “social” and “service.” Under cover of the ideal of service it tries to appropriate to itself the glory of social work, and succeeds in almost convincing itself and the world that its Christianity has always held the same ideal. The faithful are urged to extend their activities. The assumption is that, by doing good to more individuals, you are thereby becoming social. But to speak of “social democracy,” which of course means a freely coöperating, freely reciprocating society of equals, and “service,” together, is a contradiction of terms. For, when you serve people or do good to them, you thereby render yourself unequal with them. You insult the democratic ideal. If the service is compulsory, it is menial and you are inferior. If voluntary, you are superior. The difference, however, is only academic. The entire Christian scheme is a clever but unsuccessful attempt to cure the evils of inequality by transposing the values. The slave serves gladly instead of servilely. That is, he turns his master into a slave. That is why good Christian people can never get over the idea that Socialism means simply the triumph of one class over another. To-day the proletarian is down, the capitalist up. To-morrow the proletarian will be up and the capitalist down. To pull down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree is the highest pitch to which Christian ethics ever attained. The failure of the older generation to recognize a higher ethic, the ethic of democracy, is the cause of all the trouble.

The notorious Victorian era, which in its secret heart this older generation still admires so much, accentuated all the latent individualism of Christian ethics, and produced a code which, without the rebellion of the younger generation, would have spiritually guaranteed forever all moral caste divisions and inequalities of modern society. The Protestant Church, in which this exaggerated ethic was enshrined, is now paying heavily the price of this debauch of ethical power. Its rapidly declining numbers show that human nature has an invincible objection to being individually saved. The Catholic Church, which saves men as members of the Beloved Community, and not as individuals, flourishes. When one is saved by Catholicism, one becomes a democrat, and not a spiritual snob and aristocrat, as one does through Calvinism. The older generation can never understand that superb loyalty which is loyalty to a community,--a loyalty which, paradoxical as it may seem, nourishes the true social personality in proportion as the individual sense is lessened. The Protestant Church in its tenacious devotion to the personal ideal of a Divine Master--the highest and most popular Christian ideal of to-day--shows how very far it still is away from the ideals and ethics of a social democracy, a life lived in the Beloved Community.

The sense of self-respect is the very keystone of the personality in whose defence all this individualistic philosophy has been carefully built up. The Christian virtues date from ages when there was a vastly greater number of morally depressed people than there is now. The tenacious survival of these virtues can be due only to the fact that they were valuable to the moral prestige of some class. Our older generation, with its emphasis on duty, sacrifice, and service, shows us very clearly what those interests were. I deliberately accuse the older generation of conserving and greatly strengthening these ideals, as a defensive measure. Morals are always the product of a situation; they reflect a certain organization of human relations which some class or group wishes to preserve. A moral code or set of ideals is always the invisible spiritual sign of a visible social grace. In an effort to retain the _status quo_ of that world of inequalities and conventions in which they most comfortably and prosperously live, the older generation has stamped, through all its agencies of family, church and school, upon the younger generation, just those seductive ideals which would preserve its position. These old virtues upon which, however, the younger generation is already making guerilla warfare are simply the moral support with which the older generation buttresses its social situation.

The natural barriers and prejudices by which our elders are cut off from a freely flowing democracy are thus given a spiritual justification, and there is added for our elders the almost sensual luxury of leaping, by free grace, the barriers and giving themselves away. But the price has to be paid. Just as profits, in the socialist philosophy, are taken to be an abstraction from wages, through the economic power which one class has over another, so the virtues of the older generation may be said to be an abstraction from the virtue of other classes less favorably situated from a moral or personal point of view. Their swollen self-respect is at the expense of others.

How well we know the type of man in the older generation who has been doing good all his life! How his personality has thriven on it! How he has ceaselessly been storing away moral fat in every cranny of his soul! His goodness has been meat to him. The need and depression of other people has been, all unconsciously to him, the air which he has breathed. Without their compensating misfortune or sin, his goodness would have wilted and died. If good people would earnestly set to work to make the world uniformly healthy, courageous, beautiful, and prosperous, the field of their vocation would be constantly limited, and finally destroyed. That they so stoutly resist all philosophies and movements which have these ends primarily in view is convincing evidence of the fierce and jealous egoism which animates their so plausibly altruistic spirit. One suspects that the older generation does not want its vocation destroyed. It takes an heroic type of goodness to undermine all the foundations on which our virtue rests.

If then I object to the ethical philosophy of the older generation on the ground that it is too individualistic, and, under the pretense of altruism, too egoistic, I object to its general intellectuality as not individual enough. Intellectually the older generation seems to me to lead far too vegetative a life. It may be that this life has been lived on the heights, that these souls have passed through fires and glories, but there is generally too little objective evidence of this subjective fact. If the intuition which accompanies experience has verified all the data regarding God, the soul, the family, and so forth,--to quote one of the staunchest defenders of the generation,--this verification seems to have been obtained rather that the issues might be promptly disposed of and forgotten. Certainly the older generation is rarely interested in the profounder issues of life. It never speaks of death,--the suggestion makes it uncomfortable. It shies in panic at hints of sex-issues. It seems resolute to keep life on as objective a plane as possible. It is no longer curious about the motives and feelings of people. It seems singularly to lack the psychological sense. If it gossips, it recounts actions, effects; it rarely seeks to interpret. It tends more and more to treat human beings as moving masses of matter instead of as personalities filled with potent influence, or as absorbingly interesting social types, as I am sure the younger generation does.

The older generation seems no longer to generalize, although it gives every evidence of having once prodigiously generalized, for its world is all hardened and definite. There are the good and the criminal, and the poor, the people who can be called nice, and the ordinary people. The world is already plotted out. Now I am sure that the generalizations of the truly philosophical mind are very fluid and ephemeral. They are no sooner made than the mind sees their insufficiency and has to break them up. A new cutting is made, only in turn to be shaken and rearranged. This keeps the philosopher thinking all the time, and it makes his world a very uncertain place. But he at least runs no risk of hardening, and he has his eyes open to most experience.

I am often impressed with the fact that the older generation has grown weary of thinking. It has simply put up the bars in its intellectual shop-windows and gone off home to rest. It may well be that this is because it has felt so much sorrow that it does not want to talk about sorrow, or so much love that to interpret love tires it, or repulsed so many rude blows of destiny that it has no interest in speaking of destiny. Its flame may be low for the very reason that it has burned so intensely. But how many of the younger generation would eagerly long for such interpretations if the older would only reveal them! And how little plausible is that experience when it is occasionally interpreted! No, enthusiasm, passion for ideas, sensuality, religious fervor,--all the heated weapons with which the younger generation attacks the world, seem only to make the older generation uneasy. The spirit, in becoming reconciled to life, has lost life itself.

As I see the older generation going through its daily round of business, church, and family life, I cannot help feeling that its influence is profoundly pernicious. It has signally failed to broaden its institutions for the larger horizon of the time. The church remains a private club of comfortable middle-class families, while outside there grows up without spiritual inspiration a heterogeneous mass of people without ties, roots, or principles. The town changes from a village to an industrial center, and church and school go through their time-honored and listless motions. The world widens, society expands, formidable crises appear, but the older generation does not broaden, or if it does, the broadening is in no adequate proportion to our needs. The older generation still uses the old ideas for the new problem. Whatever new wine it finds must be poured into the old bottles.

Where are the leaders among the older generation in America who, with luminous faith and intelligence, are rallying around them the disintegrated numbers of idealistic youth, as Bergson and Barrès and Jaurès have done in France? A few years ago there seemed to be a promise of a forward movement toward Democracy, led by embattled veterans in a war against privilege. But how soon the older generation became wearied in the march! What is left now of that shining army and its leader? Must the younger generation eternally wait for the sign?

The answer is, of course, that it will not wait. It must shoulder the gigantic task of putting into practice its ideals and revolutionary points of view as wholeheartedly and successfully as our great-grandfathers applied theirs and tightened the philosophy of life which imprisons the older generation. The shuddering fear that we in turn may become weary, complacent, evasive, should be the best preventive of that stagnation. We shall never have done looking for the miracle, that it shall be given us to lighten, cheer, and purify our “younger generation,” even as our older has depressed and disintegrated us.

A MIRROR OF THE MIDDLE WEST

No Easterner, born forlornly within the sphere of New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, can pass very far beyond the Alleghanies without feeling that American civilization is here found in the full tide of believing in itself. The flat countryside looks more ordered, more farmlike; the Main Streets that flash by the car-windows somehow look more robust and communal. There may be no less litter and scrubbiness; the clustered houses of the towns may look even more flimsy, undistinguished, well-worn; but it is a litter of aspiring order, a chaos which the people are insensitive to because they are living in the light of a hopeful future. The East has pretty much abandoned itself to the tides of immigration and industrial change which have overwhelmed it: no one really believes that anything startling will be done to bring about a new heaven and a new earth. But the intelligence of the West seems to live in apocalyptic sociological--not socialistic, however--dreams. Architects and business men combine half-heartedly to “save New York” from the horrors of the Jewish clothing-trade invasion, but Chicago draws great maps and sketches of a city-planning that shall make it not only habitable but radiant and palatial.

Hope has not vanished from the East, but it has long since ceased to be our daily diet. Europe has infected us perhaps with some of its world-weariness. The East produces more skeptics and spiritual malcontents than the West. For the Middle West seems to have accomplished most of the things, industrial and political, that the East has been trying to do, and it has done them better. The Middle West is the apotheosis of American civilization, and like all successes it is in no mood to be very critical of itself or very examinatory as to the anatomy and physiology of its social being. No Easterner with Meredith Nicholson’s human and literary experience would write so complacently and cheerfully about his part of the country as Mr. Nicholson writes about “The Valley of Democracy.” His self-confidence is the very voice of the Middle West, telling us what it thinks of itself. This, we say as we read, must be the inner candor which goes with the West that we see with our eyes. So we like Mr. Nicholson’s articles not so much for the information they give us as for the attitudes they let slip, the unconscious revelations of what the people he is talking for think important.

It is not a book of justification, although he would rather anxiously have us take not too seriously the political vagaries like Bryanism and Progressivism. And he wishes us to miss none of the symphony orchestras and art institutes that evidently now begin to grow like grasshoppers on the prairies. He treats himself rather as an expositor, and he is explicitly informational, almost as if for a foreign country. He sometimes has an amusing air of having hastily read up and investigated Western wonders and significances that have been not only common material in the Eastern magazines, but matter of despairing admiration on the part of those of us who are general improvers of mankind. He is naïve about the greatness of Chicago, the vastness of agricultural production, the ravages of culture among the middle classes. He is almost the professional Westerner showing off his prize human stock.

Mr. Nicholson does well to begin with the folksiness of the West. No one who has experienced that fine open friendliness of the prosperous Middle Westerner, that pleasant awareness of the alert and beneficent world we live in, can deny that the Middle West is quite justified in thinking of itself as the real heart of the nation. That belief in the ultimate good sense, breadth of vision, and devotion to the common good, of the “folks back home,” is in itself a guaranty of social stability and of a prosperity which implies that things will never be any different except as they slowly improve. Who can say that we have no Gemüthlichkeit in America, when he runs up against this warm social mixability which goes so far to compensate for the lack of intellectual _nuances_ and spontaneous artistic sensibilities?

Of course the Middle West has to pay for its social responsiveness in a failure to create, at least in this day and generation, very vigorous and diverse spiritual types. An excessive amiability, a genius for adaptability will, in the end, put a premium on conformity. The Westerner sincerely believes that he is more averse to conventionality than the Easterner, but the latter does not find him so. The heretic seems to have a much harder time of it in the West. Classes and attitudes that have offended against the “folks’” codes may be actually outlawed. When there are acute differences of opinion, as in the war, society splits into bitter and irreconcilable camps, whereas in the East the undesirables have been allowed to shade off towards limbo in gradual degrees. When hatred and malice, too long starved by too much “niceness,” do break out from the natural man, they may produce those waves of persecution and vindictiveness which, coming from a so recently pacifist West, astonished an East that was no less densely saturated with aliens but was more conversant with the feeling that it takes all kinds of people to make a world. Folksiness evidently has its dark underlining in a tendency to be stampeded by herd-emotion. “Social conscience” may become the duty to follow what the mob demands, and democracy may come to mean that the individual feels himself somehow expressed--his private tastes and intelligence--in whatever the crowd chooses to do.

I have followed Mr. Nicholson in his speaking of the Middle West as if he thought of the region as a unit. He does speak as if he did, but he does not really mean it. Much as he would like to believe in the substantial equality of the people in the Valley of Democracy, he cannot help letting us see that it is but one class that he has in mind--his own, the prosperous people of the towns. He protests against their being scornfully waved aside as bourgeoisie. “They constitute the most interesting and admirable of our social strata.” And he is quite right. Certainly this stratum is by far the most admirable of all the middle classes of the world. It is true that “nowhere else have comfort, opportunity, and aspiration produced the same combination.” He marvels at the numbers of homes in the cities that cannot imaginably be supported on less than five thousand a year. And it is these homes, and their slightly more impoverished neighbors, who are for him the “folks,” the incarnate Middle West. The proletarian does not exist for him. The working-classes are merely so much cement, filling in the bricks of the temple--or, better, folks in embryo, potential owners of bungalows on pleasant suburban streets. Mr. Nicholson’s enthusiasm is for the college-girl wife, who raises babies, attends women’s clubs, and is not afraid to dispense with the unattainable servant. It is for the good-natured and public-spirited business man, who goes into politics because politics in the Middle West has always been concerned with the prosperity of the business community. But about the economic foundation of this class Mr. Nicholson sounds as innocent as a babe.

Take his attitude towards the farmer. You gather from these pages that in the Middle West the farmer is a somewhat unfortunate anomaly, a shadow on the bright scene. Farming is scarcely even a respectable profession: “the great-grandchildren of the Middle Western pioneers are not easily persuaded that farming is an honorable calling”! He hints darkly at a decay in fiber. Only one chapter out of six is given to the farmer, and that is largely occupied with the exertions of state agencies, universities, to lift him out of his ignorance and selfishness. The average farmer has few of the admirable qualities of the Valley of Democracy. He is not “folksy”; he is suspicious, conservative, somewhat embittered, little given to coöperation; he even needed prodding with his Liberty bonds. In Mr. Nicholson’s pages the farmer becomes a huge problem which lies on the brain and conscience of a Middle West that can only act towards him in its best moments like a sort of benevolent Charity Organization Society. “To the average urban citizen,” says Mr. Nicholson, “farming is something remote and uninteresting, carried on by men he never meets in regions that he only observes hastily from a speeding automobile or the window of a limited train.”

It would take whole volumes to develop the implications of that sentence. Remember that that urban citizen is Mr. Nicholson’s Middle West, and that the farmer comprises the huge bulk of the population. Is this not interesting, the attitude of the prosperous minority of an urban minority--a small but significant class which has in its hands all the non-productive business and political power--towards the great productive mass of the people? Could class division be revealed in plainer terms? This Middle West of Mr. Nicholson’s class sees itself as not only innocent of exploitation, but full of all the personal and social virtues besides. But does the farmer see this class in this light? He does not. And Mr. Veblen has given us in one of his books an analysis of this society which may explain why: “The American country town and small city,” he says, “is a business community, that is to say it lives for and by business traffic, primarily of a merchandising sort.... Municipal politics is conducted as in some sort a public or overt extension of that private or covert organization of local interests that watches over the joint pecuniary benefit of the local businessmen. It is a means ... of safe-guarding the local business community against interlopers and against any evasive tactics on the part of the country population that serves as a host.... The country town is a product and exponent of the American land system. In its beginning it is located and ‘developed’ as an enterprise of speculation in land values; that is to say, it is a businesslike endeavor to get something for nothing by engrossing as much as may be of the increment of land values due to the increase of population and the settlement and cultivation of the adjacent agricultural area. It never (hitherto) loses this character of real-estate speculation. This affords a common bond and a common ground of pecuniary interest, which commonly masquerades under the name of public patriotism, public spirit, civic pride, and the like.”

In other words, Town, in the traditional American scheme of things, is shown charging Country all the traffic will bear. It would be hard to find a member of Mr. Nicholson’s Middle West--that minority urban class--who was not owing his prosperity to some form of industrial or real-estate speculation, of brokerage business enterprise, or landlordism. This class likes to say sometimes that it is “carrying the farmer.” It would be more like the truth to say that the farmer is carrying this class. Country ultimately has to support Town; and Town, by holding control of the channels of credit and market, can make the farmer pay up to the hilt for the privilege of selling it his product. And does. When the farmers, getting a sense of the true workings of the society they live in, combine in a Non-Partisan League to control the organism of market and credit, they find they have a bitter class war on their hands. And the authentic voice of Mr. Nicholson here scolds them roundly for their restlessness and sedition. In this ferocious reaction of Town against Country’s socialistic efforts to give itself economic autonomy, we get the betrayal of the social malaise of the Middle West, a confession of the cleavage of latent class conflict in a society as exploitative, as steeply tilted, as tragically extreme in its poles of well-being, as any other modern society based on the economic absolutism of property.

A large part of the hopefulness, the spiritual comfort of the Middle West, of its sturdy belief in itself, must be based on the inflexible reluctance of its intelligentsia to any such set of ideas. However thoroughly Marxian ideas may have saturated the thought of Europe and become the intellectual explosive of social change, the Middle West, as in this book, persists in its robust resistance to any such analysis or self-knowledge. It is not that Mr. Nicholson’s attitudes are not true. It is that they are so very much less than the whole truth. They need to be supplemented by analysis set in the terms in which the progressive minds of the rest of the world are thinking. The intelligent Middle West needs to sacrifice a certain amount of complacency in exchange for an understanding of the structure of its own society. It would then realize that to read “The Valley of Democracy” in conjunction with pages 315-323 of Veblen’s “Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution” is to experience one of the most piquant intellectual adventures granted to the current mind.

ERNEST: OR, PARENT FOR A DAY