The Valley of Democracy

by Meredith Nicholson

I

MUCH water has flowed under the bridge since these papers were undertaken, and I cheerfully confess that in the course of the year I have learned a great deal about the West. My observations began at Denver when the land was still at peace, and continued through the hour of the momentous decision and the subsequent months of preparation. The West is a place of moods and its changes of spirit are sometimes puzzling. The violence has gone out of us; we went upon a war footing with a minimum amount of noise and gesticulation. Deeply preoccupied with other matters, the West was annoyed that the Kaiser should so stupidly make it necessary for the American Republic to give him a thrashing, but as the thing had to be done the West addressed itself to the job with a grim determination to do it thoroughly.

We heard, after the election of 1916, that the result was an indication of the West’s indifference to the national danger; that the Middle Western people could not be interested in a war on the farther side of the Atlantic and would suffer any indignities rather than send their sons to fight in Europe. It was charged in some quarters that the West had lost its “pep”; that the fibre had softened; that the children and the grandchildren of “Lincoln’s men” were insensible to the national danger; and that thoughts of a bombardment of New York or San Francisco were not disturbing to a people remote from the sea. I am moved to remark that we of the West are less disposed to encourage the idea that we are a people apart than our friends to the eastward who often seem anxious to force this attitude upon us. We like our West and may boast and strut a little, but any intimation that we are not loyal citizens of the American Republic, jealous of its honor and security and responsive to its every call upon our patriotism and generosity, arouses our indignation.

Many of us were favored in the first years of the war with letters from Eastern friends anxious to enlighten us as to America’s danger and her duty with respect to the needs of the sufferers in the wake of battle. On a day when I received a communication from New York asking “whether nothing could be done in Indiana to rouse the people to the sore need of France,” a committee for French relief had just closed a week’s campaign with a fund of $17,000, collected over the State in small sums and contributed very largely by school children. The Millers’ Belgian Relief movement, initiated in the fall of 1914 by Mr. William C. Edgar, of Minneapolis, publisher of The Northwestern Miller, affords a noteworthy instance of the West’s response to appeals in behalf of the people in the trampled kingdom. A call was issued November 4 for 45,000 barrels of flour, but 70,000 barrels were contributed; and this cargo was augmented by substantial gifts of blankets, clothing for women and children, and condensed milk. These supplies were distributed in Belgium under Mr. Edgar’s personal direction, in co-operation with Mr. Herbert C. Hoover, chairman of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium.

Many Westerners were fighting under the British and French flags, or were serving in the French ambulance service before our entrance into the war, and the opening of the officers’ training-camps in 1917 found young Westerners of the best type clamoring for admission. The Western colleges and universities cannot be too strongly praised for the patriotic fervor with which they met the crisis. One president said that if necessary he would nail up the doors of his college until the war was over. The eagerness to serve is indicated in the Regular Army enlistments for the period from June to December, 1917, in which practically all of the Middle Western States doubled and tripled the quota fixed by the War Department; and any assumption that patriotism diminishes the farther we penetrate into the interior falls before the showing of Colorado, whose response to a call for 1,598 men was answered by 3,793; and Utah multiplied her quota by 5 and Montana by 7. This takes no account of men who, in the period indicated, entered training-camps, or of naval and marine enlistments, or of the National Guard or the selective draft. More completely than ever before the West is merged into the nation. The situation when war was declared is comparable to that of householders, long engrossed with their domestic affairs and heeding little the needs of the community, who are brought to the street by a common peril and confer soberly as to ways and means of meeting it.

“The West,” an Eastern critic complains, “appears always to be demanding something!” The idea of the West as an Oliver Twist with a plate insistently extended pleases me and I am unable to meet it with any plausible refutation. The West has always wanted and it will continue to want and to ask for a great many things; we may only pray that it will more and more hammer upon the federal counter, not for appropriations but for things of value for the whole. “We will try anything once!” This for long was more or less the Western attitude in politics, but we seem to have escaped from it; and the war, with its enormous demands upon our resources, its revelation of national weaknesses, caused a prompt cleaning of the slate of old, unfinished business to await the outcome.

It is an element of strength in a democracy that its political and social necessities are continuing; there is no point of rest. Obstacles, differences, criticism are all a necessary part of the eternal struggle toward perfection. What was impossible yesterday is achieved to-day and may be abandoned to-morrow. Democracy, as we have thus far practised it, is a series of experiments, a quest.