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.