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.