Our Part in the Great War

by Arthur Gleason

I have told of what the American tradition of nationality has driven our men and women and our boys to do in France. They see the fight of France as our fight, just as France saw the American Revolution as her struggle. None of this work was done in vague humanitarianism. These men and women and boys are giving of their best for a definite aim. They are giving it to the American cause in France. France is defending the things that used to be dear to us, and our fellow-countrymen who are of the historic American tradition are standing at her side.

In recent years, our editors and politicians have been busy in destroying our historic tradition and creating a new tradition, by means of which we are to obtain results without paying the price. Neutrality is the method, and peace and prosperity are the rewards. I have collected many expressions of this new conception of Americanism. One will suffice.

Martin H. Glynn, temporary chairman of the National Democratic Convention, in renominating Woodrow Wilson for president, said:

"Neutrality is America's contribution to the laws of the world.... The policy of neutrality is as truly American as the American flag.... The genius of this country is for peace. Compared with the blood-smeared pages of Europe, our records are almost immaculate. To-day prosperity shines from blazing furnaces and glowing forges. Never was there as much money in our vaults as to-day.... When the history of these days comes to be written, one name will shine in golden splendor upon the page that is blackened with the tale of Europe's war, one name will represent the triumph of American principles over the hosts of darkness and of death. It will be the name of the patriot who has implanted his country's flag on the highest peak to which humanity has yet aspired: the name of Woodrow Wilson."

It was in protest against this neutrality, this reveling in fat money vaults, this assumption that prosperity is greater than sacrifice, that these young men of whom I have told have gone out to be wounded and to die. This mockery of the "blackened page" and "blood-smeared pages" of Europe has stung many thousands of Americans into action. The record of their service is a protest against such gloating. These fighters and rescuers and workers would not have served Germany with an equal zest. Neutrality between France and Germany is impossible to them. Those who fail to see the difference between France and Germany in this war are not of our historic American tradition.

Meanwhile our friends at home, very sincere and gifted men, but mistaken, I believe, in their attitude toward nationality, are summoning America to an artistic rebirth, so that "the new forces in our arts may advance." They write: "The soldier falls under the compulsion of the herd-instinct and is devoted by his passion to a vision out of which destruction and death are wrought." To one who has heard the guns of Verdun, this piping is somewhat scrannel. Art is not something that exists in a vacuum beyond space and time, and good and evil. Art is the expression of a belief in life, and that belief takes varying forms, according to the place and age in which it falls. It may be the expression of a surge of national feeling, as in Russian music. It may be the response to a rediscovery of ancient beauty, as in the Renaissance. It may be the quickening received from fresh discoveries of territory and strange horizons, such as touched the Elizabethans. In America we have long tried by artificial stimulants to revive art. We have omitted the one sure way, which is a deep nationality, achieved by sacrifice, a reassertion of national idealism. Out of that soil will spring worthy growths, which the thin surface of modern fashionable cosmopolitanism can never nourish. The sense of the true America has laid hold of these young men of ours in France. By living well they create the conditions of art. The things they do underlie all great expression. Already they are writing with a tone and accent which have long gone unheard in our America.

My lot has cast me with young men at their heroic moment. For the first months of the war it was with Belgian boys, later with French sailors, finally with these young Americans. They have made me impatient of our modern cosmopolitan American who, in the words of Dostoievski, "Can be carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet, by noble ideals, but only if they come of themselves, if they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be paid for."

The reason why pacifism is ineffectual is because it is an intellectual theory, which does not build on instinct. A man's love of his home and his nation is an instinctive thing, full of rich emotional values and moving with the vital current of life itself. Our pacifists would clear their thinking if they came under shell-fire. All that is sound in modern radical thought has been strengthened by this war. The democratic movement in England has become an overwhelming force. But the unsound elements in radical thought, those elements introduced by intellectual theorists who scheme a world distasteful to average human nature, have been burned away in the fire. One of those unsound elements was the theory of pacifism and cosmopolitanism. Many Americans have no belief in the idea of our country. They are busy with the mechanics of life. Any person who is not "getting results" is felt by them to be ineffectual. In that absorption in material gain, they have laid hold of a doctrine which would justify them in their indifference to profounder values. It is so that we have weakened our sense of nationality.

The nation is a natural "biological group," whose members have an "instinctive liking" for each other and "act with a common purpose." The instinctive liking is created by common customs and a shared experience. This experience, expressed in song and legislative enactment and legend, becomes known as the national tradition, and is passed on from generation to generation in household heroes, such as Lincoln, and famous phrases such as "Government of the people." That instinctive liking, created by the contacts of a common purpose and rooted in a loved tradition, is gradually being weakened in our people by importations of aliens, who have not shared in a common experience, and have not inherited our tradition. It is not possible to blend diverse races into a nation, when members of one race plot against our institutions in the interests of a European State, and members of another race extract wealth from our industry and carry it home to their own people. Instinctive liking is not so nourished. A common purpose is not manifested in that way. We have not touched the imagination of these newcomers. It requires something more than "big chances" to lay hold of the instinctive life of peasants. Our lax nationalism never reaches the hidden elements of their emotion to make them one in the deeper life of the State. Skyscrapers and hustling and easy money are excellent things, but not enough to call out loyalty and allegiance.