If a democracy, like England, is too proud to present its case to a sister democracy, then at that point it is not a democracy. If it gives as excuse (and this is the excuse which officials give) that the military will not tolerate propaganda, then the Allies are more dominated by their military than Germany. Of course the real reason is neither of these. The real reason is that England and France are unaware of the situation in our Middle West.
The Middle West is a hard-working, idealistic, "uncommercialized" body of citizens, who create our national policy. It has some of the best universities in America—places of democratic education, reaching every group of citizen in the State, and profoundly influential on State policy. Such Universities as the State Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan are closely related to the life of their community, whereas Yale University could not carry a local election in New Haven. What the late Professor Sumner (of Yale) thought, was of little weight at the Capitol House at Hartford, Conn. What John R. Commons (Professor at the State University of Wisconsin) thinks, has become State law. The Middle West has put into execution commission government in over 200 of its cities, the first great move in the overthrow of municipal graft. It practices city-planning. Many of its towns are models. Our sane radical movements in the direction of equality are Middle-Western movements. To curse this section as money-grubbing, uninspired, and to praise the Harvard-Boston Brahmins, the Princeton-Philadelphia Tories, and the Yale-New York financial barons, as the hope of our country, is to twist values. Both elements are excellent and necessary. Out of their chemical compounding will come the America of the future. The leaders of the Middle West are Brand Whitlock, Bryan, La Follette, Herbert Quick, Henry Ford, Booth Tarkington, Edward Ross, John R. Commons, William Allen White, The Mayos, Orville Wright. Not all of them are of first-rate mentality. But they are honest, and their mistakes are the mistakes of an idealism unrelated to life as it is. The best of them have a vision for our country that is not faintly perceived by the East. Their political ideal is Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman expressed what they are trying to make of our people. The stories of O. Henry describe this type of new American.
A clear analysis of our Middle West is contained in the second of Monsieur Emile Hovelaque's articles in recent issues of the Revue de Paris. In that he shows how distance and isolation have operated to give our country, particularly the land-bound heart of it, a feeling of security, a sense of being unrelated to human events elsewhere on the planet. He shows how the break of the immigrant with his Old World has left his inner life emptied of the old retrospects, cut off from the ancestral roots. That vacancy the new man in the new world filled with formula, with vague pieces of idealism about brotherhood. He believed his experiment had cleared human nature of its hates. He believed that ideals no longer had to be fought for. Phrases became a substitute for the ancient warfare against the enemies of the race. And all the time he was busy with his new continent. Results, action, machinery, became his entire outer life. The Puritan strain in him, a religion of dealing very directly with life immediately at hand, drove him yet the harder to tackle his own patch of soil, and then on to a fresh field in another town in another State: work, but work unrelated to a national life—least of all was it related to an international ideal.
And he let Europe go its own gait, till finally it has become a dim dream, and just now a very evil dream. But of concern in its bickerings he feels none. So to-day he refuses to see a right and a wrong in the European War. He confuses the criminal and the victim. He regards the Uhlan and the Gerbéviller peasant as brothers. Why don't they cease their quarrel, and live as we live?
That, in brief, is a digest of Hovelaque's searching analysis of our national soul at this crisis. We have not understood the war. We are not going to see it unless we are aided. If we do not see it, the future of the democratic experiment on this earth is imperiled. The friends of France and England lie out yonder on the prairies. The Allies have much to teach them, and much to learn from them. But to effect the exchange, England and France must be willing to speak to them through the voices they know—not alone through "Voix Americaines" of James Beck, and Elihu Root and Whitney Warren and President Lowell and Mr. Choate. England must speak to them through Collier's Weekly and the Saturday Evening Post and the newspaper syndicates. There is only one way of reaching American public opinion—the newspapers and periodicals. No other agency avails. England must recognize the function of the correspondent in the modern democracy. Through him come the facts and impressions on which the people make up its mind. He supplies public opinion with the material out of which to build policy. For our failure to understand the war, France and England must share the blame with America. We should have been ready enough to alter our indifference and ignorance into understanding, if only our writers had been aided to gain information.
But the Western Allies have little knowledge of American public opinion, and small desire to win it. They have sent some of our best men over in disgust to the enemy lines. Any one, coming on such a quest as I have been on, that of proving German methods from first-hand witness, is regarded by the Allies as partly a nuisance and partly misguided. If any public criticism is ever made of my country's attitude by the French or English, we, that have sought to serve the Allies, will be obliged to come forward and tell our experience:—namely, that it has been most difficult to obtain facts for America, as the Allies have seen fit to disregard her public opinion, and scorn the methods and channels of reaching that public opinion.
II
SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR