Our immaturity and peevishness about an established routine for labor disputes has to be counted on as a factor in our character, chiefly because we shall remain for some time behind the other great industrial countries in the smoothness of operation. In normal times a British contractor did not have to allow for strikes, an American did; and our present war effort, our propaganda, and our plans for the future, all have to take this element into consideration. The false unity of December, 1941, resulted in a serious pledge of "no strikes, no lockouts"; but within three months the National Labor Relations Board was admitting that it needed guidance to create a policy, and worse than sporadic trouble was in the wind. So much the more did we have to know what we were like in labor affairs, and without self-imposture, act accordingly. The war gave an opportunity for statesmen to make a new amalgam of the elements in the labor situation; but the war also made people hysterical about unrealities, and the labor situation was treated in two equally bad ways: as if we could have maximum production without any policy, or as if no policy could be evolved, and we would have to fight the Axis while the Administration destroyed capital and Congress destroyed labor.
The Danger of Godlessness
I am listing certain actualities of American life, with notes on their sources, as a guide to conduct—particularly the conduct of the war (which should be built on our character) and the conduct of civilian propaganda which must, at times, effect temporary alterations in our habits. I have, so far, named those aspects of our total outlook which come from the size and many-sided wealth of the country, and from our confident, unskilled attempts to deal with wealth and labor and the shifts of power which are bound to occur in a democracy. I come now to items which are no less potent because they are impalpable. Any effort which counts on bringing the whole strength of America into play must count also on these.
We are a profoundly irreligious people. We are highly sectarian and we are a church-going people; but in the sense that religion rises from our relation to a higher power, we are irreligious. We are not constantly aware of any duty: to the state, to our fellowmen, to Mankind, to the Universal Principle, to God. We live unaware even of a connection between ourselves and anything we do not instantly touch or see or hear; we have grown out of asking for help or protection, and disasters fall on us heavily because we are separated from our fellowmen, having no common needs, or faith.
The coming together, in freedom, of many faiths, and the rise of material happiness in the great era of scepticism, left us without a functioning state religion; the emancipation of each individual man from political tyranny and economic degradation left us without any sense of the universal; we have been able to gratify so many private purposes, that we are unaware of any great purpose beyond. As for the mystic's faith, it never makes itself felt, and the name "mystic" itself, far from connoting a deeper insight into the nature of God, is now associated with flummery and hoax.
We are irreligious because we have set out to conquer the physical world and deliver a part of the spoils to every man. In our good intention to create and to distribute wealth, creating democracy in our stride, we approach a new relation to others. We are capable of cooperation; but religious people do not cooperate with God; they seek his will and bow to it. We exalt our own will.
This has to be taken into account, because it makes the creation of a practical unity difficult. If we had felt ourselves linked through God with one another, it would have been easier to join hands in any job we had to do. I do not know whether any of the western democratic countries had a remnant of this mystical religion; but the appeal to the "blood" and the "race" of both Japan and Germany, the appeal to universal brotherhood in both China and Soviet Russia, indicate what a deep source of strength can be found in man if he can be persuaded to abandon himself. And as this is the fundamental demand of the State in war time, means must be found to compensate for the absence of deep universally shared feeling in America. We shall not find a substitute for religion and we will do well to concentrate on the non-religious actions and emotions which bring men together. Common fears we already have and we may rediscover our common hopes; common pleasures we are enjoying and preparing to sacrifice them for the common good. (Fear and hope and sacrifice and the common good all lie on the periphery of religious feeling; and point toward the center.) But I doubt whether the American people would accept "a great wave of religious feeling" which would be artificially induced to persuade us that all our past was a mistake and that our childish pleasure in good things was as vain as our hope for better.
The Alger Factor
The end result of all the separate elements, the land, the people, the departure from Europe, the struggle for wealth, the fight against wealth, was to make us a people of unbounding optimism, which was our Horatio Alger substitute for religious faith. The cool realistic appraisal of man's fate which an average Frenchman makes, the trust of the Englishman that he will "muddle through", the ancient indifference of the Russian peasant, the resignation of the Orient, are matched in America by an intense and confident appeal to action, in the faith that action will bring far better things than have been known. The vulgar side of this is bustle and activity for its own sake and a childish confusion between what is better and what is merely bigger or newer or more expensive or cheaper; we have to accept all this because on the other side our faith in action has broken the vise of poverty in which man has been held since the beginning of modern history; it has destroyed tyranny and set free the bodies and the minds of the hundred millions who have lived in a new world. We have rejected some of the most desirable and beautiful creations of other peoples, the arts of Europe, the Asiatic life of contemplation, the wisdom of philosophers, the exaltation of saints—but we have also rejected the slavery on which these rest or the negation of life to which they tend.
The "materialism" of America is not as terrible as it looks; and it must be respected by those who want us to make sacrifices. What aristocratic Europeans call gross in us is a hundred million hands reaching for the very things the aristocrats held dear. In the scuffle, some harm is done; the first pictures reproduced on magazine covers were not equal to the Mona Lisa; within fifty years the Mona Lisa could be reproduced in a magazine for ten million readers, but the aristocrats still complained of vulgarizing. The first music popularized by records or radio was popular in itself; within fifty years records and radio will have multiplied the audience for the greatest music, popular or sublime, ten thousand fold; it is possible that on one Saturday or Sunday afternoon music, good even by pedantic standards, is heard by more people than used to hear it in an entire year. And both of these instances have another special point of interest: each is creating new works on its own terms, so that pictures, very good ones, are painted for multiple reproduction and music, as good as any other, is specially composed for radio.