Everyday Americans

by Henry Seidel Canby

I am not so sure. Being one of those who doubted whether the successful termination of the war would forever make safe democratic ideals, I feel at liberty to doubt whether the triumph of a European proletariate will give us what we want. It depends much upon what one means by democracy. And correspondingly, whether America is fundamentally radical or conservative depends much upon what one means by radicalism. If, like Louis XIV or Napoleon, I had a leash of writers and scholars at my command, I would have them produce nothing but definitions while these critical years of transition lasted. I would make them into an academy whose fiat in general definition would be as valid as the French Academy’s in the meaning of a word. I would make it a legal offense for two men to quarrel over socialism when one means communism and the other state control of the post-office. I would, like the early Quakers, require arbitration for all disputants, especially in politics, knowing that a clear head would quickly discover that arguers on democracy conceivably meant anything from a standard collar for every one to nationalization of women. But the good old days of literary dictatorship are past. The most a writer upon the mind of the everyday American can do is to endeavor honestly to make his own definitions as he goes; and I believe that American radicalism needs a good deal of defining.

It is not the doctrines of Babeuf or Marx or Lenine that have made what seems to be the indigenous variety of American radicalism. Their beliefs, and especially those of Marx, have found acceptance here. There are moments in intellectual or industrial development when men’s minds become seeding-grounds for ideas blown from without. There were centuries when the mystical ideas of the Christian East were sown and rooted in the barbarian brains of the West. There were the years when the liberal ideas of the French Revolution were blown across Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. And much that we call radical in America is simply foreign seed, growing vigorously in our soil, but not yet acclimated, as it is growing also in Russia and New Zealand. And much is not American in any sense, but rather the purely alien ideas of immigrants—individual men among us. It is not for nothing that Trotzky was here, and the Marxists, the syndicalists, the nihilists, and the communists of half Europe. We have been exposed to every germ of radicalism ever hatched in the Old World; yet neither the young professor, lecturing on the redistribution of wealth, nor the Russian stevedore, who in lower New York awaits the proletariate revolution, truly represents American radicalism. These are the ideas and these the men our restless youth are borrowing from, but they are not yet, they may never be, American.

It is fortunately not yet difficult to separate foreign from indigenous radicalism. There is that in both our heredity and our environment which makes the American mind bad soil for the seed of foreign ideologies. They rain upon us, they germinate; but they do not make a crop. We are too self-reliant, too concrete; our New World has kept us too cheerfully busy; the heavens of opportunity have leaned too low over this blessed America for discontent which leads to dreaming, oppression which makes revolt, to be common among us. We “old Americans,” at least of this generation, are poor material for Bolshevism; even as socialists we are never more than half convinced. Our radicalism has been of a different breed.

Indeed, radicalism, like religion and sea-water, takes color from the atmosphere in which it is found. The French radical possesses the lucidity and the self-regarding spirit of the modern French mind. He lends ideas, but does not propagate them. The English radical seeks his ends by direct political action in good English fashion. And the native American has his own way also. That its essential quality of radicalism has often been overlooked, while the term has been bandied among soapbox orators and devotees of the bomb, is natural, but unfortunate for clear thinking.

Our home-bred radicalism has been physical and moral, not intellectual. It has been a genuine attempt to tear down and rebuild, but it has not ordinarily been called radicalism, which term has been usually applied to radical thinking, to the intellectual radicalism of revolutionary organizations and protestants against the social order. Our effective radicals have been the leaders, not the opponents, of American society. They have been business men, philanthropists, educators, not strike-leaders, social workers, and philosophers.

I talked recently to the head of a great manufacturing plant where technical skill both of hand and of brain was exercised upon wood and brass and steel. The modern world, according to his viewing (which was very obviously from the angle of business) is divided into two categories, executives and engineers. Executives are the men who organize and control. They are the ones chiefly rewarded. Engineers invent and carry out. They are the experts. It is the executives who lead; the experts supply ideas, work out methods, but follow.

This statement may be disputable, and it is certainly a painfully narrow bed in which to tuck American life and American ideals. Nevertheless, it has at least one element of profound truth. In the world of physical endeavor and physical organization it is executive business men who have changed, broken up, reorganized, developed the material world of America. They have fearlessly scrapped the whole machinery of production, transportation, and trade as it existed in the last generation, and in many respects improved upon, or destroyed by competition, the parallel order in the Old World. They have been true radicals of the physical category, and their achievements have been as truly radicalism as the experiments of Lenine in government ownership. That it is a physical radicalism, dealing with material values chiefly and without reference to some of the greatest needs of the human spirit, does not mean that intellect of a high, if not the highest, order may not have been required for its successful accomplishment.

Our other native radicals, the philanthropists and the educators, have also been chiefly executives. Their work has been inspired by the stored-up moral force of America, especially puritan America. But their great achievements, like those of the business men, have been in organization and development rather than in thought.

In earlier generations our moral radicals were such men as Emerson and Whitman. To-day they are college presidents, organizers of junior high-school systems, or heads of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations—prime movers all of them in systems of educational or philanthropic practice that uplift millions at a turn of a jack-screw. And these men in any true sense of the word are radicals—so radical in their thorough-going attempts to transform society by making it more intelligent, healthier, more productive that all Europe is protesting or imitating them. Who is exercising a greater pressure for durable change upon the largest number, who is digging most strenuously about the roots of the old order, John Rockefeller, Jr. and his co-workers or Trotzky? It is not easy to say.

This essay is not propaganda, and I am not particularly concerned as to whether or no the reader accepts my broadening of the term “radicalism.” Time may force him to do so, for no one can tell in a given age just what actions and what theories will lead to the tearing up of old institutions and the planting of a new order. Those absolutist kings, Philip Augustus and his successors, who crushed together the provinces of France, were, we see now, radicals, though power and privilege were their motives. I, however, am interested in men rather than in categories, and the philanthropist radicals, the business radicals, and the educational pioneers of America already interest the world strangely.