Everyday Americans

by Henry Seidel Canby

What they are in essence is of course more important than the name we give them. And first of all I believe that in a genuine, if narrow, sense they have been idealistic; indeed, that their American idealism has made them radical. If America at present is actively, practically idealistic (something Europe and the world in general would like to have determined) it is due to them.

Idealism is not a negative virtue. It is not mysticism. It is not meditation, though it may be its fruit. Whatever idealism may be in philosophical definition, in life it is the desire and the attempt to put into practice conceptions of what ought theoretically to be accomplished in this imperfect world; and the quality of the idealism depends upon the quality of the idealist.

In this sense—a true sense for America, however inapplicable to the Middle Ages—who can doubt that such Americans as I have described are idealistic? Nowhere in the world are there more visible evidences of the desires of men wreaking themselves upon earth and stone and metal, upon customs and government and morals, than in this new continent. And these desires are predominantly for betterment, for perfection—a low perfection sometimes, it is true—for the “uplift,” physically, morally, intellectually of humanity.

Of course the quality of American idealism is mixed. Beside the pure ambition of a St. Francis to make men brothers, beside the aspiring hope of the cathedral builders to make faith lovely to the eye, the ideal of a chain of five-and-ten cent stores, or a railroad system, or even a democratic method of education, is not a luminous, not a spiritual, idealism. But a working ideal for the benefit of the race it may be, and often is.

The truth of this has not seemed obvious to Europeans or to most Americans. Our individualism has been so intense and often so self-seeking, our preoccupation since the Civil War so dominantly with matter rather than with mind or spirit, that it is easy for foreigners to call us mere money-grubbers. Yet no one who has ever talked with a “captain of industry” or the director of a great philanthropic enterprise feels doubt as to the unsoundness of this description. Unfair, narrow, material-minded we may have been, but our enterprises have had vision behind them, dreams, perhaps, imposed upon us by the circumstances of a new, raw, continent, by wealth for the seeking, by opportunities for the making, by vast battles with nature to be organized and won.

Furthermore, behind and beneath all our striving, sets of moral ideas have been active. America has never been blasé or cynical. We have never relinquished the ethics of puritanism, which are the ethics of the Bible. Even the greedy capitalist has disgorged at last, and devoted his winnings to the improvement of the society he preyed upon. But most American capitalists have not been greedy. They themselves have been devoured by a consuming desire to accomplish, to build up, to put through. When they have broken laws, it is because the laws have held them back from what seemed to them necessary, inevitable development for the greater good of all—because, in a word, they were radical.

One night in war-time, at a base port in Scotland far from our own environment and our native prejudices, I heard the self-told tale of an arch-enemy of American “interests,” a pugnacious man who had fought and won, with a price on his head, sent millionaires to jail, been calumniated, been trapped by infamous conspiracies, and escaped them—a man better hated, better loved than is the fortune of most of us. My other companion was another American, a young, but celebrated, preacher, a moralist of the breed of the Beechers and the Spurgeons. And the same question rose to our lips when the story was finished. These enemies, these magnates who had been jailed and defeated, and yet still fought and often successfully, were they mere self-seekers, rascals, by any fair definition? And neither of us was satisfied with that answer, nor was the hero of the story. Two of us at least agreed that it was rather a case of “enterprise” versus “social justice,” of individualistic effort versus the rights of a community. The zeal of the capitalists had burned in their hearts until they broke through morality in an effort to make good.

But of course most of our American radicals have not been even illegal in their idealism. Their zeal has encountered only obstinacy, stupidity, and the intractable conservatism of ordinary life. These men have built up great industries that made life more facile, or extended great educational and health enterprises over States and beyond seas, with little harm to any man and much good to most, unless the source of the wealth expended be questioned, or the effect of a zealot’s ideas enforced upon millions.

Indeed, if strength of purpose, if energy, if a burning desire to change, to better the minds, the bodies, or the tools of men, were all that could be asked of radicalism, then we might well rest content with the achievements of the American idealist-radical. But more has been asked of the reformer, even of the reformer of business methods, than energy and will. The radicalism I have described, based upon common sense and inspired by restless virility, has not always been adequate. The pioneering days are ended when a good shot could always get game, a strong arm always find plowlands. It is time to take thought. And if one compares the uprooting energy of Americans with the intellectual radicalism of Europe or with the new radicalism of the incoming American generation, a curious difference appears. Our old radicalism was perhaps healthier, certainly more productive of immediate betterment to those who profited by it; but it is harder to define, harder to follow into a probable future, because, when all is said, it is relatively aimless.

Where do our vast business enterprises lead? Toward a greater production of this world’s goods, toward an accumulation of wealth in the hands of the sturdy organizers; but equally toward a vast corporate machine in which the individual man becomes a particle lost in the mass, toward a society which produces wealth without learning to distribute or employ it for the purposes of civilization. I do not say that this latter port is our destination. I say that our business leaders are steering a course which is just as likely to land us there as anywhere. Or, rather, they are stoking the engines and letting the rudder go free.