Everyday Americans

by Henry Seidel Canby

And is our vast educational enterprise any more definitely aimed? Perhaps so, for the increase of intelligence is an end in itself. Nevertheless, for what, let us say, is the American high school preparing, a new social order, or the stabilization of the old one? When the aristocrats and the burghers of Europe began to be educated, they tore themselves apart in furious wars over religion. When the Western proletariate becomes educated, will it not tear our social fabric in class wars also? Are we educating for this or against it? For what kind of society are we educating? The socialist has his answer. Can American school boards say?

And our organized philanthropists, combating hookworm, tuberculosis, lynching, child labor, liquor, slums, and preventable crime? The medieval church, hampered by its lack of science and the waywardness of its world, engaged in such a struggle, and from a thousand monasteries, built, like our modern foundations, upon the profits of exploitation, strove to uplift Europe. Its aim and end were clear: to practise charity that the souls of workers and donors might be saved; to clothe the naked and feed the hungry that love might be felt to govern the world. And the church succeeded in its measure until, on the somewhat specious plea that not love, but justice, was demanded, rapacious governments seized the capital of the ecclesiastical corporations and sold the abbeys for building stone and lead.

Our great organizations are more efficient than the church, because they are more scientific. Whether they are more successful depends upon one’s estimate of success. The modern man, for whom they care, is a cleaner, brighter, more long-lived person than his medieval ancestor. He is probably better material for civilization, because, if more vulgarized, he is more intelligent. That he is happier is not so certain. The church inspired a confidence (not always justified) in the friendliness of destiny which the Rockefeller Foundation has so far failed to equal. Nevertheless, scientific philanthropy, though it promises less, achieves what it does promise more thoroughly and without those terrible by-products of the ecclesiastical system—servility, pauperism, bigotry, and superstition. But what is its aim?

With little more regard to the source of their wealth than the church, the philanthropies of to-day have far less regard for the final results of their benefactions. As with the educators, it is enough for them, so to speak, to improve the breed. The apparent philosophy behind their program is that when the proletariate is bathed, educated, and made healthy, it will be civilized, and therefore competent to take over the world (including universities and steel mills, railroads and hospitals) and run it. But the executives of these great organizations would probably protest against this reading of their expectations almost as quickly as the donors of the funds; certainly they show no readiness to meet the proletariate half-way on its upward path. Clearly, you cannot wash, teach, and invigorate society without powerfully affecting the whole social fabric. The feeble experiments of the nineteenth century in universal education have already proved that. Some transformation the great endowments of our age are laboring to bring about. For the creating of a new race they have a plan, but not for its salvation, even on this side of heaven. Indeed, as the German experience shows, they may even become instruments by which the common man is made a mere tool firmly grasped by the hand of authority. Common sense alone governs them. Their vision is bent upon the immediate, not the ultimate, future.

A little vague these criticisms may seem to the practical mind; and vague, when philosophically considered, are the aims of American radicalism. Very different, indeed, they are from the clean-cut programs of the European radical. There is little vagueness in socialism, little vagueness in syndicalism, the very opposite of vagueness, despite the efforts of the American press, in Bolshevism. In all these systems the past is condemned, the present reconstructed, and the future made visible with a lucidity that betrays their origin in efforts of the pure reason. That, of course, is the difficulty—at least to American and most British intelligences. The aim of Bolshevism is so definite as to be almost mathematical. Society as a whole is considered economically, and a program deduced that will fill the most mouths with the least labor. To be sure, stomach-filling is not the sole purpose of Lenine and his followers. They argue, and with more right than our easy-going bourgeois civilization is willing to concede, that idleness, unrest, and crime are more often the result than the cause of poverty. Nevertheless, the type radical of the European variety does unquestionably rest his case upon the premise that man is merely a tool-using animal. Ask a Bolshevik where civilization is going, and he will answer you with ease and explicitness. Ask the average American, and he will either reply in vague platitudes or deny both knowledge and responsibility. Of the two men he is less likely to be wrong.

And note well that our domesticated socialists and intelligentzia, though far more inclined to consider the human factor than the Bolsheviki, have the same advantage of clarity of aim, and the same tendency to confuse ideas with facts. Common sense—not the highest virtue, not the virtue which will save our souls, or even our bodies, in a crisis like war or a turmoil of the spirit—is often lacking in the socialist. Good humor—again not a quality that wins heaven’s gates, but a saving grace, nevertheless—is noticeably absent from the columns of our radical weeklies. An admirable service they are rendering in clarifying the American mind, in forcing it, or some of it, to face issues, to think things through, to be intelligent as well as sensible; but the logical rigidity of their program inhibits that sense of proportion which recognizes the Falstaffs and the Micawbers of this world, smiles sometimes over miscarriages of idealism, sympathizes with feeble, humorous man, does not always scold.

And yet the American who dislikes scolding should beware of superciliousness. It is much easier for genial folks to chide the critics with programs than to be critical of themselves. The normal American is a product of American education, with its insistence upon liberal progress, upon acceleration toward the vaguest of goals. It has not taught him to be critical of others in any thorough-going fashion, it has not taught him to be critical of himself. The confidence that has carried our business to a maximum, that has flung our schools broadcast, and swept our philanthropies over the world, spelled differently is self-assurance. Nothing disturbs us so much as to be told to stop and think. Nothing angers the business world so much as legislation that “halts business.” Nothing infuriates an educational organizer more than to question the quality, not the quantity, of his product. We have seen clearly what we wished to do with iron and coal and food. We have felt, in education and philanthropy, sure of our moral bases. Our energy has been concentrated on going ahead. To be radical intellectually, to think it all out in terms of a possible relation of labor and capital, of a possible education, of a possible society for the future—that has not appealed to us. We have shunned philosophical programs by instinct, and wilfully built for to-day instead of tomorrow. The American radical has done too little thinking; the European, perhaps too much.

But the infection of thought is spreading. I do not believe that the youths who will make the coming generation—the youths that fought the war—are going to be radicals in the sense that I have called European. If the ideas of Marx and Lenine ever take root in America, it will be because social injustice such as we have not yet been cursed with makes a soil for them. If they take root, they transform in the growing, like foreign plants in California weather. But the new generation is not like the old. It is more sensitive to the winds of doctrine. It is less empirical, less optimistic, less self-assured.

Already one can divide into two classes the undergraduates as one finds them in American colleges. The smaller group their elders would call radical. But they are not socialists, not anarchists, not even consistently liberal. More truly, they are critics of things as they are. Their minds are restless; they are ever seeking for definitions, for solutions, for a cause to enroll under. They are restless under the push of common sense America that drives them into activity without explanation. They are painfully aware of the difference between their ideas and the conditions of life in modern society, and are determined to test one by the other. Their native idealism has become intellectual.

The other group is far larger, but, if less restless, is no more static. Most of its members are indifferent to the new ideas scintillating all over the world, if indeed they are not ignorant of them. Nevertheless, their faith in society as it was is curiously weak. If few of them are likely to become socialists, few also will be inspired by the physical and moral idealism of their fathers. The naïve enthusiasm of those fathers for “movements,” “ideals,” “progress” is not (unless I miss my guess) common among them. They are not likely to overturn America a second time in order to make great fortunes; philanthropy does not interest them; education as a missionary endeavor does not seem to attract them. Their moral foundations are less solid than in old days; their energies less boundless; aimless endeavor for the sake of doing something is no longer a lure. Either they will find a program of their own to excite them, or stand pat upon the fortune they expect to inherit. If their future is to be narrowed to a choice between pleasure and mere productivity, why, then these men would rather run motor-cars than make them. There is a very real danger that rather than hustle for the sake of hustling, they will prefer to “lie down” on their job. And thanks to the homogeneity of the current American mind, this analysis, if it is true at all, is true of thousands.