Everyday Americans

by Henry Seidel Canby

And yet the college undergraduates, after hatching, and the American business man have made for us a very comfortable America, just now the safest place in the world to live in, the most prosperous country in the world, the most cheerful. The liberal-conservative way of doing things has its great advantages. America is its product, and the ranter who describes the United States as the home of super-capitalism, a sink of cheaply exploited labor, a dull stretch of bourgeois mediocrity, does not seem to be able to persuade even himself that the United States is not the best of all countries for a permanent residence.

And the great Americans of the past have nearly all been conservative-liberals. Washington was a great republican; he was also essentially an aristocrat in social and economic relations, who kept slaves and did not believe in universal suffrage. Lincoln, politically, was the greatest of English-speaking democrats, but he let the privileged classes exploit the working-man and the soldier, partly in order to win the war, chiefly because problems of wages and unearned increments and economic privilege generally did not enter into his scheme of democracy. Roosevelt fought a good fight for the square deal in public and private life, but hesitated and at last turned back when it became evident that a deal that was completely square meant the overturning of social life as he knew and loved it in America.

And these men we feel were right. Their duty was to make possible a good government and a stable society, and they worked not with theories only, but also with facts as they were. The Germans have argued that the first duty of the state is self-preservation, and that rights of individual men and other states may properly be crushed in order to preserve it. We have crushed the Germans and, one hopes, their philosophy. But no one doubts that it is a duty of society to preserve itself. No one believes that universal suffrage for all, negroes included, would have been advisable in Washington’s day, when republicanism was still an experiment. No one believes, I fancy, that the minimum wage, the inheritance tax, and coöperative management should have had first place, or indeed any place, in the mind of the Lincoln of 1863. Few suppose that Roosevelt as a socialist would have been as useful to the United States as Roosevelt the Progressive with a back-throw toward the ideals of the aristocratic state; as Roosevelt the conservative-liberal.

But too great reliance on even a great tradition has its disadvantages. I know an American preparatory school that for many college generations has entered its students at a famous university with the highest of examination records, and a reputation for courtesy and cleanness of mind and soundness of body scarcely paralleled elsewhere. I have watched these boys with much interest, and I have seen them in surprising numbers gradually decline from their position of superiority as they faced the rapid changes of college life, as they settled into a new environment with different demands and more complex standards. They leaned too heavily upon their admirable schooling; they were too confident of the strength and worth of their tradition; they looked backward instead of forward, and stood still while less favored men went on. Their fault was the fault of American liberalism, which stands pat with Washington and Roosevelt and Lincoln.

Perhaps the greatest teacher in nineteenth-century American universities was William Graham Sumner. In his day he was called a radical, and unsuccessful efforts were made to oust him from his professorship because of his advocacy of free trade. Now I hear him cited as a conservative by those who quote his support of individualism against socialism, his distrust of coöperation against the league of nations. His friends forget that an honest radical in one age would be an honest radical in another; and that the facts available having changed, it is certain that his opinions would change also, although just what he would advocate, just how decide, we cannot certainly know. Is it probable that Dante, the great advocate of imperial control in a particularistic medieval world, would have been a pro-German in 1914? The American liberal who proclaims himself of the party of Lincoln, and is content with that definition, might have an unpleasant shock if that great reader of the heart of the common man could resume his short-cut life.

Indeed, an inherited liberalism has the same disadvantages as inherited money: all the owner has to do is to learn how to keep it; in other words, to become a conservative. That is what is going on in America. While we were pioneers in liberty and individualism, wealth and opportunity and independence were showered upon us, and although wealth for the average man is harder to come by, and opportunity is more and more limited to the fortunate, and independence belongs only to good incomes, nevertheless the conservative-liberal keeps the pioneer’s optimism, and is satisfied to take ready-made a system that his ancestors wrought by painful and open-minded experiment. In practice he is still full of initiative and invention; in principle he can conceive of only one dispensation, the ideas of political democracy which were the radicalism of 1861 and 1840 and 1789 and 1776.

Suppose that he could conceive of industrial democracy, of a system where every man began with an equal share of worldly privilege as he begins now with an equal share of worldly rights. Would he not work it out, with his still keen practicality, and test its value precisely as he tests a new factory method or an advertising scheme? But he cannot conceive of it. It lies beyond his dispensation. His liberalism turns conservative at the thought. It was different with political democracy and With religious toleration. The first cannot even now be said to be precisely a perfect system, and the second has left us perilously near to having no religion at all. Nevertheless, the liberal ancestor of our American never doubted that they were his problems, to be worked out to some solution. He followed boldly where they led.

What has happened to the political and economic thinking of many an American much resembles what has happened to his religion. He learns at church a number of ethical principles which would make him very uneasy if put into practice. He learns the virtue of poverty, the duty of self-sacrifice, the necessity of love for his fellow-man. Now, saintly poverty has not become an ideal in America—certainly not in New York or Iowa or Atlantic City—nor is self-sacrifice common among corporations, or love a familiar attribute of the practice of law. Does the American therefore eschew the ethics of Christianity? On the contrary. Religion is accepted at its traditional value. The church grows richer and more influential—within limits. The plain man keeps all his respects for religion as an ideal; but he regards it precisely as an ideal, a formula beautiful in its perfection, not to be sullied by too close an application, not to be worked out into new terms to fit a new life.

And that is just what the conservative-liberal does with the vigorous liberalism of his forefathers. He buries it in his garden, and expects to dig it up after many days, a bond with coupons attached. He has accepted it as the irrevocable word of Jehovah establishing the metes and bounds wherein he shall think. It is his creed; and like the creeds of the church, the further one gets from its origins, the greater the repugnance to change. He stands by the declaration of his forefathers; stands pat, and begs to be relieved of further abstract discussion. Business is pressing; controversy is bad for business; ideas are bad for business; change is bad for business: let well enough alone.

But by all odds the most important fact as regards this conservative-liberal mind of which I have been writing remains to be stated, and that is its success, for it is now the prevailing mind in America. As our soldiers in France, though bearing Italian names, Irish names, Hebrew, Polish, German names, yet in helmet and uniform looked all, or nearly all, like the physical type we call American, so in this confusing country of ours, immigrant-settled, polylingual, built upon fragments of the empires of England and Spain and Russia and France, there is indubitably a mental type which we may call with some confidence American, a mind liberal in its principles, but in its instincts conservative.