Indeed it is arguable and perhaps demonstrable that this American mental type is the most definite national entity to be found anywhere in the Western world. I know that this sounds paradoxical. We have heard much for several years now of the lack of homogeneity in America. We felt in 1914 our German-Americans cleave away from us (to be sure, they came back); we saw in 1918 and 1919 the radical socialist and the I. W. W. and the vehement intellectual manifest symptoms that were certainly not American as the ’nineties knew America. We began to realize that the immigrant changes his language more quickly than his mores, and frequently changes neither. All this is true. And yet, in spite of it, this conservative-liberal way of looking at things which we know so well in America comes nearer to being a definite national psychology that acts in expected fashions, has qualities that you can describe as I have been describing them, and characteristics common to all varieties of it, than either the “British mind” or the “French mind” of which we write glibly.
For the British mind includes the Irish, which is as different from the English as a broncho from a dray-horse. It includes the Tory mind and the Liberal mind, which in England are as dissimilar as were Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. It includes, if we use it loosely, Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Asquith and H. G. Wells, each of whom represents a considerable British constituency. And they could no more think alike on any topic on the earth below or the heavens above than a Turk, a Greek, and a Jew. Certain fundamental attitudes would unite all three of these latter if they were civilized: they would all eat with knives and forks. And in the same fashion certain definite racial traits unite the Britons aforementioned. But the differences imposed by social caste or diverging political and social philosophies are far greater than anything to be found in everyday America, which latter I define as lying between the fringe of recent immigrants on the one hand and the excrescences of Boston intellectual aristocrats or New York radical intellectuals on the other.
Is there a “French mind”? Intellectually and esthetically, perhaps yes. Politically and socially, to a less degree of uniformity than can be found in America. From the simple homogeneity of France, as we casuals see it, has crystallized out the aristocracy and much of the church, whose respective parties differ not merely as regards the policy of the Government, but are still opposed to that Government itself.
The United States, far more heterogeneous in race, far less fixed in national character, threatened by its masses of aliens, who are in every sense unabsorbed, is yet much more homogeneous in its thinking. In America weekly magazines for men and women spread everywhere and through every class but the lowest, and so does this conservative-liberalism in politics and social life which I have tried to define. In Connecticut and Kansas and Arizona it is displayed in every conversation, as our best known national weekly (itself conservative-liberal) is displayed on every news-stand. Irrespective of racial or financial differences, everywhere in America, between the boundaries I have already indicated—the alien immigrant on one hand, the advanced intellectual on the other—nine out of ten of us are conservative-liberals; everywhere, indeed, throughout the American bourgeoisie, which with us includes skilled laborer and farmer, professional man and millionaire.
And the mental habits of this contemporary American are of more than local importance. We who are just now so afraid of internationalism are more likely than any other single agency to bring it about. Our habits of travel, our traverse of class lines, our American way of doing things, are perhaps the nearest approximation of what the world seems likely to adopt as a modern habit if the old aristocracies break down everywhere, if easy transportation becomes general, if there is wide-spread education, if Bolshevism does not first turn our whole Western system upside down. Already in newspapers and books, in theaters and politics, in social intercourse and in forms of music and language, one sees all through Western Europe (and, they say, also in the East) the American mode creeping in, to be welcomed or cursed according to circumstances. And those great international levelers, the movies, are American in plot and scene and idea and manners from one end to the other of a film that stretches round the world.
Thus the American mind is worth troubling about; and if politically, socially, economically the spirit that we and the foreigners call American has become stagnant in its liberalism, it is time to awake. In liberalism inheres our vitality, our initiative, our strength. Its stagnation, its inertia, its blindness to the new waves of freedom sweeping upward from the masses and on in broken and muddy torrents through the world are poignant dangers. We must open eyes; we must change our ground; we must fight the evil in the new revolution, but welcome the good. Our own revolution lies before the deluge; it is no longer enough to go on; it is not now the sufficing document of a political philosophy. We must not stop with Washington and Lincoln. We must go on where the conservative Washington and the radical Lincoln would lead if they were our contemporaries. Radical-conservatism is good, and Toryism or radicalism have their uses; but conservative-liberalism, preserved, desiccated, museum liberalism, long continued in, is death to the minds that maintain it.
CHAPTER II
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA
THERE is one experience that conservative-liberal America—bourgeois America, the pushing America that gets what it wants on this side of the ocean—possesses in common, and that is its education. We of the vast American middle class have all been to high school, or we have lived with high school graduates; we have all been to college, or we have worked with college graduates. Our education, when viewed with any detachment, is astoundingly homogeneous. In a given generation most of us have studied the same textbooks in mathematics and geography and history, read the same selections in literature, been inoculated with the same ethical principles from the Bible and the moralists. Ask us a question as to what makes right or wrong, as the President did in his war messages, and we will respond with a universal roar, like factory whistles when a button is punched on some celebration day.