Everyday Americans

by Henry Seidel Canby

It is not sound. The boys and girls, especially the boys, are coddled for entrance examinations, coddled through freshman year, coddled oftentimes for graduation. And they too frequently go out into the world fireproof against anything but intellectual coddling. Such men and women can read only writing especially prepared for brains that will take only selected ideas, simply put. They can think only on simple lines, not too far extended. They can live happily only in a life where ideas never exceed the college sixty per cent of complexity, and where no intellectual or esthetic experience lies too far outside the range of their curriculum. A world where one reads the news and skips the editorials; goes to musical comedies, but omits the plays; looks at illustrated magazines, but seldom at books; talks business, sports, and politics, but never economics, social welfare, and statesmanship—that is the world for which we coddle the best of our youth. Many indeed escape the evil effects by their own innate originality; more bear the marks to the grave.

The process is simple, and one can see it in the English public schools (where it is being attacked vivaciously) quite as commonly as here. You take your boy out of his family and his world. You isolate him except for companionship with other nursery transplantings and teachers themselves isolated. And then you feed him, nay, you cram him, with good traditional education, filling up the odd hours with the excellent, but negative, passion of sport. Then you subject him to a special cramming and send him to college, where sometimes he breaks through the net of convention woven about him, and sees the real world as it should appear to the student before he becomes part of it; but more frequently wraps himself deep and more deeply in conventional opinion, conventional practice, until, the limbs of his intellect bound tightly, he stumbles into the outer world.

And there, in the swirl and the vivid practicalities of American life, is the net loosened? I think not. I think rather that the youth learns to swim clumsily despite his encumbrances of lethargic thinking and tangled idealism. But if they are cut? If he goes on the sharp rocks of experience, finds that hardness, shrewdness, selfish individualism pay best in American life, what has he in his spirit to meet this disillusion? Of what use has been his education in the liberal, idealistic traditions of America? Of some use, undoubtedly, for habit, even a dull habit, is strong; but whether useful enough, whether powerful enough, to save America, to keep us “white” in the newer and more colloquial sense, the future will test and test quickly.

Why do we coddle our aristocracy, who can pay for the best and most effective education? I think that the explanation again is to be sought in the traditionalism of American education. If our chief, our ultimate, duty to the boy that we teach is to make him an “American gentleman,” and if by this is meant that we are to instil the essence of the Americanism which made Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt, and let it go at that, and if all our education hovers about this central purpose—why, the stage is set for a problem play that may become tragedy or farce. It is not thinking we teach then so much as what has been taught. It is not life, but what has been lived; not American liberalism, but a conservatism that never has been characteristically American. The tradition is not at fault, nor the thought of the past, nor the lives of our ancestors; it is when all these things are taught as dead idealism unrelated to the facts of the present that they become merely traditional.

And the boy and girl are not deceived. They take all that is given them—no youth in the world are so pliable, so receptive as ours—and retain and respect and cherish what they remember of it. But it is clear that for them it is tradition, it is unreal in comparison with their sports, their social aspirations. It will be unreal in comparison with their business and their politics and their household affairs. It will be a venerated tradition of liberal thinking for them of which they will be highly conservative. But it will not function in their lives—not more at least than the sixty per cent that they sought for in order to get that degree of bachelor of arts which certified that they were versed in the thought of their forefathers. And so they merge in the common American mind that I have called conservative-liberal.

I know of no better proof of the truth of what I have just written than the history of our college undergraduates in war-time.

Here is such a demonstration as comes only once in a generation. Of all unpreparedness, the unpreparedness of the undergraduate for war was apparently chief. He knew little about the war, its causes, its manifestations, for he is not an ardent reader of current events outside his college world, nor does he hear much of the talk of the market-place. He knew little about war. The R. O. T. C. had spread some ideas of drill and discipline and the technic of fighting; but he was neither drilled nor disciplined in 1917. And as for the training in accurate obedience and in exact thinking which war is supposed to demand, he simply did not have it, or so we thought. Nor had his particularistic fashion of following his own little contests to the exclusion of loyalties to the world outside, and his indifference to politics beyond fraternity elections, or economics beyond the cost of theater-tickets and beer, led us to assume a ready response to a great moral emergency in national affairs.

We were utterly deceived. The response of the American undergraduate was immediate and magnificent. He crowded into the most dangerous military professions, and was eminent in the most difficult branches of organization and experiment. He did not, it is true, think very broadly about the war, but he thought intensely. He did not learn accuracy, steadiness, independence overnight, but he learned them. He was wholly admirable. And the women, who in ways not yet sufficiently celebrated made it possible for the country to stiffen to the crisis, were as eager to serve as the men.

And the reason, I believe, was that for the time the education of the undergraduate ceased being traditional and became a moving force in his experience. The dim liberal idealism in which his mind had been moving for many years suddenly took on color and became fire. Every impulse of his mental training urged him to do just what was asked of him, to struggle for democracy, for justice, for a square deal; to believe in the rights of man and the permanence of right and the supremacy of a righteous idealism. And his habits of hard, earnest play, where rules were obeyed and victory went to the best player, also were the very stuff the world wanted, also transformed miraculously into the very apparatus of war. His traditional education, with its extra-curriculum of games that also were traditional in their neglect of the new and special qualities required for success in modern life, precisely fitted the clamorous need of the hour. And the undergraduate for a little while silenced his critics, amazed his friends, and was in many respects happier than in those years of peace when he was trying to bridge the gap between his education and life as it was being lived in America.

And with peace he relapses—the American in general relapses into the old discontinuity. The crisis of self-defense over, our ideals once more begin to seem impractical, traditionary. As long as the patriotism lit by the war and danger crackled under the pot, our liberalism bubbled ardently; but peace chills the brew. For peace means that we drop our ardors and face again the insistent reachings of the democracy for a greater share in wealth, for a greater control over productivity, for representation in industry as well as in politics. Peace means that we must face not war, with its romantic thrills and its common enemy, but the prosaic causes of war that hide among friends as well as enemies, that for cure demand self-criticism, self-denial, and humbleness of spirit, a struggle in which the Croix de Guerre is likely to be reproach and contumely.