I took on self-support at the start that I might be free to find answers to questions which puzzled me. After long floundering I blundered into man’s old struggle for the betterment of his life.
My point of attack has always been that of a journalist after the fact, rarely that of a reformer, the advocate of a cause or a system. If I was tempted from the strait and narrow path of the one who seeks for that which is so and why it is so, I sooner or later returned. This was partly because of the humor and common sense of my associates on McClure’s and The American Magazine, and partly because the habit of accepting without question the teachings and conventions of my world was shattered when in girlhood I discovered that the world was not created in six days of twenty-four hours each. That experience aroused me to questioning, qualifying even what I advocated, which no first-class crusader can afford to do.
I have never had illusions about the value of my individual contribution! I realized early that what a man or a woman does is built on what those who have gone before have done, that its real value depends on making the matter in hand a little clearer, a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain. One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.
In our eagerness to prove we have found the true solution, we fail to inquire why this same solution failed to work when tried before—for it always has been tried before, even if we in our self-confidence do not know it.
We are given to ignoring not only the past of our solutions, their status when we took them over, but the variety of relationships they must meet, satisfy. They must sink or swim in a stream where a multitude of human experiences, prejudices, ambitions, ideals meet and clash, throw one another back, mingle, make that all-powerful current which is public opinion—the trend which swallows, digests, or rejects what we give it. It is our indifference to or ignorance of the multiplicity of human elements in the society we seek to benefit that is responsible for the sinking outright of many of our fine plans.
There are certain exhibits of the eighty years I have lived which particularly impress me. Perhaps the first of these is the cyclical character of man’s nature and activities. If I separate my eighty years—1857 to 1937—into four generations, examine them, compare my findings, I find startling similarities in essentials. Take the effort, to create, distribute, and use wealth. How alike are the ups and downs that have marked that effort!
I was born in the year of a major panic. The depression which followed it was smothered in war. That war over, quickly there followed in 1866 a serious depression—world-wide. In 1873 came a major panic. When this first period came to an end in 1877 the country was still deep in the clutch of the unhappy depression which followed that panic.
Each of my three successive generations beginning in 1877, 1897, 1917, has featured a “major” panic followed by five to seven years of depression. Then has come a brilliant short-lived recovery ending in what we euphoniously call today a recession.
My fifth generation, just opening, promises well to duplicate its predecessor. If I live ten years longer I no doubt shall see another major panic, and one still more difficult for the productive individual or group to handle because the practice of following the provident ant’s example and storing up in the good time reserves to meet the bad has been made a political offense.
Each generation repeats its leaders. Each sees men endowed with superior inventiveness, energy, and genius for business, inspired by love of power and possession, launch selfish schemes—Carnegies, Rockefellers, Goulds. If each of these strong men left something sinister behind, each also contributed to higher living standards and hurried on the nationalization of the country. The public without whom they could not have lived a day saw in their greedy grandiose undertakings whatever was for its benefit, and took it while ordering its government to control whatever was sinister.