The Valley of Democracy

by Meredith Nicholson

Many of us were favored in the first years of the war with letters from Eastern friends anxious to enlighten us as to America’s danger and her duty with respect to the needs of the sufferers in the wake of battle. On a day when I received a communication from New York asking “whether nothing could be done in Indiana to rouse the people to the sore need of France,” a committee for French relief had just closed a week’s campaign with a fund of $17,000, collected over the State in small sums and contributed very largely by school children. The Millers’ Belgian Relief movement, initiated in the fall of 1914 by Mr. William C. Edgar, of Minneapolis, publisher of The Northwestern Miller, affords a noteworthy instance of the West’s response to appeals in behalf of the people in the trampled kingdom. A call was issued November 4 for 45,000 barrels of flour, but 70,000 barrels were contributed; and this cargo was augmented by substantial gifts of blankets, clothing for women and children, and condensed milk. These supplies were distributed in Belgium under Mr. Edgar’s personal direction, in co-operation with Mr. Herbert C. Hoover, chairman of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium.

Many Westerners were fighting under the British and French flags, or were serving in the French ambulance service before our entrance into the war, and the opening of the officers’ training-camps in 1917 found young Westerners of the best type clamoring for admission. The Western colleges and universities cannot be too strongly praised for the patriotic fervor with which they met the crisis. One president said that if necessary he would nail up the doors of his college until the war was over. The eagerness to serve is indicated in the Regular Army enlistments for the period from June to December, 1917, in which practically all of the Middle Western States doubled and tripled the quota fixed by the War Department; and any assumption that patriotism diminishes the farther we penetrate into the interior falls before the showing of Colorado, whose response to a call for 1,598 men was answered by 3,793; and Utah multiplied her quota by 5 and Montana by 7. This takes no account of men who, in the period indicated, entered training-camps, or of naval and marine enlistments, or of the National Guard or the selective draft. More completely than ever before the West is merged into the nation. The situation when war was declared is comparable to that of householders, long engrossed with their domestic affairs and heeding little the needs of the community, who are brought to the street by a common peril and confer soberly as to ways and means of meeting it.

“The West,” an Eastern critic complains, “appears always to be demanding something!” The idea of the West as an Oliver Twist with a plate insistently extended pleases me and I am unable to meet it with any plausible refutation. The West has always wanted and it will continue to want and to ask for a great many things; we may only pray that it will more and more hammer upon the federal counter, not for appropriations but for things of value for the whole. “We will try anything once!” This for long was more or less the Western attitude in politics, but we seem to have escaped from it; and the war, with its enormous demands upon our resources, its revelation of national weaknesses, caused a prompt cleaning of the slate of old, unfinished business to await the outcome.

It is an element of strength in a democracy that its political and social necessities are continuing; there is no point of rest. Obstacles, differences, criticism are all a necessary part of the eternal struggle toward perfection. What was impossible yesterday is achieved to-day and may be abandoned to-morrow. Democracy, as we have thus far practised it, is a series of experiments, a quest.

II

The enormous industrial development of the Middle West was a thing undreamed of by the pioneers, whose chief concern was with the soil; there was no way of anticipating the economic changes that have been forced upon attention by the growth of cities and States. Minnesota had been a State thirteen years when in 1871 Proctor Knott, in a speech in Congress, ridiculed the then unknown name of Duluth: “The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar and indescribable charm, like the gentle murmur of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the soft, sweet accent of an angel’s whisper in the bright, joyous dream of sleeping innocence.” And yet Duluth has become indeed a zenith city of the saltless seas, and the manufactured products of Minnesota have an annual value approximating $500,000,000.

The first artisans, the blacksmiths and wagon-makers, and the women weaving cloth and fashioning the garments for their families in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, never dreamed that the manufactures of these States alone would attain a value of $5,500,000,000, approximately a fifth of the nation’s total. The original social and economic structure was not prepared for this mighty growth. States in which the soil was tilled almost wholly by the owners of the land were unexpectedly confronted with social and economic questions foreign to all their experience. Rural legislators were called upon to deal with questions of which they had only the most imperfect understanding. They were bewildered to find the towns nearest them, which had been only trading centres for the farmer, asking for legislation touching working hours, housing, and child labor, and for modifications of local government made necessary by growth and radical changes in social conditions. I remember my surprise to find not long ago that a small town I had known all my life had become an industrial centre where the citizens were gravely discussing their responsibilities to the laborers who had suddenly been added to the population.

The preponderating element in the original occupation of the Middle Western States was American, derived from the older States; and the precipitation into the Mississippi valley industrial centres of great bodies of foreigners, many of them only vaguely aware of the purposes and methods of democracy, added an element of confusion and peril to State and national politics. The perplexities and dangers of municipal government were multiplied in the larger cities by the injection into the electorate of the hordes from overseas that poured into States whose government and laws had been fashioned to meet the needs of a homogeneous people who lived close to the soil.

The war that has emphasized so many needs and dangers has sharply accentuated the growing power of labor. Certain manifestations of this may no longer be viewed in the light of local disturbances and agitations but with an eye upon impending world changes. Whatever the questions of social and economic reconstruction that Europe must face, they will be hardly less acutely presented in America; and these matters are being discussed in the West with a reassuring sobriety. The Industrial Workers of the World has widely advertised itself by its lawlessness, in recent years, and its obstructive tactics with respect to America’s preparations for war have focussed attention upon it as an organization utterly inconsonant with American institutions. An arresting incident of recent years was the trial, in 1912, in the United States Court for the District of Indiana, of forty-two officers and members of the International Association of Structural Iron Workers for the dynamiting of buildings and bridges throughout the country. The trial lasted three months, and the disclosures, pointing to a thoroughly organized conspiracy of destruction, were of the most startling character. Thirty-eight of the defendants were convicted. The influence of labor in the great industrial States of the West is very great, and not a negligible factor in the politics of the immediate future. What industrial labor has gained has been through constant pressure of its organizations; and yet the changes of the past fifty years have been so gradual as to present, in the retrospect, the appearance of an evolution.

There is little to support an assumption that the West in these critical hours will not take counsel of reason; and it is an interesting circumstance that the West has just now no one who may be pointed to as its spokesman. No one is speaking for the West; the West has learned to think and to speak for itself. “Organized emotion” (I believe the phrase is President Lowell’s) may again become a power for mischief in these plains that lend so amiable an ear to the orator; but the new seriousness of which I have attempted to give some hint in the progress of these papers, and the increasing political independence of the Western people, encourage the belief that whatever lies before us in the way of momentous change, the West will not be led or driven to ill-considered action.