The Valley of Democracy

by Meredith Nicholson

It is to be hoped that in the general awakening to our imperfections caused by the war, there may be a widening of these groups of patient, earnest citizens, who labor for the rationalization of municipal government. The disposition to say that “as things have been they remain” is strong upon us, but it is worth remembering that Clough also bids us “say not the struggle naught availeth.” The struggle goes on courageously, and the number of those who concern themselves with the business of strengthening the national structure by pulling out the rotten timbers in our cities proceeds tirelessly.

Western cities are constantly advertising their advantages and resources, and offering free sites and other inducements to manufacturers to tempt them to move; but it occurs to me that forward-looking cities may present their advantages more alluringly by perfecting their local government and making this the burden of their appeal. We shall get nowhere with commission government or the city-manager plan until cities realize that no matter how attractive and plausible a device, it is worthless unless due consideration is given to the human equation. It is very difficult to find qualified administrators under the city-manager plan. A successful business man or even a trained engineer may fail utterly, and we seem to be at the point of creating a new profession of great opportunities for young men (and women too) in the field of municipal administration. At the University of Kansas and perhaps elsewhere courses are offered for the training of city managers. The mere teaching of municipal finance and engineering will not suffice; the courses should cover social questions and kindred matters and not neglect the psychology involved in the matter of dealing fairly and justly with the public. By giving professional dignity to positions long conferred upon the incompetent and venal we should at least destroy the cynical criticism that there are no men available for the positions created; and it is conceivable that once the idea of fitness has become implanted in a careless and indifferent public a higher standard will be set for all elective offices.

VI

No Easterner possessed of the slightest delicacy will read what follows, which is merely a memorandum for my friends and neighbors of the great Valley. We of the West have never taken kindly to criticism, chiefly because it has usually been offered in a spirit of condescension, or what in our extreme sensitiveness we have been rather eager to believe to be such. In our comfortable towns and villages we may admit weaknesses the mention of which by our cousins in partibus infidelium arouses our deepest ire. We shall not meekly suffer the East in its disdainful moods to play upon us with the light lash of its irony; but among ourselves we may confess that at times we have profited by Eastern criticism. After all, there is no spirit of the West that is very different from the spirit of the East. Though I only whisper it, we have, I think, rather more humor. We are friendlier, less snobbish, more sanguine in our outlook upon public matters, and have a greater confidence in democracy than the East. I have indicated with the best heart in the world certain phases and tendencies of our provinces that seem to me admirable, and others beside which I have scratched a question-mark for the contemplation of the sober-minded. I am disposed to say that the most interesting thing about us is our politics, but that, safely though we have ridden the tempest now and again, these be times when it becomes us to ponder with a new gravity the weight we carry in the national scale. Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin wield 145 votes of the total of 531 in the electoral college; and in 1916 Mr. Wilson’s majority was only 23. The political judgment of the nation is likely, far into the future, to be governed by the West. We dare not, if we would, carry our responsibilities lightly. We have of late been taking our politics much more seriously; a flexibility of the vote, apparent in recent contests, is highly encouraging to those of us who see a hope and a safety in the multiplication of the independents. But even with this we have done little to standardize public service; the ablest men of the West do not govern it, and the fact that this has frequently been true of the country at large can afford us no honest consolation. There is no reason why, if we are the intelligent, proud sons of democracy we imagine ourselves to be, we should not so elevate our political standards as to put other divisions of the republic to shame. There are thousands of us who at every election vote for candidates we know nothing about, or for others we would not think of intrusting with any private affair, and yet because we find their names under a certain party emblem we cheerfully turn over to such persons important public business for the honest and efficient transaction of which they have not the slightest qualification. What I am saying is merely a repetition of what has been said for years without marked effect upon the electorate. But just now, when democracy is fighting for its life in the world, we do well to give serious heed to such warnings. If we have not time or patience to perform the services required of a citizen who would be truly self-governing, then the glory of fighting for free institutions on the battle-fields of Europe is enormously diminished.

The coming of the war found the West rather hard put for any great cause upon which to expend its energy and enthusiasm. We need a good deal of enthusiasm to keep us “up to pitch,” and I shall not scruple to say that, in spite of our fine showing as to every demand thus far made by the war, the roll of the drums really found us inviting the reproach passed by the prophet upon them “that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall.” Over and over again, as I have travelled through the West in recent years, it has occurred to me that sorely indeed we needed an awakening. Self-satisfaction and self-contemplation are little calculated to promote that clear thinking and vigorous initiative that are essential to triumphant democracy. Yes; this may be just as true of East or South; but it is of the West that we are speaking. I shall go the length of saying that any failure of democracy “to work” here in America is more heavily chargeable upon us of these Middle Western States than upon our fellow Americans in other sections. For here we are young enough to be very conscious of all those processes by which States are formed and political and social order established. Our fathers or our grandfathers were pioneers; and from them the tradition is fresh of the toil and aspiration that went to the making of these commonwealths. We cannot deceive ourselves into believing that they did all that was necessary to perpetuate the structure, and that it is not incumbent upon us to defend, strengthen, and renew what they fashioned. We had, like many of those who have come to us from over the sea to share in our blessings, fallen into the error of assuming that America is a huge corporation in which every one participates in the dividends without reference to his part in earning them. Politically speaking, we have too great a number of those who “hang on behind” and are a dead weight upon those who bear the yoke. We must do better about this; and in no way can the West prove its fitness to wield power in the nation than through a quickening of all those forces that tend to make popular government an intelligently directed implement controlled by the fit, and not a weapon caught up and exercised ignorantly by the unfit.

Again, still speaking as one Westerner to another, our entrance into the war found us dangerously close to the point of losing something that was finely spiritual in our forebears. I am aware that an impatient shrug greets this suggestion. The spires and towers of innumerable churches decorate the Western sky-line, and I accept them for what they represent, without discussing the efficiency of the modern church or its failure or success in meeting the problems of modern life. There was apparent in the first settlers of the Mississippi valley a rugged spirituality that accounted for much in their achievements. The West was a lonesome place and religion—Catholic and Protestant—filled a need and assisted greatly in making wilderness and plain tolerable. The imagination of the pioneer was quickened and brightened by the promise of things that he believed to be eternal; the vast sweep of prairie and woodland deepened his sense of reliance upon the Infinite. This sense so happily interpreted and fittingly expressed by Lincoln is no longer discernible—at least it is not obtrusively manifest—and this seems to me a lamentable loss. Here, again, it may be said that this is not peculiar to the West; that we have only been affected by the eternal movement of the time spirit. And yet this elementary confidence in things of the spirit played an important part in the planting of the democratic ideal in the heart of America, and we can but deplore the passing of what to our immediate ancestors was so satisfying and stimulating. And here, as with other problems that I have passed with only the most superficial note, I have no solution, if indeed any be possible. I am fully conscious that I fumble for something intangible and elusive; and it may be that I am only crying vainly for the restoration of something that has gone forever. Perhaps this war came opportunely to break our precipitate rush toward materialism, and the thing we were apparently losing, the old enthusiasm for higher things, the greater leisure for self-examination and self-communion, may come again in the day of peace.

“There is always,” says Woodberry, “an ideality of the human spirit” visible in all the works of democracy, and we need to be reminded of this frequently, for here in the heart of America it is of grave importance that we remain open-minded and open-hearted to that continuing idealism which must be the strength and stay of the nation.

Culture, as we commonly use the term, may properly be allowed to pass as merely another aspect of the idealism “deep in the general heart of man” that we should like to believe to be one of the great assets of the West. Still addressing the Folks, my neighbors, I will temerariously repeat an admission tucked into an earlier chapter, that here is a field where we do well to carry ourselves modestly. There was an impression common in my youth that culture of the highest order was not only possible in the West but that we Westerners were peculiarly accessible to its benignant influences and very likely to become its special guardians and apostles. Those were times when life was less complex, when the spirituality stirred by the Civil War was still very perceptible, when our enthusiasms were less insistently presented in statistics of crops and manufactures. We children of those times were encouraged to keep Emerson close at hand, for his purifying and elevating influence, and in a college town which I remember very well the professor of Greek was a venerated person and took precedence in any company over the athletic director.

In those days, that seem now so remote, it was quite respectable to speak of the humanities, and people did so without self-consciousness. But culture, the culture of the humanities, never gained that foothold in the West that had been predicted for it. That there are few signs of its permanent establishment anywhere does not conceal our failure either to implant it or to find for it any very worthy substitute. We have valiantly invested millions of dollars in education and other millions in art museums and in libraries without any resulting diffusion of what we used to be pleased to call culture. We dismiss the whole business quite characteristically by pointing with pride to handsome buildings and generous endowments in much the same spirit that we call attention to a new automobile factory. There are always the few who profit by these investments; but it is not for the few that we design them; it is for the illumination of the great mass that we spend our treasure upon them. The doctrine of the few is the old doctrine of “numbers” and “the remnant,” and even at the cost of reconstructing human nature we promised to show the world that a great body of people in free American States could be made sensitive and responsive to beauty in all its forms. The humanities still struggle manfully, but without making any great headway against adverse currents. The State universities offer an infinite variety of courses in literature and the fine arts, and they are served by capable and zealous instructors, but with no resulting progress against the tide of materialism. “Culture,” as a friend of mine puts it, “is on the blink.” We hear reassuring reports of the State technical schools where the humanities receive a niggardly minimum of attention, and these institutions demand our heartiest admiration for the splendid work they are doing. But our development is lamentably one-sided; we have merely groups of cultivated people, just as older civilizations had them, not the great communities animated by ideals of nobility and beauty that we were promised.

In the many matters which we of the West shall be obliged to consider with reference to the nation and the rest of the world as soon as Kultur and its insolent presumptions have been disposed of, culture, in its ancient and honorable sense, is quite likely to make a poor fight for attention. And yet here are things, already falling into neglect, which we shall do well to scan once and yet again before parting company with them forever. There are balances as between materialism and idealism which it is desirable to maintain if the fineness and vigor of democracy and its higher inspirational values are to be further developed. Our Middle Western idealism has been expending itself in channels of social and political betterment, and it remains to be seen whether we shall be able to divert some part of its energy to the history, the literature, and the art of the past, not for cultural reasons merely but as part of our combat with provincialism and the creation of a broad and informed American spirit.