[IV]
AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD
The United States of America has a new meaning in the world, and has entered, by no desire of its own, into the great family of nations, as a rich uncle whose authority and temper must be respected by those who desire his influence in their family quarrels, difficulties, and conditions of life. Before the war the United States was wonderfully aloof from the peoples of Europe. The three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean made it seem enormously far away, and quite beyond the orbit of those passionate politics which stirred European communities with Old World hatred and modern rivalries. It was free from the fear which was at the back of all European diplomacy and international intrigue—the fear of great standing armies across artificial frontiers, the fear of invasion, the fear of a modern European war in which nation against nation would be at one another's throats, in a wild struggle for self-preservation. America was still the New World, far away, to which people went in a spirit of adventure, in search of fortune and liberty. There was a chance of one, a certainty of the other, and it was this certain gift which called to multitudes of men and women—Russians and Russian Jews, Poles and Polish Jews, Czechs, and Bohemians, and Germans of all kinds—to escape from the bondage which cramped their souls under the oppression of their own governments, and to gain the freedom of the Stars and Stripes. To the popular imagination of Europe, America was the world's democratic paradise, where every man had equal opportunity and rights, a living wage with a fair margin and the possibility of enormous luck. A steady stream of youth flowed out from Ireland to New York, year after year, and Irish peasants left behind in their hovels heard of great doings by Pat and Mick, who had become the gentlemen entirely out there in the States, and of Kathleen and Biddy, who were piling up the dollars so fast that they could send some back to the old people and not feel the loss of them at all, at all.
The internal resources of America were so vast and the development of their own states so absorbed the energies of the people that there was no need of international diplomacy and intrigue to capture new markets of the world or to gain new territory for the possession of raw material. The United States was self-centered and self-sufficient, and the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine prohibiting foreign powers from any colonizing within the boundaries of the Republic was developed in popular imagination and tradition to a firm policy of self-isolation and of non-interference by others. The American people had no interest, politically, in the governments or affairs of other nations, and they desired to be left alone, with a "Hands off!" their own sovereign power. It was this reality of isolation which gave America immense advantages as a republic and had a profound influence upon the psychology of her citizens. Being aloof from the traditions of European peoples and from their political entanglements and interdependence, the United States could adopt a clear and straightforward policy of self-development on industrial lines. Her diplomacy was as simple as a child's copy-book maxim. Her ambassadors and ministers at European courts had no need of casuistry or Machiavellian subtlety. They had an exceedingly interesting and pleasant time reporting back the absurdities of European embassies, the melodrama of European rivalries, the back-stairs influence at work in secret treaties, the assassinations, riots, revolutions, and political crises which from time to time convulsed various countries—and the corrupt bargainings and jugglings between small powers and great powers. The American representatives in Europe watched all this as the greatest game on earth, but far away from the United States, and without the slightest effect upon the destiny of their own country, except when it excited Wall Street gamblers. American diplomats were not weighted down by the fear of offending the susceptibilities of Germany or France or Italy or Russia, nor were they asked to play off one country against another, in order to maintain that delicate and evil mechanism known as "the balance of power"—the uniting of armed bands for self-defense or the means of aggression. The frontiers of America were inviolate and the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards were not open to sudden attack, like the boundaries between Germany and France, Turkey and Bulgaria, Italy and Austria, where fear of invasion was the under-current of all political and popular thought, and the motive power of all national energy, to the detriment of social progress, because of the crippling cost of standing armies and unproductive labor for the material of war. Nationally, therefore, the United States of America was in supreme luck because it could use its youth and resources with full advantage, free from menace and beyond all rivalry.
The character of the people responded to this independence of the Republic. The average American citizen, as far as I knew him, in Europe before the war, had an amused contempt for many institutions and social ideas which he observed in a continental tour. He was able to regard the hotch-potch of European nationalities and traditions from an aloof and judicial viewpoint. They seemed to him on the whole very silly. He could not understand why an invisible line on a road should make people on each side of the line hate each other desperately. He watched the march past of troops in France or Germany, the saluting of generals, the clicking of heels, the brilliant uniforms of officers, as a pageant which was utterly out of date in its application to life, and as a degradation of individual dignity. He did not link up the thriftiness of the French peasant—the desperate hoarding of his petit sou—with the old fear of invasion by German legions across the frontier, when the peasant might see his little farm in flames and his harvest trampled down by soldiers' boots. The American visitor observed the fuss made when one king visited another, and read the false adulation of the royal visitor, the insincere speeches at royal banquets, the list of decorations conferred upon court flunkies, and laughed at the whole absurdity, not seeing that it was all part of a bid for a new alliance or a bribe for peace, or a mask of fear, until the time came when all bids and bribes should be of no more avail, and the only masks worn were to be gas-masks, when the rival nations should hack at one another in a frenzy of slaughter. The American in Europe who came to have a look 'round was astonished at the old-fashioned ways of people—their subservience to "caste" ideas, their allegiance to the divine right of kings, as to the "Little Father" of the Russian people, and the "shining armor" of the German Kaiser, and their apparent contentment with the wide gulf between underpaid labor and privileged capital. He did not realize that his own liberty of ideas and high rate of wage-earning were due to citizenship in a country free from militarism and its crushing taxation, and free also from hereditary customs upheld by the power of the sword used in civil strife as well as in international conflict, by the imperial governments of Russia, Germany, and other powers whose social philosophy was no different, though less tyrannical in expression. The American said, "I like Europe as a peep-show, and it's a good place to spend money in; but we can teach you a few things in the United States; one of them is equality, and another is opportunity." He was right, and it was his luck. Because of those privileges many pilgrims of fortune went to America from all the countries of Europe, in a great tide of emigration, adopting American citizenship in most cases soon after sighting the Statue of Liberty—"old Lib.," as I heard her called. The United States received these foreigners in hundreds of thousands and became "the melting-pot" of races. The melting process, however, was not so rapid as some people imagined, and it was something of a shock to the States to discover a few years before the war, and with a deeper realization at the outbreak of war, that they had within their boundaries enormous populations of foreign-born citizens, Germans, Poles, Slavs of all kinds, Italians, and Austrians, who had not assimilated American ideas, but kept their speech, customs, and national sentiment. It was the vast foreign element which had to be converted to the American outlook upon the world tragedy which opened in August, 1914. This mass of hostile or unwilling people had to be dragged into action when America found that her isolation was broken, that she could no longer stand aloof from the rest of mankind, nor be indifferent to the fate of friendly nations menaced with destruction, nor endure a series of outrages which flouted her own power, nor risk the world supremacy of a military autocracy which, if triumphant in Europe, would very soon dictate to the United States. It is the miracle of the Stars and Stripes that when the American government conscripted all able-bodied youth and raised a vast and well-trained army, and sent it into the battlefields of France and Flanders, there was no civil outbreak among those foreign-born citizens, and with absolute obedience they took their places in the ranks, Germans to fight against their own flesh and blood, because of allegiance to a state which had given them liberty, provided they defended the ideals which belonged to the state—in this case the hardest test of loyalty, not without tragedy and agony and fear.
For the first time there was no liberty in the United States—no liberty of private judgment, no liberty of action, no liberty of speech. The state ruled with complete despotism over the lives of its citizens, not tolerating any infringements of its orders, because the safety of the state would be endangered unless victory were assured. That was an enormous shock, I am sure, to the psychology of all Americans, even to those most loyal to the state authority, and it has caused an entire change in the mental attitude of all American citizens toward the conditions and relationships of life, because that sense of utter liberty they had before the war is limited now by the knowledge that at any time the Republic of which they are citizens may call upon them for life itself and for all service up to that of death, and that, whatever their ideas should be, they may not refuse. In that way they have no longer an advantage over Frenchmen, or Germans, or Russians, or Italians, whom they pitied as men without liberty of souls or bodies. That is to say, they have to make surrender to the state of all things in the last resort, which is war—a law which many European peoples learned to their cost, many times before, and which America learned once in her own Civil War, but thought she could forget with other painful old things in the lumber-room of history.
The people of the United States have learned many other things during the last few years, when all the world has changed, and they stand now at the parting of the ways, looking back on the things they knew which they will never see again, and looking forward to the future, which is still doubtful to them in its destiny. I went to them on a visit during the period between armistice and peace, when mentally, I think, they were in a transition stage, very conscious of this place at the crossroads, and filled with grave anxiety, in spite of exultation at the power of their armies and the valor of their men who had helped to gain stupendous victory.
The things that had happened within the United States before and after its declaration of war had stirred them with passionate and complicated emotions. From the very outset of the Great War, long before the United States was directly involved, large numbers of Americans of the old stock, born of English, Irish, Scottish, or Dutch ancestry, were neutral only by order and not at all in spirit. Their sentiment toward France, based on the Lafayette tradition and their love of Paris and of French literature and wit, made them hate the invasion of northern France and eager to act as champions of the French people. Their old ties with England, the bond of speech and of blood, made them put aside any minor antagonisms which they had felt on account of old prejudice, and they followed with deep sympathy and anxiety the progress of the heroic struggle of British armies in the slaughter-fields. They were impatient for America to get into the conflict against German aggression. As the Germans became more ruthless of humane laws, more desperate in their attacks upon non-combatant as well as military populations by sea and air and land, these Americans became sick and fevered at the thought of their own neutrality, and supported Colonel Roosevelt in his driving influence to get the United States into the war. They became more and more embittered with President Wilson, who adopted an academic view of the jungle scenes in Europe, dissociated the German people from the crimes of their war lords, and expounded a Christian philosophy of world politics which seemed like cowardice and humiliation of American pride to people stung to fury by German insults and outrages. These thoughts were beginning to seethe like yeast throughout masses of American people, especially in the East, but took a long time to reach and stir the great West and were resisted by the mentality of foreign-born populations, including the Jewish communities and the Irish. They were averse to war, and took a detached view of the struggle in Europe, which seemed to them too far away to matter to America. The German populations had a natural sympathy for their own race, much as some of them detested its militaristic ideals. There were, I imagine, also many intellectual men, not dragged down by the apathy of the masses, to whom "the war" seemed of less importance to the United States than the condition of the crops or the local baseball match. They felt that President Wilson's hesitations, long-drawn-out notes, and exalted pacifism were on nobler lines of thought than the loud-mouthed jingoism and bloodthirsty howlings of low-class newspapers and speakers.
The Lusitania was sunk, and a cry of agony and wrath went up from many hearts in the world at this new phase of war; but still the United States stayed out; and many Americans lowered their heads with shame and had a fire of indignation in their hearts because their President still temporized. They believed that the American people would have rallied to him as one man had he made that outrage the signal of war. They had no patience with his careful letter-writing, his anxiety to act as a moral mentor instead of as a leader of great armies in a fight against world criminals.... At last Wilson was forced to act, even his caution being overmastered by the urgent necessity of intervention on behalf of Great Britain and France and Belgium, panting and bleeding from every pore after three years of struggle; even his philosophy of aloofness being borne down by acts of war which wounded American interests and threatened American security. So the United States declared war, gathered its youth into great training-camps, and launched into the world struggle with slow but ever-increasing energy which swept the people with a mighty whirlwind of emotion.