The culture of any age consists of the feelings, habits, customs, activities, thoughts, ambitions and dreams of a people. It is a composite picture of their homes, their work, their arts, their pleasures and the other channels of their life-expression.
The culture of each age has two aspects. On the one hand there is the established or accepted culture of those who dominate and control,—the culture of the leisure or ruling class. This culture is respected, admired, applauded, and sometimes even worshipped by those who benefit from it most directly. Civilization—even life itself seems bound up with its continuance. When the advocates of the established culture cry "Long live the King!" they are really shouting approval of royalty, aristocracy, landlordism, vassalage, exploitation and of all the other attributes of divine right. The world as it is becomes in their minds, synonymous with the world as it should be. For them the old culture is the best culture.
On the other hand there is the new culture, comprising the hopes, beliefs, ideas and ideals of those who feel that the present is but a transition-stage, leading from the past into the future—a future that they see radiant with the best that is in man, developing soundly against the bounties that are supplied by the hand of nature. These forward looking ones, impatient with the mistakes and injustices of to-day, preach wisdom and justice for the morrow. So imperfect does the present seem to them, and so obvious are the possibilities of the future, that they look forward confidently to the overthrow of the old social forms, and the establishment, in their places, of a new society, the embryo of which is already germinating within the old social shell.
The old culture relies on tradition, custom, and the normal conservatism of the masses of mankind, The new culture relies on concepts of justice, truth, liberty, love, brotherhood. Eighteenth century, Feudal France was filled with the prophecies of a form of society that would supplant Feudalism. Nineteenth century Russia, in the grip of a capitalist bureaucracy, proved to be the centre for the revolutions of the early twentieth century. The new culture, growing at first under the shadow of the old, gradually assumes larger and larger proportions until it takes all of the sunlight for itself, throwing the old culture into the shadow of oblivion.
Each ruling class knows these facts,—knows that the old must give place to the new; knows that the living, ruling culture of to-day will be the history of the day after tomorrow, yet because of the vested interests which they rely upon for their power, and because they are satisfied to have the deluge come after them, they oppose each manifestation of the new culture and strain every nerve to make the temporary organization of the world permanent. The more vigorously the new culture thrives, the more eagerly do the representatives of the old order strive to destroy it.
IV.
During three eventful centuries, the part of North America that is now the United States has witnessed two fierce culture-survival struggles. In the first of these struggles—that between the American Indians and the whites, the culture of Western Europe supplanted the culture of primitive America. In the second struggle—that between the slave holders of the South and the rising business interests of the North, the slave oligarchy was swept from power, and in its place there was established the new financial imperialism that dominates the public life of the nation at the present time. Despite the extreme youth of the capitalist system in the United States, there are already many signs that those who profit by it must be prepared to defend it at no distant date. The Russian Revolution of 1917 sounded the loudest note of warning, but even before that occurred, the industrial capitalists had entered upon a struggle which they believed to be of the greatest importance to their future.
During the twenty years that elapsed between the Homestead and Pullman strikes and the beginning of the world war, the pages of American industrial history are crowded with stories of the labor conflict—on an ever vaster and vaster scale, between nationally organized employers, using the power of the police, the courts and, where necessary, the army; and the nationally organized workers, backed by some show of public sentiment, and armed with the strength of numbers. Although the bulk of the workers was still unorganized, and although those who were organized thought and acted within the lines of their crafts, considering themselves as railway trainmen or as carpenters first, and as workers afterward, there was not wanting a new spirit—sometimes called the spirit of industrial unionism—emphasizing labor solidarity and speaking most loudly through the propaganda, first of the Socialist Labor Party and later of the I. W. W.
The old culture was joining battle with the new. "America is the land of opportunity. It was good enough for my father: it is good enough for me" was the slogan of the capitalists. "The world for the workers," answered the vanguard of the exploited masses.
The advocate of a labor state is as unpopular in a capitalist society as the abolitionist was in the Carolinas before the Civil War. He sees a vision that the stalwarts of the existing order do not care to see; he speaks a language that they cannot comprehend; he represents an interest that is as hateful to them as it is alien to their privileges.