History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

President Butcher’s social philosophy is as sound as his political. The flexibility of his mind is shown in the fact that, although an immutabilist in politics, he is a staunch Darwinian in sociology. Himself triumphantly fit, he never wearies of expressing his robust contempt for the unfit who encumber the earth. His essay on “The Insurrection of the Maladjusted” is already a classic in American literature. The trenchant attack on modern social movements as the impudent revolt of the unfit against those who, by their personal merits and industry, have, like himself, achieved success, has been a grateful bulwark to thousands who might otherwise have been swept sentimentally from their moorings by those false guides who erect their own weakness and failure into a criticism of society.

Dr. Butcher’s literary eminence has not only won him a chair in the American Academy of All the Arts, Sciences, and Philosophies, but has made him almost as well known abroad as at home. He has lectured before the learned societies of Lisbon on “The American at Home,” and he has a wide circle of acquaintances in every capital in Europe. Most of the foreign universities have awarded him honorary degrees. In spite of his stout Americanism, Dr. Butcher has one of the most cosmopolitan of minds. His essay on “The Cosmopolitan Intellect” has been translated into every civilized language. With his admired friend, Owen Griffith, he has collaborated in the latter’s endeavor to beat the swords of industrial exploitation into the ploughshares of universal peace. He has served in numerous capacities on Griffith’s many peace boards and foundations, and has advised him widely and well how to distribute his millions so as to prevent the recurrence of war in future centuries.

Let it not be thought that, in recounting President Butcher’s public life and services, I am minimizing his distinction as a university administrator. As executive of one of the largest universities in America, he has raised the position of college president to a dignity surpassed by scarcely any office except President of the United States. The splendid $125,000 mansion which President Butcher had the trustees of Pluribus build for him on the heights overlooking the city, where he entertains distinguished foreign guests with all the pomp worthy of his high office, is the precise measure both of the majesty with which he has endowed the hitherto relatively humble position, and the appreciation of a grateful university. The relations between President Butcher and the trustees of Pluribus have always been of the most beautiful nature. The warm and profound intellectual sympathy which he feels for the methods and practices of the financial and corporate world, and the extensive personal affiliations he has formed with its leaders, have made it possible to leave in his hands a large measure of absolute authority. Huge endowments have made Pluribus under President Butcher’s rule one of the wealthiest of our higher institutions of learning. With a rare intuitive response to the spirit of the time, the President has labored to make it the biggest and most comprehensive of its kind. Already its schools are numbered by the dozens, its buildings by the scores, its instructors by the hundreds, its students by the thousands, its income by the millions, and its possessions by the tens of millions.

None who have seen President Butcher in the commencement exercises of Pluribus can ever forget the impressiveness of the spectacle. His resemblance to Henry VIII is more marked now that he has donned the crimson gown and flat hat of the famous English university which gave him the degree of LL.D. Seated in a high-backed chair—the historic chair of the first colonial president of Pluribus—surrounded by tier upon tier of his retinue of the thousand professors of the university, President Alexander Mackintosh Butcher presents the degrees, and in his emphatic voice warns the five thousand graduates before him against everything new, everything untried, everything untested.

Only one office could tempt President Butcher from his high estate. Yet even those enthusiastic alumni and those devoted professors who long to see him President of the United States have little hope of tempting him from his duties to his alma mater. Having set his hand to the plough, he must see Pluribus through her harvest season, and may God prosper the work! So, beloved of all, alumni and instructors alike, the idol of the undergraduates, a national oracle of Prosperity and Peace, President Butcher passes to a green old age, a truly Olympian figure of the time.

THIS OLDER GENERATION

I

I read with ever-increasing wonder the guarded defenses and discreet apologies for the older generation which keep filtering through the essays of the Atlantic. I can even seem to detect a growing decision of tone, a definite assurance of conviction, which seems to imply that a rally has been undertaken against the accusations which the younger generation, in its self-assurance, its irreverence for the old conventions and moralities, its passion for the novel and startling, seemed to be bringing against them. The first faint twinges of conscience felt by the older generation have given place to renewed homily. There is an evident anxiety to get itself put on record as perfectly satisfied with its world, and desirous that its sons and daughters should learn anew of those peculiar beauties in which it has lived. Swept off its feet by the call to social service and social reform, it is slowly regaining its foundation, and, slightly flushed, and with garments somewhat awry, it proclaims again its belief in the eternal verities of Protestant religion and conventional New England morality.

It is always an encouraging sign when people are rendered self-conscious and are forced to examine the basis of their ideals. The demand that they explain them to skeptics always makes for clarity. When the older generation is put on the defensive, it must first discover what convictions it has, and then sharpen them to their finest point in order to present them convincingly. There are always too many unquestioned things in the world, and for a person or class to have to scurry about to find reasons for its prejudices is about as healthy an exercise as one could wish for either of them. To be sure, the reasons are rarely any more than ex post facto excuses,—supports and justifications for the prejudices rather than the causes thereof. Reason itself is very seldom more than that. The important point is that one should feel the need of a reason. This always indicates that something has begun to slide, that the world is no longer so secure as it was, that obvious truths no longer are obvious, that the world has begun to bristle with question marks.

One of the basic grievances of this older generation against the younger of to-day, with its social agitation, its religious heresy, its presumptive individuality, its economic restlessness, is that all this makes it uncomfortable. When you have found growing older to be a process of the reconciliation of the spirit to life, it is decidedly disconcerting to have some youngster come along and point out the irreconcilable things in the universe. Just as you have made a tacit agreement to call certain things non-existent, it is highly discommoding to have somebody shout with strident tones that they are very real and significant. When, after much struggling and compromise, you have got your world clamped down, it is discouraging to have a gale arise which threatens to blow over all your structure. Through so much of the current writing runs this quiet note of disapprobation. These agnostic professors who unsettle the faith of our youth, these “intellectuals who stick a finger in everybody’s pie in the name of social justice,” these sensation-mongers who unveil great masses of political and social corruption, these remorseless scientists who would reveal so many of our reticences—why can’t they let us alone? Can they not see that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world?