History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

It would take whole volumes to develop the implications of that sentence. Remember that that urban citizen is Mr. Nicholson’s Middle West, and that the farmer comprises the huge bulk of the population. Is this not interesting, the attitude of the prosperous minority of an urban minority—a small but significant class which has in its hands all the non-productive business and political power—towards the great productive mass of the people? Could class division be revealed in plainer terms? This Middle West of Mr. Nicholson’s class sees itself as not only innocent of exploitation, but full of all the personal and social virtues besides. But does the farmer see this class in this light? He does not. And Mr. Veblen has given us in one of his books an analysis of this society which may explain why: “The American country town and small city,” he says, “is a business community, that is to say it lives for and by business traffic, primarily of a merchandising sort.... Municipal politics is conducted as in some sort a public or overt extension of that private or covert organization of local interests that watches over the joint pecuniary benefit of the local businessmen. It is a means ... of safe-guarding the local business community against interlopers and against any evasive tactics on the part of the country population that serves as a host.... The country town is a product and exponent of the American land system. In its beginning it is located and ‘developed’ as an enterprise of speculation in land values; that is to say, it is a businesslike endeavor to get something for nothing by engrossing as much as may be of the increment of land values due to the increase of population and the settlement and cultivation of the adjacent agricultural area. It never (hitherto) loses this character of real-estate speculation. This affords a common bond and a common ground of pecuniary interest, which commonly masquerades under the name of public patriotism, public spirit, civic pride, and the like.”

In other words, Town, in the traditional American scheme of things, is shown charging Country all the traffic will bear. It would be hard to find a member of Mr. Nicholson’s Middle West—that minority urban class—who was not owing his prosperity to some form of industrial or real-estate speculation, of brokerage business enterprise, or landlordism. This class likes to say sometimes that it is “carrying the farmer.” It would be more like the truth to say that the farmer is carrying this class. Country ultimately has to support Town; and Town, by holding control of the channels of credit and market, can make the farmer pay up to the hilt for the privilege of selling it his product. And does. When the farmers, getting a sense of the true workings of the society they live in, combine in a Non-Partisan League to control the organism of market and credit, they find they have a bitter class war on their hands. And the authentic voice of Mr. Nicholson here scolds them roundly for their restlessness and sedition. In this ferocious reaction of Town against Country’s socialistic efforts to give itself economic autonomy, we get the betrayal of the social malaise of the Middle West, a confession of the cleavage of latent class conflict in a society as exploitative, as steeply tilted, as tragically extreme in its poles of well-being, as any other modern society based on the economic absolutism of property.

A large part of the hopefulness, the spiritual comfort of the Middle West, of its sturdy belief in itself, must be based on the inflexible reluctance of its intelligentsia to any such set of ideas. However thoroughly Marxian ideas may have saturated the thought of Europe and become the intellectual explosive of social change, the Middle West, as in this book, persists in its robust resistance to any such analysis or self-knowledge. It is not that Mr. Nicholson’s attitudes are not true. It is that they are so very much less than the whole truth. They need to be supplemented by analysis set in the terms in which the progressive minds of the rest of the world are thinking. The intelligent Middle West needs to sacrifice a certain amount of complacency in exchange for an understanding of the structure of its own society. It would then realize that to read “The Valley of Democracy” in conjunction with pages 315-323 of Veblen’s “Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution” is to experience one of the most piquant intellectual adventures granted to the current mind.

ERNEST: OR, PARENT FOR A DAY

I

I had been talking rather loosely about the bringing-up of children. They had been lately appearing to me in the guise of infinitely prevalent little beings who impressed themselves almost too vividly upon one’s consciousness. My summer vacation I had passed in a household where a vivacious little boy of two years and a solemn little boy of six months had turned their mother into a household slave. I had seen walks, conversations, luncheons, and all the amenities of summer civilized life, shot to pieces by the indomitable need of imperious little children to be taken care of. Little boys who came running at you smiling, stubbed their toes, and were instantly transformed into wailing inconsolables; babies who woke importunately at ten o’clock in the evening, and had to be brought down warm and blinking before the fire; human beings who were not self-regulating, but to whom every hard surface, every protuberance, was a menace to happiness, and in whom every want and sensation was an order and claim upon somebody else—these were new offerings to my smooth and independent existence. They interested and perturbed me.

The older little boy, with his sunny luxuriance of hair and cheek, was always on the point of saying something novel and disconcerting. The baby, with his deep black eyes, seemed to be waiting silently and in soft anticipation for life. He would look at you so calmly and yet so eagerly, and give you a pleasant satisfaction that just your mere presence, your form, your movement, were etching new little lines on his cortex, sending new little shoots of feeling through his nerves. You were being part of his education just by letting his consciousness look at you. I liked particularly to hold my watch to his ear, and see the sudden grave concentration of his face, as he called all his mind to the judgment of this arresting phenomenon. I would love to accost him as he lay murmuring in his carriage, and to check his little breakings into tears by quick movements of my hands. He would watch me intently for a while until the fact of his little restless woe would come upon him again. I was challenged then to something more startling, and the woe would disappear in little short gasps. But I would find that he was subject to the law of diminishing returns. The moment would arrive when the woe submerged everything in a wail, and his mother would have to be called to nurse or coddle him in the magical motherly way.

The baby I found perhaps more interesting than his little brother, for the baby’s moods had more style to them. The brother could be transformed from golden prattlingness to raging storm, with the most disconcerting quickness. He could want the most irrational things with an intensity that got itself expressed in hypnotic reiteration. Some smoldering will-to-power in one’s self told one that a child should never be given the thing that he most wanted; and yet in five minutes one would have given him one’s soul, to be rid of the brazen rod which he pounded through one. But I could not keep away from him. He and his baby brother absorbed me, and when I contemplated their mother’s life, I had many a solemn sense of the arduousness of being a parent. I thought of the long years ahead of them, and the incalculability of their manifestations. I shuddered and remained, gloating, I am afraid, a little over the opportunity of enjoyment without responsibility.

All these things I was recounting the other evening after dinner to a group of friends who professionally look after the minds and bodies of the neglected. I was explaining my absorption, and the perils and merciless tyranny of the mother’s life, and my thankfulness at having been so much in, and yet so much not of, the child-world. I was not responsible, and the policeman mother could be called in at any time to soothe or to quell. I could always maintain the amused aloofness which is my usual attitude toward children. And I made the point that parenthood must become less arduous after the child is a self-regulating little organism, and can be trusted not to commit suicide inadvertently over every threshold, can feed himself, dress himself, and take himself reasonably around. I even suggested unwarily that after five or six the tyranny was much mitigated.

There was strong dissent. Just at that age, I was told, the real responsibilities began. I was living in a fool’s paradise of bachelordom if I thought that at six children were grown-up. One of the women before the fire made it her business to get children adopted. I had a sense of foreboding before she spoke. She promptly confirmed my intuition by offering to endow me with an infant of six years, for a day or for as long as I would take him. The hearty agreement of the rest amazed and alarmed me. They seemed delighted at the thought of my becoming parent for a day. I should have Ernest. They all knew Ernest; and I should have him. They seemed to have no concern that he would not survive my brief parenthood. It rather warmed and flattered me to think that they trusted me.