Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

That this service is a hard one, its most ardent advocates make no attempt to conceal. Its very stringency is made the text of appeals for ever and ever fresh efficiency, intensive training, specialization. “The pace they must travel is so swift,” one advocate of strenuousness warns his disciples, “competition has become so fierce that brains and vision are not enough. One must have the punch to put things through.” The impression grows that the American business man, new style, is a sombre gladiator, equipped for his struggle by rigorous physical and mental discipline. The impression is helped by a host of axioms, plain and pictured, that feature a sort of new cant of virility. “Red-blooded men,” “Two-fisted men,” “Men who do things,” “Get-there fellows,” are a few headliners in this gospel of push and shove.

The service is made still more difficult by its uncertainty, since no gospel of efficiency can greatly change the proportion of rewards, though it can make the contest harder and the marking higher. Year in year out, while competition intensifies and resources are fenced off, insecurity of employment remains, an evil tradition from days when opportunity was really boundless and competition could be escaped by a move of a few score miles Westward. Continuity in one employment still remains the exception rather than the rule, and when death or retirement reveals an instance it is still thought worthy of space in local journals. “Can you use me?” remains the customary gambit for the seeker after employment. The contempt of a settled prospect, of routine work, the conception of business as something to work up rather than to work at is still latent in the imagination of atavistic and ambitious young America. Of late years this restlessness, even though in so worthy a cause as “getting on,” has been felt as a hindrance to full efficiency, and the happy idea has been conceived of applying the adventurous element of competition at home. Territorial or departmental spheres are allotted within or without the “concern” to each employé; the results attained by A, B, and C are then totalled, analyzed, charted, and posted in conspicuous places where all may see, admire, and take warning. In the majority of up-to-date houses “suggestions” for the expansion or improvement of the business are not only welcomed but expected, and the employé who does not produce them in reasonable bulk and quality is slated for the “discard.” When inventiveness tires, “shake-ups” on a scale unknown in England take place, and new aspirants eager to “make good” step into the shoes of the old. The business athletes strain and pant toward the goal. There is no rest for the young man “consecrated” to merchandising effort. Like the fly in the fable, he must struggle and swim until the milk around his legs is churned into the butter of executive position.

The American press, hybrid, highly coloured, and often written by men of erratic genius who prefer the poor rewards of news writing to the commercial yoke, conveys but a partial idea of this absorption of an entire race in a single function. A far more vivid impression is to be gained from the “house organs,” and publicity pamphlets which pour from the press in an unceasing stream and the production of which within recent years has become a large and lucrative industry. Here articles and symposia on such themes as “Building Character into Salesmanship,” “Hidden Forces that bring Sales,” and “Capitalizing Individuality,” often adorned with half-tones of tense and joyless faces, recur on every page. No sanctuary is inviolable, no recess unexplored. The demand of the commercial God is for the soul, and he will be content with no less.

This demand implies a revised conception of the relation between employé and employer. The old contract under which time and effort were hired for so many hours a day at a stated remuneration, leaving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness outside those hours a matter of personal predilection, is now abrogated, or at least sharply questioned. It is recognized, and with entire logic, that the measure of accomplishment within working hours will depend largely on the environment amid which hours of recreation are spent; and that though detection of inefficiency is a task of keen brains that seldom fail, this detection, in the nature of things, may not take place until damage has been done the commercial structure. This is the real inwardness of a whole new gospel of “Welfare” and “Uplift,” under whose dispensation employés are provided with simple and tested specifics for recreation, with the watchful and benevolent eye of department heads upon them, in which it is presumed and stated with entire candour that the physical, moral, and mental efficiency of the staffs and “salesforce” has become the concern of the organization that has allotted them a place in its economy. The organism works, plays, rests, moves on together.

Nothing is more terrifying, as that master of terror, Edgar Allan Poe, perceived, than an organism that is at once mean and colossal. Properties of efficiency and adaptation to one definite end are bestowed in an eminent degree only on the lower orders of animal life. With rigid bodies, encasing organs that are designed for simple, metabolic purposes, armed with an elaborate mechanism of claws, hinges, borers, valves, and suckers the lepidoptera are living tools that fly or creep. Absorbed in one tireless function, with all distractions of love and war delegated to specialized subspecies, they neither love, hate, nor rebel. As the scale ascends, efficiency dwindles, until in the litter and loneliness of the den, lazy domesticity with dam and cubs, the joy of prey hunt and love hunt, between the belly pinch of hunger and the sleep of repletion, the lives of the big carnivora pass in a sheer joy of living for living’s sake until the gun of the hunter ends the day dream.

It has been left for man—hapless and inventive—to realize a life that touches both ends of the scale, to feel at his heart the pull of hive-life and jungle-life in turn. Something of the ant and something of the tiger lurks in every normal human creature. If he has immense powers of assertion, his faculty for abdication seems to be as limitless. It is just this dual nature in man that makes prophecy as to what “will happen the world” so difficult and unsafe. But one prophecy may be ventured on and that is, that in proportion as acquiescence or revolt seize the imaginations of separated nations will those nations coalesce or drift apart into antagonism.

If a life spent during the last twenty years between England and the United States is any title to judge, I should say that at the present moment the dominant note in America is acquiescence in, and in England revolt against the inordinate demands of commercialism. Here, to all appearances, the surrender for the moment is complete. There are revolts, but they are sporadic and misguided and their speedy suppression seems to stir no indignation and to awaken no thrill of common danger among the body of workers. Strikes confined to wage issues are treated more indulgently, but even they are generally strangled at their birth by injunctions, and a sour or hostile attitude of authority makes success difficult. In any display of opposition to established conditions, even when based on the most technical grounds, authority appears to sense a challenge to larger issues and to meet them half way with a display of force that to an Englishman appears strangely over-adequate. It is evident the ground is being tested. Interpretations of liberty that date from easier and roomier days are under revision, and where they are found at variance with a conception of society as a disciplined and productive force, they are being roughly retrenched. The prevailing character of the labour mass, at once heterogeneous and amorphous, makes it a safe and ductile medium for almost any social experiment. “If you don’t like it, go back,” is an argument to which no answer has been found. Native-born labour shares in the universal dis-esteem and takes refuge from it in aristocratic and doctrinaire federations whose ineffectiveness is apparent whenever a labour issue arises. For the rebel who, under these conditions, chooses to fight on, rougher methods are found. He may become fera natura. Tarring and feathering, ducking and rubbing with acid, and deportation from State to State may be his portion. Under any social condition conformity is the easiest course. When the prison cell and social pillory are its alternatives, to resist requires a degree of fanatical courage and interior moral resources possessed only by a handful of men in a generation.

To this conception of a disciplined community harnessed to the purpose of production, thousands of the possessing and capitalistic classes look wistfully from the other side of the Atlantic. But there are many obstacles to its realization in England. The English proletarian is no uprooted orphan, paying with docile and silent work for the citizenship of his children and grandchildren. That great going concern, the British Empire, is his personal work, built on the bones and cemented with the blood of his forebears. His enfranchisement is as complete as his disinheritance, and the impoverishment of his country, evidenced in the stream of gold that pours Westward like arterial blood, has not reached to his spirit. Even the Great War, with its revelation to him of how ruthless and comprehensive the demands of the State on the individual can be, has only reinforced his sense of being a very deserving person and has added to the long debt which he is frankly out to collect. The promises, the appeals to national pride and tradition with which he had to be appeased while, for the first time in his history, the yoke of universal service was laid upon his neck, trip up the feet of his rulers to-day. It is difficult to tell him to go elsewhere, for he “belongs” in England. Even suggestions that he should emigrate wholesale to British colonies in order to relieve the congested labour market are received with mocking laughter in which a threat lurks. He is, I am sure, because I know him, looking on with a certain sardonic relish and enjoyment at the flurries, the perplexities of his rulers, their displays of force alternated with appeals to sweet reason, their brave words succeeded by abject denials and qualifications. He is waiting until the naked economic question, which he knows well underlies all the rhodomontade of national greatness and imperial heritage, shall be put to him. It will be a great and momentous day when the Englishman is given his choice. A choice it must be. The means to compulsion are not here.

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To America just now Europeans as a whole must seem a helpless race, bewildered actors in a vast and tragic blunder. To thousands of Red Cross workers, Knights of Columbus, and welfare auxiliaries in devastated districts, the spectacle of suffering and want must have come home to reinforce impressions already gained from sights witnessed at Ellis Island or Long Wharf. None the less, it is an historical misfortune that the first real contact between the people of the two continents should have come at a time when the older was bankrupt and had little to show save the rags and tatters of its civilization. The reverse of the tenderness to the stricken European abroad has been a hardening of the heart to the immigrant at home, and it is difficult for the American, schoolmaster and lawgiver to so many alien peoples in his own country, to divest himself of a didactic character in his foreign relations. To many countries he is “saying it with flour,” and those who accept the dole can do little else than swallow the sermon. Even to those countries who were his allies he does shine forth in a certain splendour of righteousness. His sacrifice was deliberate—which is, perhaps, its best excuse for being a little conscious. It was self-imposed, and fifty thousand of his dead, wrested from productive enterprises to lie in France, attest its sincerity. No Englishman, at any rate, believes in his heart that its material reward, great and inevitable as it is now seen to be, was the driving force at the time the sacrifice was accepted. There are a host of reasons, some creditable, others less so, that make Europe curb its restiveness under American homilies.