Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

What the Cavalier brought to America, we should have to investigate only if we were tracing the history of divergent directions, of local cultures: because the original soul of America is undoubtedly the Puritanic soul of New England, and the South, even before the War of Secession, in relation to the main direction, to the general culture, has a merely episodical significance. Yet, though the founders of New England were only Puritans, certain traits of the Cavalier spirit, the adventurer in the pilgrim, will inevitably reappear in their descendants, repeating the original dichotomy in the generations issuing from an apparently pure stock: partly, because a difference in beliefs is not always the mark of a fundamental difference in temperaments, and partly because those traits correspond to some of the generally human impulses suppressed by the choice of the Puritan.

There is one element which is common to Puritan and Cavalier in America, and which cannot be said to belong in precisely the same fashion to their ancestors in England. It is, in England and the rest of Europe, a mythology formed by similar hopes and desires, by a similar necessity of giving an imaginary body to certain thoughts and aspirations, on the part of the spirit of the Renaissance as well as of the spirit of the Reformation: a mythology which, in the mind of the European during the centuries between the discovery of America and the French Revolution, inhabits such regions as the island of Utopia, the city of the Sun, and the continent of America. In that mythology, Utopism and American exoticism coincide. But the adventurer and the pilgrim were actually and firmly setting their feet on one of the lands mapped in that purely ideal geography, and thoughts and aspirations confined by the European to the continent of dreams, became the moral exigencies of the new Commonwealth. Thus America set herself against Europe as the ideal against the real, the land of the free, and the refuge of the oppressed; and was confirmed in such a position by her natural opportunities, by the conditions of pioneer life, by contrast to European despotism—finally, by the Revolution and the Constitution, in which she felt that the initial moral exigencies were ultimately fulfilled. It is to this myth of a Promised Land, which is neither strictly Puritan nor strictly Cavalier, and yet at times seems to coincide with the less static aspects of Puritanism, that a peculiarly American idealism, unconquerable by defeat and even by the evidence of facts, abstract, self-confident, energetic, youthful and optimistic, owes its strength and its courage: an idealism which is hardly conscious of what Europe has been taught by centuries of dire experience—the irreparable contingency and imperfection of history; and which believes, as firmly as the Puritan legislator believes it, that such institutions have been devised, or can be devised, through which the ideal law, when thought out and written, will not fail to become the law of reality for all times to come.

From two contrasting elements, a firm belief in a Law which was at the beginning, and a romantic mythology, a third characteristic of the American mind is thus engendered: a full confidence in the power of intellect conceived as a mechanism apt to contrive practical schemes for the accomplishment of ideal ends. This intellectual faith is similar in its static nature to the moral faith of the Puritan: it is the material weapon of Puritanism. Perfectibility is within its reach, but not the actual processes of evolution. The intellect that does not conceive itself as a process or function, but as a mechanism, can tend towards, and theoretically possess, a state of perfection, but will resent and condemn the gropings and failings of actual, imperfect growth and change. Not without reason, the greatest individual tragedy of the war, in a typically American mind confronted with the sins and misery of Europe, was a tragedy of intellectual pride: of the inability of a static intellect to become charitably active in the tragic flux of European life; a tragedy which a little moral and intellectual humility might well have spared to the generous hopes of America, and the childish, messianic faith which irradiated for only too short a time the bleeding soul of Europe.

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If we have called Puritanism a culture, what name shall we reserve for that vast and complicated collection of mechanical contrivances which constitute the material body of American society to-day? We are in the presence of a technology, a more highly developed one, perhaps (with the possible exception of Germany before the war), than any that has ever existed in the world. Technologies have a logic of their own, and that logic is apt to take the place of higher spiritual constructions; either when conditions of life lend a miraculous character to the means of sustaining life itself and invest the practical actions of hunting or agriculture with a religious significance; or when the complexity of their organization is such that the workings of that practical logic inevitably transcend the power of observation of the individual agent, however highly placed in the machinery itself, and moral or intellectual myths are born of an imperfect knowledge. This is the case of America, and in America this technological or industrial mythology has crushed out of existence the rival myths of the farms and the prairie, allowing them a purely romantic value and decorative function, through the industrially controlled power of the press. Even pioneering, and the conquest of the West, a process in which Americans of another age found an energetic, if partly vicarious, satisfaction for certain moral and ideal yearnings, has receded, in the mind of Americans of to-day, into the shades of a fabulous and solemn background.

The industrial revolution followed in America the lines of development of its early English model. This commonwealth beyond the sea, agricultural and democratic, found in itself the same elements which gave birth in the original country to an industrial feudalism, grafting itself, without any solution of continuity, on a feudalism of the land. The ineradicable optimism of the American invested the whole process with the same halo of moral romance which had coloured the age of pioneering, and accepted as a useful substitute (or rather, as a new content) for Puritanic moralism the philosophy of opportunity and of success constantly commensurate with true merit. The conception of intellect as a mechanism to be used for moral and ideal ends, gave way to a similar though more complex conception, modelled not on the methods of pure science, from whose early conquests the revolution itself had been started, but on those of applied science or of practical machinery.

When, in the natural course of events, the bonds which kept together the purely economic elements of the country became more powerful and real than any system of political institutions, when, in fact, a financial syndicalism became the structure underlying the apparent organs of government, all the original ideals of America had already gathered to the defence of the new order. Hence the extraordinary solidity of the prevailing economic system in this country, when compared with any European country. Economic, as well as political systems, ultimately rest on convictions rather than on sheer force, and the radical in America, in all spheres of thought, is constantly in the necessity of fighting not mere institutions, as in Europe, but institutionalized ideals, organisms and personalities which establish their right on the same assumptions which prompt him in his rebellion. There is less difference in fundamentals between a Carnegie and a Debs than between any two individuals placed in similar positions in Europe.

An interesting by-product of this particular development is the myth of the captain of industry, possessed, in the popular imagination, of all the virtues. And a consequence of this myth is an unavoidable revision of the catalogue of virtues, from which some were expunged that do not lead to industrial success, and others were admitted because industrial success is thought to be impossible without them. This myth is not believed in by the aspiring multitudes only, but by a good many among the captains of industry themselves, who accept their wealth as a social trust, and conceive of their function in a manner not dissimilar from that of the old sovereign by the grace of God.

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This transposition of ideals from the religious and moral field to the practical and economic, leaves only a very thin ground for personal piety and the religion of the Churches. Yet there is no country in the world (again, with the only possible exception of Northern Africa during the first centuries of the Christian Era) which has produced such a wealth and such a variety of religious movements as America. The substance of that very thin ground is diluted Puritanism, Puritanism which, in a vast majority of the population, converts itself, strangely enough, as we have seen, into social optimism, a belief sufficient to the great active masses, but not to the needs of “the heart,” when the heart is given enough leisure to consider itself, through either too much wealth or too little hope: through the discovery of its emptiness, when the possession of the means makes manifest the absence of an end, or through the spasms of its hunger, when means are beyond reach, in the hands of the supposed inferior and unworthy. In this second case, even a purely sensual craving dignifies itself with the name of the Spirit. The more or less official Churches, in an attempt to retain the allegiance of their vast congregations, have followed the masses in their evolution: they pride themselves essentially on their social achievements, a little doubtfully, perhaps, knowing that their particular God has no more reason to inhabit a church than a factory, and that the highest possible embodiment of their doctrine is an orderly and paternally governed industrial organization.