The native theatre, for all the fact that it is on the way, is not yet ready for such things as demand a degree of civilization for receptive and remunerative appreciation. The “Pegs o’ My Heart” and “Pollyannas,” the “Turn to the Rights” and “Lightnin’s” still make millions, while the bulk of finer things languish and perish. I speak, remember, not of the theatre of one city, but of the theatre of the land. This theatre, considering it in so far as possible as a unit, is still not much above the Midway Plaisance, the honk-a-tonk, the Sunday School charade. That one, or maybe two, foreign national theatres may not be much better is no apology. Such foreign theatres—the French, say—are less national theatres than one-city theatres, for Paris is France. But the American theatre spreads from coast to coast. What it spreads, I have herein tried to suggest.
George Jean Nathan
ECONOMIC OPINION
IF there were conscious restriction upon the expression of opinion in America, this essay would possess the pompous certainty of an official document. Instead of threading its hazardous way through a mass of confused thought, it would record in formal terms acceptable utterance. In fact, the very restrictions upon thought and speech, with the aid of scissors and a license to speech, could easily be turned into a statement of the reputable theory of the welfare of the community.
Unluckily, however, American life has not been arranged to make matters easy for the interpreter of economic opinion. Every American is conscious of a right to his own opinion about “why all of us taken together are as well off as we are” and “why some of us are better off and others of us worse off than the average of us.” Whether this privilege comes from the Bill of Rights, the constitution of the United States, or his Simian ancestry, he could not say; but he is fully assured that it is “inalienable” and “indefeasible.” No restriction of birth, breeding, position, or wealth limits his right to an opinion or persuades him to esteem his more fortunate neighbour’s more highly than his own. Nor do intellectual limitations check the flow of words and of ideas. No one is examined upon the growth of industrialism, the institutions which make up the economic order, or the nature of an industrial problem before he is allowed to speak. In fact, the idea that a knowledge of the facts about the subject under discussion, or of the principles to be applied to it, is essential to the right to an opinion is a strange notion little understood here. Even if occasionally some potentate attempts a mild restriction upon the spoken or the written word, it checks only those who talk directly and therefore clumsily. Its principal effect is through provocation to add mightily to the volume of opinion.
The result is a conglomerate mass of opinion that sprawls through the known realm of economics and into regions uncharted. The mighty men of finance spin a theory of national welfare in terms of foreign concessions no more glibly than the knights of the road in solemn convention solve with words the riddle of unemployment. The newly enfranchised women compete with the members of the Dynamite Club in proposals for setting the industrial cosmos in order. Economic opinion bobs up in the financial journals, “the labour press,” the periodicals of the “learned” societies, and in all the “Christian” advocates. It shows itself boldly in political speeches, in directors’ reports, in public hearings, and in propagandist sheets. It lurks craftily in editorials, moving pictures, drawing-room lectures, poems, cartoons, and hymns. It ranges from the sonorous apologies for the existing order voiced by the Aaron Baal Professor of Christian Homiletics in the Midas Theological Seminary to the staccato denunciation of what is by the Sons of Martha Professor of Proletarian Tactics in the Karl Marx College for Workers.
A mere semblance of order is given to this heterogeneous mass of opinion by the conditions which make it. A common system of legal, business, and social usages is to be found the country over. This has left its impress too firmly in the assumptions which underlie thought to allow this material to be separate bits from so many mental universes. The prevailing scheme of economic life is so definitely established as to force its imprint upon the opinion that moves about it. Acceptable opinion is created in its likeness, and unacceptable opinion becomes acceptable opinion when the negatives are skilfully extracted. Protestants are concerned rather with eliminating the “evils” of “capitalism” than with eradicating it root and branch. Protestantism is rather a variant of orthodox doctrine than an independent system of thought. Radical opinion that is likely to pass the decent bounds of negation is kept small in volume by a press which allows it little upon which to feed. Accordingly, varied doctrines wear the semblance of unity.
Such elements, however, do not free this adventure into speculation from its perils. They merely make the hazards mortal. In the paragraphs below the economic opinion in America is recklessly resolved into four main classes. These are the laissez-faire opinion of the mid-19th century, the conventional “case for capitalism,” the protestant demand for “control,” and the academic insistence upon conscious “direction” of industrial change. Radical opinion gets a competent judgment elsewhere in this volume. Even in this bold outline the opinions of small minorities are lost to sight, and views and doctrines, seemingly alien to the authors who know their subtle differences, are often blurred into a single picture. To avoid the charge that the lion and the lamb have been pictured as one, no names have been called. Here as elsewhere particulars will rise up to curse their generalizations, and the whole will be found to be entirely too scanty to be disbursed into its parts. But the chance must be taken, and, after all, truth does not reside in copy-book mottoes.
I
The current types of economic opinion in this country all have a common origin. The men who express them are but a scant generation or two removed from the country or the small town. The opinions are so many variants of a stream of thought which goes back to a mid-19th century America of small towns and open country. This primitive economic opinion was formed out of the dust of the ground in the likeness of an exploitative America. The conditions which shaped it might be set forth in two lines of a school history thus: First, abundant natural resources; second, a scanty population; and third, the principle of letting the individual alone.