Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

Another method of definition is now in common use—a method which seems easy because of its mechanical simplicity. People are arranged in a row from left to right, according to their attitude toward the existing order. At the extreme right are the reactionaries, who want to restore the discarded. Next to them are the conservatives, who wish to keep most of what exists. At their elbow are the liberals, who are ready to examine new ideas, but who are not eager or dogmatic about change. And at the extreme left are the radicals, who want to change nearly everything for something totally new. Such an arrangement is a confusing misuse of words based on a misconception of social forces. Society is not a car on a track, along which it may move in either direction, or on which it may stand still. Society is a complex, with many of the characteristics of an organism. Its change is continuous, although by no means constant. It passes through long periods of quiescence, and comparatively brief periods of rapid mutation. It may collect itself into a close order, or again become dispersed into a nebula. There is much in its development that is cyclical; it has yet undiscovered rhythms, and many vagaries. The radical and the reactionary may be agreed on essentials; they may both wish sudden change and closer organization. The conservative may be liberal because he wishes to preserve an order in which liberal virtues may exist. Or a liberal may be so cribbed and confined by an unpleasant constriction of social tissue that he becomes radical in his struggle for immediate release. The terms are not of the same class and should not be arranged in parallel columns.

The dictionary definition is enlightening. “Radical—Going to the root or origin; touching or acting upon what is essential or fundamental; thorough.... Radical reform, a thorough reform.... Hence Radical Reformer equals Radical” (New English Dictionary). In this sense radicalism is an historic American tradition. The revolt of the Colonies against England and the formation of the Republic were, indeed, far from the complete break with the past which the schoolboy assumes them to have been, but what lives in the minds of the American people is, nevertheless, not the series of counterchecks which men like Hamilton and Madison wrote into the Constitution, but rather the daring affirmations of Jefferson which have a real kinship with the radical spirit of the French Revolution. Talk of “inalienable rights” such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was genuine radical talk; it searched out the bases of human relationship, proclaimed them against authority, and sought to found on them a system of government.

So strongly has this conception seized the imagination of Americans that it largely accounts for their almost instinctive hostility to new kinds of political change. The roots of politics have been uncovered, the change has in fact been made once for all—so they reason. To admit that any new fundamental alteration is necessary is to be disloyal to the historical liberation. Because the conservative American believes himself a complete democrat, because for him the “new order” was achieved in 1776, he is intolerant of modern radicals. Suggestions of new revolution touch him closely on his pride. In this sense Jefferson has been less a spur to future generations than an obstacle. If his fine frenzy about rights had been less eloquently expressed, if it had not obscured in a cloud of glory the true nature of the foundation of our government—a highly practical compromise which embodied a few moderate advances and many hesitancies—we should have a different temper about change to-day. We should not assume that all desirable fundamental modification of social and political structure had been completed nearly a century and a half ago.

The greatest historic expression of American radicalism has thus become the altar of the conservatives. To the unlettered man it may seem strange that a Supreme Court of elderly radicals will not allow Congress to forbid child-labour because of their loyalty to an 18th-century limitation of the federal government, presumably in the interest of freedom and humanity. To workmen voting for the eight-hour day the language of Jefferson did not seem hostile—they were struggling to pursue happiness in a way that he must have approved. And yet it is the sacred “right” of contract which deprived them, as voters, of the right to legislate for shorter hours. Workmen using their collective economic power to gain industrial freedom are met by a shower of injunctive denials, based chiefly on that same right of contract. In order to stay any further liberation of the human body and spirit, judges and officials and industrial barons have only to invoke the phrases of freedom thrown out against an ancient despotism. They have only to point out that freedom as defined abstractly over a hundred years ago forbids practical freedom to-day. Frozen radicalism of the past chills and destroys the new roots of American life.

Some appreciation of this state of affairs underlies the prevailing tendency to believe that all new radicalism has a foreign origin. It is, indeed, part of the best nationalistic tradition to attribute subversive doctrines to foreigners. This is the habit in every country. But in the United States the habit is perhaps more deep-seated than elsewhere. Americans are by definition free and equal; if then any one talks or acts as if he were not free and equal, he must have been born somewhere else. The American Government, being not a faulty product of human growth, but a new creation sprung perfect out of the ineffable minds of the Fathers, is unassailable; if any one assails it, he cannot know it, and must be subjected to courses in English and Civics (Americanization) until he recognizes its perfection. Treason in this country is not simple treason to a ruler, to a class, or to a system as elsewhere; it is an act of sacrilege, by one uninitiated, upon a religious mystery.

Of course there are and have been Americans whose radicalism is less crust and more meat. The spirit of Jefferson still lives, after all, to confute the interpretation put upon his words. And imported doctrine has actually had less to do with most of the radical movements in America than has American tradition itself. It is an easy step from the conception of political liberty to the conception of economic liberty, and the step has been made here as readily as in Europe. In a country which for so long offered extraordinary opportunities to the individual business man, it is only natural that economic liberty should have been conceived as a means of protecting his enterprise; and as a matter of fact our economic legislation for many years has been sprinkled with victories of the small business men and farmers over the interests which had already become large enough to seem to them oppressive. The regulation of the railroads, the succession of popular financial doctrines, and the anti-trust legislation, were all initiated by the interpretation of economic democracy naturally arising in the vigorous class of the small entrepreneurs. With the slow weakening of this class by its disintegration, on one hand into captains and lieutenants of the great principalities of industry, and on the other into permanently salaried or waged members of the rank and file, comes a corresponding tendency to change the prevailing conception of economic democracy. The radicalism of workmen in the United States has often been no less sweeping or assertive than the radicalism of workmen anywhere—witness the I.W.W. Even violence in the labour struggle has been practised chiefly by one hundred per cent. Americans—the steel workers in Homestead in 1892 and the West Virginia miners in Mingo County in 1921 were of old American stock. And the moment the predominating group in American thought and activity is composed of those who expect to live by their daily work rather than of those who expect to accumulate property, we are likely to see the rise of an economic radicalism more akin to that which exists in Europe, and one which, because of its sanction in our tradition, will be twice as militant and convinced.

For, after all, economic radicalism arises neither from a merely stupid desire for more material goods, nor from an intellectual adherence to a particular formula of industrial organization. It arises from a desire to be free, to achieve dignity and independence. Poverty is distressful not so much because of its physical hardships as because of its spiritual bondage. To be poor because one chooses to be poor is less annoying than to be moderately paid while the man who fixes one’s wages rides in a Rolls-Royce. The most modest aspects of the labour movement are attempts of the workmen to gain some voice in determining the conditions under which they must work—in other words, to extend democracy into industry. And when the workman wakes up to the fact that industrial policies are governed by a comparatively small class of owners, and that the visible result of those policies seems to be a large class of underemployed, undernourished, and under-housed families on one hand, and a small class of abundantly supplied families on the other, he feels that he is suffering an indignity. You may challenge him to prove that any other system would work better. You may argue that if all the wealth of the rich were distributed equally, he would receive but a trifle. Such reasoning will affect him little. If every one must be miserable, he at least wants to share and exercise whatever power exists to alter that misery. Kings have argued that the people could rule no better than they, but that has not prevented peoples from demanding representative government. The American tradition is sure to be as subversive a motive in industry as it has been in the State. The technical problem of how industry may be better organized, important as it is, is subordinate to this cry of the personality. Essentially, this sort of radicalism arises from the instinct of the workman to achieve an adult relationship to the industrial world.

The impact of the war upon industry, and the reverberation of its social results abroad, for some time stimulated this latent feeling in American workmen. For the first time in decades the competition of the unemployed and the immigrant was virtually removed, and the wage-earner began to feel secure enough to assert his personality. He was necessary to the community in an immediate way. The policy of the government was to recognize this fact, and to prevent an unduly rapid increase in wages and in the power of organized labour by compromising with it on certain simple issues like collective bargaining and the eight-hour day. But larger aspirations arose in the rank and file, and when the Russian Revolution sent a word of emancipation around the world, they were ready to listen. In spite of the crushing force of the whole ruling propaganda machinery, which had been so successful in arousing hatred against Germany, countless American workmen sensed the approach of a new order as a result of the success of the Bolsheviki. A secondary impulse of the same sort, felt even more strongly in some quarters, arose from the Nottingham programme of the British Labour Party. But affairs moved slowly, hope was deferred, and at length the new spirit lost much of its freshness and power. The very acrimoniousness and volume of the controversy over what had or had not been done in Russia wearied most people of the whole matter. The many expected revolutions in other countries, which missed fire so many times, caused disillusionment. The doctrinaire and even religious adherents of the Russian Communists began to make trouble for every radical organization in the country by their quarrels and divisions. At length, the war being over, the American labour movement itself began to display a weakness in the face of renewed attack on the part of its opponents, which showed how illusory had been many of its recent gains and how seriously its morale had been injured.

Economic radicalism never looked—on the surface—weaker than it does in the United States to-day. On the strength of statements by Mr. Gompers and some other leaders of the trade unions, we are likely to assume that organized labour will have nothing to do with it. The professed radicals themselves have been weakened by dissensions and scattered by persecution. Yet a brief survey of the formal groups which now profess radical theories will indicate why the future of American radicalism should not be assessed on the evidence of their present low estate.

The Socialist Party, even more than the Socialist Parties in other countries, was placed by the war in a difficult situation. With its roots not yet firmly in the soil, except in a few localities and among diverse national elements, it was faced with the necessity, in accordance with its principles and tradition, of denouncing the entrance of the United States into hostilities. But this decision could command no effective support from the workers organized on the economic field, who under a different leadership adopted a different attitude. Nor was the party strong enough among any other element of the population to make its decision respected. The only immediate result of the gesture was therefore to place this unarmed little force in the most exposed position possible, where it drew the fire of all those who were nervously afraid the people would not sanction the war. Socialism was not judged on the basis of its economic tenets, but was condemned as disloyal and pro-German; and the effect was to render the party even more sectarian and unrepresentative than ever before. It had adopted a position in which it could not expect recruits except from moral heroes, and no nation nourishes a large proportion of these. Such episodes make good legend, but they do not lead to prompt victories. Even those who later have come to believe that the Socialists were right about the war are likely to express their belief in some other form than joining the party.