Says Mrs. Ogi: “You are discussing one of the classics of your movement, and you know what the critics all say: the Socialists ought to begin by agreeing on what they want.”
“I know,” says Ogi, “and I’m sorry to disappoint them. But there are many different kinds of people in the world, and some of each kind in our movement. I am a Socialist who believes in machinery, and has no interest in any world that does not develop machine power to the greatest possible extent. We are like people traveling through a tunnel; it is dark and smoky, and some want to turn back, but I want to go through to the other end.”
“Morris and Ruskin said the other end was in hell.”
“Yes, but I think their eyes were blinded by the smoke. What is wrong is not with machinery, but with the private ownership of machinery. There is no reason why machines should not make beautiful and substantial things, instead of making ugly and dishonest things—except the fact that machines are owned by people who have no interest except to make a profit out of the product. A thing is not less beautiful because there are millions of other things exactly like it in the world. That is just a snobbish notion, and Morris should have learned the lesson from any field of daisies.”
Here is Sherwood Anderson telling the story of his life. He is one American who does not like machinery, and he has good reason; he has worked in factories, and he knows. He agrees with Morris that the monotony of the machine destroys the initiative and therefore the morals of the workers; they cannot create, and so they tell smutty stories. But you note that Anderson is not a Socialist, and has not the vision of what a factory might be if it were democratically owned and managed by the workers. The workers will then be very proud of their beautiful machines, they will learn to understand and tend them all, and administer the politics of the great industry of which the machines are a part. The individual worker will travel from the factories to the harvest fields and back, as many varieties of labor as he fancies. And anyhow he won’t have to work but three or four hours a day, and the rest of the time he can develop his faculties by making verses, or playing music, or staging dramas, or baseball games, or whatever he pleases. And every year the machines will become more automatic, until some day the only labor of man will consist of pressing a few buttons every morning. Whether you like that or not depends entirely upon whether or not you have developed your brains, and want to develop them still further.
CHAPTER LXXV
SEEING AMERICA FIRST
The spirit of John Milton and John Bunyan crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in Massachusetts, and the spirit of their enemies crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in Virginia. They made two civilizations, and these civilizations fought a civil war in the new world, just as they had done in the old.
For the first two hundred years the colonists were busy killing Indians and clearing the wilderness, so they had little time for art. They had to break their ties with the old country; and just as we saw Voltaire finding it easier to rebel in religion and politics than in the field of culture, so in America we shall find that the Declaration of Independence was signed a long time before any artist was bold enough to revolt from British standards of taste. The first American writers were concerned to handle American themes as they imagined Addison and Steele and Burke and Dryden would have done.
The first writer to escape this British tradition did so, not by making an American tradition, but by ascending into the universal and transcendental. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Goethe and Swedenborg and Plato and the Hindus, and became a Yankee mystic and democratic saint.
He was the son of a Unitarian clergyman, and followed in his father’s footsteps. But early in life he realized that he no longer believed the special doctrines which gave meaning to the communion service, so he stood up in his church, and very quietly and simply told about his new convictions, and went out into the world to earn his living as an independent lecturer.