American World Policies

by Walter E. Weyl

It is easier to describe than to define these tendencies. The first we might perhaps call pacifism, liberalism, humanitarianism, democracy, though none of these words exactly defines the generous, somewhat ineffectual, peace ideal, which has grown up in a democratic people with no hostile neighbours. At this moment by the light of the European camp-fires we are likely to belittle this easy do-nothing idealism. We find our idealists prosaic. They are not gaunt fanatics consumed by their own passion, but hard-working, self-respecting, religiously inclined men, asking good prices and high wages, eating good food, wearing good clothes and perhaps running a Ford automobile. To some of these meliorists, Europe seems almost as distant as China, but towards the peoples of both places they preserve a vague and benevolent missionary attitude. They want peace with Europe and peace for Europe, and would even be willing to pay for it, as they pay for relief for Belgium and Martinique. There is little passion in this good-will but there is even less hypocrisy. One may ridicule this cornfed, tepid idealism, but it is none the less the raw material out of which great national purposes are formed. The present desire of Americans for a world peace is no vaguer or more ineffectual than was the seemingly faint sense of the wickedness of slavery, as it existed in our Northern States in the days of the Missouri Compromise. Yet out of that undirected, crude and luke-warm emotion, there burst forth within a generation the white-hot flame, which consumed the detested institution and freed the millions of Negro slaves.

But not all Americans are idealists even of this commonplace sort. In our ultra-keen capitalistic competition we have evolved an American of different type. Self-centred, speculative, narrow, measuring success by the dollars gained and spent, this individualist has a short way with idealisms and larger ends. To him our involuntary rapprochement with Europe is an opportunity not for service but for gain. War is good or bad as it is profitable or the reverse. He is a realist, as is the mole, attached to the earth and not worrying about the skies. His ideal is that of a selfish nation dominated by selfish, social classes.

Here then we have the two Americanisms, both of them native and redolent of the soil, both vital and growing. Both have appeared in many of our national controversies, in the Philippine question, in Porto Rico, in our relations with Mexico. The one is liberal, democratic, often visionary, though confident because many of its visions have come true; the other is concrete, short-sighted, intense but with a low moral sensibility. Each appeals to a patriotism formed in the image of the patriot.

It is upon this divided America that there comes the sense of the impinging of Europe. These men of two opposed types (with innumerable intermediate variations) suddenly perceive that the great war is being fought not only near our shores but even within our borders. They dimly perceive that the war is but an incident in a greater, though less spectacular contest, that it is in reality a phase of a long drawn-out economic struggle in which we too have blindly played our part. To both groups, to all Americans, the war comes close. It is being fought with motives like our motives and ideals like our ideals. It is a conflict which proves to us that international peace is still very far from attainment. War on a scale never before known: war—deliberate, organised, scientific—fought by combatants and noncombatants alike, reveals itself as one of the central facts of our modern life, a fact not to be ignored or preached or argued away, a fact which for us on this side of the ocean, whatever our instincts and our philosophies, has its deep and permanent significance. Our changed relation to this central fact of war constitutes one of the gravest problems that we face to-day. Growing up in a peaceful environment we had imbibed the idea that war was a thing alien to us, monarchial, European. We had come to hold that a nation could avoid war by not desiring it, by not preparing for it, by minding its own business. We believed that what share in the world we had and wanted was what every reasonable nation would willingly concede us, and if certain powers proved refractory and unreasonable—a most improbable contingency—we could always send forth our millions of minute men, armed with patriotism and fowling-pieces. With European conflicts we had no concern; we might deplore the senseless brutality of such wars, but need not take part in their conduct or in their prevention. In due course Europe would learn from America the lessons of republicanism, federalism and international justice and the happiness and wisdom of an unarmed peace. Ourselves unarmed, we could peacefully wrest the weapons from Europe's hand.

The sheer, unthinking optimism of this earlier American attitude ended abruptly on the outbreak of the present war. It is not surprising that our first reaction towards this war, after its full sweep and destructiveness were visible, was one of fear. If a peaceful nation like Belgium could suddenly be overrun and destroyed, it behooved us also to place ourselves on guard, to be ready with men and ships to repel a similarly wanton attack. The result was a demand for preparedness, an instinctive demand, not based on any definite conception of a national policy, but intended merely to meet a possible, not clearly foreseen, contingency. The whole preparedness controversy revealed this rootlessness. It was in part at least an acrid discussion between careless optimists and unreasonable scare-mongers, between men who held positions no longer tenable and others who were moving to positions which they could not locate. Our ideas were in flux. Whether we should arm, against whom we should arm, how we should arm, was decided by the impact of prejudices and shadowy fears against an obstinate and optimistic credulity.

Nothing was more significant of the externality of these debates than the fact that they seemed to ignore everything that we had cared about before. The case for armament was presented not as a continuation of earlier national policies but as a sort of historical interlude. Past interests were forgotten in the insistence upon the immediate. Until the war broke in upon us we had been groping, both in foreign and domestic policies, towards certain forms of national expression; arbitration, international justice, democracy, social reform. Throughout a century, we had believed that we had blundered towards these goals, and that our history revealed an aspiration approaching fulfilment. We had settled a continent, built an ordered society, and amid a mass of self-created entanglements, were striving to erect a new civilisation upon the basis of a changed economic life. Now it was assumed that all this stubbornly contested progress was forever ended by the conflict engulfing the world.

This whole idealistic phase of American life was disparaged by our sudden ultra-patriots. These men, with a perhaps unconscious bias, opposed their brand new martial idealism to what they falsely believed was a purely materialistic pacifism. Actually both advocates and opponents of increased armaments were contending under the stress of a new and bewildering emotion. For decades we had concerned ourselves with our own affairs, undisturbed by events which convulsed Europe. But the present war, because of its magnitude and nearness, had set our nerves jangling, excited us morbidly, dulled us to horror and made us oversensitive to dread. We read of slaughter, maiming, rape and translated the facts of Belgium and Servia into imaginary atrocities committed against ourselves. We wanted to be "doing something." Not that we wished war, but rather the chance to rank high according to the standards in vogue at the hour. While hating the war, we had insensibly imbibed the mental quality of the men who were fighting. We were tending to think as though all future history were to be one continuing cataclysm.

For the moment, like the rest of the world, we were hypnotised. Upon our minds a crude picture had been stamped. We were more conscious of peril than before the war, though the peril was now less. Our immediate danger from invasion was smaller than it had been in June, 1914; yet while we were perhaps foolishly unafraid in 1914, in 1916 we trembled hypnotically.

It was to this state of the American mind that all sorts of appeals were made. Those who wanted universal conscription and the greatest navy in the world argued not only from dread of invaders but from the necessity of a united nation. They wanted "Americanism," pure, simple, undiluted, straight. There was to be no hyphen, no cleavage between racial stocks, no line between sections or social classes. America was to be racially, linguistically, sectionally one.