III
FORGETTING THE AMERICAN TRADITION
The Chicago Evening American places on its editorial page on August 10, 1916, a letter to which it gives editorial approval. The letter says: "There are thousands of German-born citizens, in fact the writer knows of no others, whose very German origin has made them immune against such influences as ancestry, literature, sentiment and language, which count for so much in their effect upon a great percentage of our population. These very men continue to be loyal Americans. If we are disloyal, what then do you call the Choates, the Roosevelts, the Eliots, and the foreign-born Haven Putnams?"
The letter is signed M. Kirchberger. Mr. Hearst finds this statement of sufficient importance to spread out before five or six million readers of his newspapers. It is of importance, because it voices the belief of an ever-increasing element in our population. Our ancestry, literature, sentiment and language do produce such men as Joseph Choate, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles William Eliot and George Haven Putnam. Those names do go straight back in our national history to the original stock, which shaped our national policy and ideals. It was their ancestry, English and American literature, their racial sentiment, and the English language, which made the historic America. Mr. Kirchberger believes them to be disloyal to the New America. I trust he and his numerous clan will define what sort of country he wants to make of us, what ancestry he wishes to have prevail, what literature he will introduce into our schools, what sentiment and what language. I hope his group will come out into the open with their program of action. For they have one. He sees clearly that the civilization of a nation is the resultant of its racial inheritance, its literature, its language and its ideas about life. He means that our civilization shall go his way, not the way of the Choates and Eliots. He has no quarrel whatever with the vague internationalism of many of our social workers because under that fog he and his kind can operate unobserved. I do not underestimate the influence of such thought as his. It is growing stronger every day. It is sharply defined, forceful, and it will prevail unless we fight it.
When one comes among us, sharing the privileges of citizenship, to tell us that he is "immune" from the claims of our great ancestry, and the noble sentiment of our past, he is striking at the heart of our nationality. He is vastly more significant than his own alien voice. For his claims are being advocated by editors and politicians. His ideas are sweeping our communities. Our nation does not live because it is a geographical unit, nor because it accepts all the races of Europe. It lives because it fought at Yorktown side by side with Rochambeau and his Frenchmen. It lives in the songs of Whittier and in the heart of Lincoln. By its past of struggle for ideas it has given us a heritage. But we have substituted pacifism and commercialism for the old struggle, and we have substituted phrases for the old ideas which cost sacrifice to maintain. If enough citizens become "immune" from the influences that have shaped us, we shall lose our historic continuity, and become the sort of nation which these enemies would have us be. But these considerations do not bring alarm to our leaders. Our leaders supply the very intellectual defense for this treason. They supply it in the doctrine of so-called internationalism.
Let us without delay select our position and hold it. Let us stand firmly on our traditions and history. We have no wish to be "immune" from our language and literature, our sentiment and ancestry. We need a fresh inoculation of those "influences." Let us reinforce the policy of Franklin which recognized the desirability of friendship with France and England. Let us restate the policy of Lincoln, who paused in the stress of a great war to strike hands with the workers of England, because they and he were at one in the love of liberty.
No single factor of race and climate, language and culture is determinative on that central power of cohesion which gathers a multitude of persons – "infinitely repellent particles" – into an organism which lives its life in unity, and forms its tradition from a collective experience. But it does not follow that some one of these factors cannot be so strengthened as to disturb the balance. If the geographical territory is carved up the nation is destroyed. Successive waves of immigration can drown out the sharply defined character of a people. This is now taking place in the United States. The proof is our reaction to the war. It is not that we revealed differences of "opinion." It is that we were untrue to our tradition.
It is easy to throw the discussion into nonsense by asking: Is there any such thing as a pure race? Are not the greatest nations of mixed blood? Do you think race and nation are the same thing? It is true that no one thing is determinative in the making of a nation. Race and language, culture and government, border line and climate, religion and economic system, are each an influence, and, together, they shape the people in face and habit till they walk the earth with a new stride and look out on the world with different eyes from those of any people elsewhere. But the supreme thing about a nation is that it happened. A certain group of people developed affinities and aspirations, cohered and became an organism, fought its way to independence, and remembered the blood it had spilled. That tradition of common experience and sacrifice in victory and defeat is the cord that binds the generations. It is a spiritual ancestry that colors every thought and governs every action. An English historian, Professor Ramsay Muir, has stated this aptly. He writes:
"The most potent of all nation-molding factors, the one indispensable factor which must be present whatever else be lacking, is the possession of a common tradition, a memory of sufferings endured and victories won in common, expressed in song and legend, in the dear names of great personalities that seem to embody in themselves the character and ideals of the nation, in the names also of sacred places wherein the national memory is enshrined."
Gilbert K. Chesterton said to me:
"Certain people like the arrangements under which they live. They prefer to die rather than to let other people come in and change things. Even if their nation decides on a policy that is suicidal, they would rather die with her than live without her. That is nationality. When the call came, the citizens of the nations answered with what was deep in their subconsciousness. All resolutions to act as 'workers,' as members of an 'International,' fell away. If pacifists of the ruling class, like Miss Hobhouse and Bertrand Russell, would analyze what is really in their mind, they would find that what they dislike is the spectacle of democracy enthusiastically and unanimously agreeing to do something. They distrust democracy on the march. It is their artistocratic sense that disapproves. Just now, it is the Kaiser whom the democracies are marching out to find, and the people are not behaving as the pacifists would like to have them."
This idea of nationalism, instead of being an early and now obsolete idea, is a recent and a noble idea. What the common life of the home is to the father and mother and children, through poverty and childbirth and fame, that is the life of a nation to its citizens. In the blood of sacrifice it is welded together. Mixed races cannot dilute it, a doctored border cannot suppress it, a stern climate cannot quench it, an oppressive government cannot enslave it. Only one thing can destroy it and that is when it annuls its past and weakens at the heart. When it ceases to respond to the great ideas that once aroused it, then it is time for those who love it to look to the influences at work that have made it forgetful. The denial of that common experience, the refusal to inherit the great tradition, the unwillingness to continue the noble and costly policy – these mark the decline of a nation. These are the signs of peril we see in the unwieldy life of our immense democracy to-day. The call that came to us from France was the same voice that we once knew as the voice of our most precious friend. By our failure to respond we show that we have allowed something alien to enter our inmost life. In our equal failure to safeguard our own helpless non-combatants, we reveal that the old compulsions no longer move us. By the cry that went up from half our nation – not of outrage at stricken France, not of anger for slaughtered children of our own race – but that strange mystical cry, "He kept us out of war," we betray that we have lost our hardihood. We have been overwhelmed by numbers. We have suffered such a heaping up of new elements that we have no time to teach our tradition, no will to continue our race experience.
I was talking of this recently with a profound student of race psychology, Havelock Ellis. He said that the determining factor is the strength of the civilization receiving the fresh contributions. Is that civilization potent enough to shape the new contributions? The French have always had their boundaries beaten in upon by other races, but so distinctive, so salient, is their civilization that it absorbs the invasion. He said that the question to decide is whether the cells are sufficiently organized and determinate to receive alien matter.
Surely no student of our social conditions can say that our tendencies are clear, our collective will formed, our national mind unified. We keep adding chemical elements without coming to a solution. England accepted a few invasions and conquests and then had to stiffen up and work the material into a mold. France was overrun every half century, but finally she drew the sacred circle around her borders, and proceeded to the work of coalescing her parts. Our present stream of tendency, and our present grip on our own historic tradition, are not strong enough to admit of immense new European contributions. We are losing the sense of what we mean as a people.
In dealing with any pet assumption of modern thought, one must guard against misunderstanding. The opponent calls one reactionary and then one's day in court is over. Or the opponent pushes a plain statement over into an academic discussion, and the whole matter at issue is befogged. I am not attacking the desirability of a true internationalism. I am saying that our conception of it is all wrong, and that our method of attaining it is futile. The greater day of peace between nations will not come by weakening the ties of nationality. It will come through a deepening of the sense of citizenship in each nation. But much of our recent thinking has tended to weaken the claims of nationality. It is against this that we must set ourselves. We want internationalism, but the internationalism we mean is an understanding and a good will between distinct nations, not an internationalism which is the loss of a rich variety, and the blurring of distinctions. Nations will not disappear. They will heighten their individuality under the process of time. The hope of peace lies in the appreciation of those differences. We are not to reach internationalism by ceasing to become nations, as our present-day theorists advocate. There lies the service of the war. It has taught us that the Frenchman and the German will refuse to merge their ideas about life and duty in a denationalized world league. Each wants his plot of ground, his own patch of sky, his own kind of a world, with those men for neighbors who think as he thinks. The Frenchman does not wish to be speeded up by universal vocational training, and a governmental régime where efficiency and organization are the aims of the corporate life. The German does not wish his world to contain waste and laziness and dilettantism. A hundred years ago the world put up a sign in front of encroaching France: "No trespassing on these premises." To-day the grass of France is red where the marauder crossed the line. I have seen the soul of France at tension for two years, and I know that her agony has deepened her sense of nationality.
It is easy to retort that it is the nationalism of Germany that has spread fire and blood across Europe. But it is easier yet to give the final answer. There are diseases of individuality – the "artistic temperament," egoism, freakishness, criminality – which require chastening. But because certain individuals have to be restrained, we do not crush individual liberty, self-expression and the free play of development. There are diseases of nationalism – the lust for power and territory, the desire to impose the will, the language and the customs, on smaller units. When a nation hands over its foreign policy and its personal morality to the state, which is only the machinery of a nation, and when the machine, operated by a little group of imperialists instead of by the collective will of the nation, turns to organized aggression, there is catastrophe. Prussian history from the vivisection of Poland, through the rape of Schleswig and the crushing of Paris, to the assassination of Belgium, offers us no guarantees of a common aim for human welfare. But it is because nationality has been betrayed, not because it has been expressed. The Uhlan officer, murdering women, is no reason for abolishing Habeas Corpus. The misbehavior of Germany is no excuse for rebuking the liberty of France.
At the touch of the bayonet, on the first shock of reality, internationalism crumbles – the internationalism, I mean, that disbelieves in national quality, and disregards essential differences. Groups of "workers," the "universal" church of co-religionists, dissolve. The nation emerges. Wars have been the terrible method by which nations have created themselves, and by which they have defended their being. Pacifism is not a disease, it is the symptom of the disease of a false internationalism. Pacifism springs from the belief that nations do not matter, that "humanity is the great idea." "Why should nations go to war, since the principle of nationality is not vital?" But, actually, this principle is vital. "An effective internationalism can only be rendered possible by a triumphant nationalism." The present war is a fight by the little nations of Belgium and Serbia, and by the great nation, France, for the preservation of their nationality. We have failed to understand "the causes and objects" of this war, because we have weakened our own sense of nationality. Our tradition has been drowned out by new voices. Ninety years ago, we responded to Greece, and, later, to Garibaldi and Kossuth. To-day, only those understand the fight of the nations who have been reared in our American tradition. Richard Neville Hall went from Dartmouth College and died on an Alsatian Hill, serving France. A friend writes of him: "He was saying things about the France of Washington and Lafayette, how he had been brought up on the tradition of that historic friendship."
I have found something inspiring in the action of these young Americans in France. Perhaps out of them will come the leadership which our country lacks. My own generation moves on to middle life, and, as is the way of elders, reveals moderation of mind and a good-natured acceptance of conditions. Nothing is to be hoped for from us. The great generation of Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe is dead, and the next generation of George Haven Putnam and Eliot and O. O. Howard is dying. There is nowhere to turn but to the young. They must strive where we have failed. They must fight where we were neutral. I have seen some hundreds of these youth who love France because they love America. In them our tradition is continued. Through them the American idea can be reaffirmed for all our people. May they remember their dead, their boy-comrades who fell in service at the front. They have shared in the greatness of France. May they come home to us very sure of their possession. We have nothing for them. Complacent in our neutrality, and fat with our profits, we have lost our chance. They bring us moral leadership.
Now, all this will have no appeal to the many nationalities among us. The American tradition (except for a few personalities and ideas) is meaningless to them. I have dealt with their needs in the preceding chapter. I am writing these next chapters for the inheritors of our American tradition, who have grown slack and cosmopolitan, who, though of the blood-strain and cultural consciousness that fought our wars and created our civilization, are now too tired, some of them, to do anything but exploit the other nationalities which have tumbled in on the later waves of immigration. Others of us are simply swamped by the multitude and find our refuge in cosmopolitanism. "They're all alike. They will all be Americans to-morrow." If these tame descendants of America will be true to their own tradition, they will learn to be merciful to their fellow-countrymen with quite other traditions. It is precisely because we "old-timers" have been forgetting our tradition that we have been blind to the rich inherited life of those that come to us. If we recover our own sense of spiritual values, we shall welcome the tradition and the hope which the humblest Jew has brought us.
IV
COSMOPOLITANISM
Cosmopolitanism is the attempt to deny the instinct of nationality. It works in three ways with us. It seeks to impose an English culture on our mixed races; it seeks to create an American type at one stroke; it preaches an undiscriminating indeterminate merging of national cultures into a new blend, "the human race," which will be composed of individuals pretty much alike, with the same aspirations. The differences of inheritance will be thrown away like the bundle from the pilgrim's back. Modern thought is permeated with this "new religion of humanity," which is going to accomplish what the Roman Empire and the Spanish Inquisition failed to do: unify the infinite variety of human nature.
One of its analysts says that "internally it is productive of many evil vapors which issue from the lips in the form of catchwords." He traces it to ill-assimilated education, and sees its final stage when "the victim, hating his teachers and ashamed of his parentage and nationality, is intensely miserable." He is the man without roots, who has lost his contacts with the ideas, the ethic, the customs, the affectionate attachments, out of which social life develops.
For the last fifty years certain Germans have preached a boundless cosmopolitanism, while the German people have practiced an intense ingrowing racialism. It is, of course, true that these men who preached it were themselves rebels against the German system. Karl Marx, Lasselle, Engels, helped to found an international movement in protest against the form of nationality within which they lived. But the direction and violence of their rebound were governed by the hard surface from which they recoiled. The personality of these men and the tonic value of their thought have been of inestimable benefit to our age. In their main position they were much nearer the truth than their opponents. But the precise point I am dealing with is their theory of cosmopolitanism. And here a grievous personal experience in a cramping environment misled these early radicals, and they incorporated in their program the anti-national item which did not belong. Because their analysis of conditions was in the main so searching, so just, their thought has continued to exercise a profound influence, and the animating ideas in their philosophy of history and in their analysis of industrialism were imported to England and to America. The stern and unbending leaders of socialist thought have reproduced their masters' voice with an almost unchanged accent. A few great Russians contributed to the same theory of cosmopolitanism, and have powerfully affected groups of modern thinkers. I doubt if any single idea has traveled further and more swiftly than this idea that the sense of nationality is a mistaken thing, and that a something wider and vaguer is the goal of the future. The Latin races have sometimes thought they believed it, but they quickly corrected their thinking under the impact of event.
Our present school of softened, daintily stepping radicals have whittled away some of the original doctrine of the class war. The materialistic theory of history, surplus value and the proletarian division have had to yield in part to the facts of the case. But the modern reformers cling to that creation of German and Russian thought, a cosmopolitan world, the merging of races and nations into a universal undifferentiated brotherhood with gradually disappearing boundaries. We find it in our intelligent skilled social workers. I mention them in no unfriendliness, but because I believe that they and their group are a noble influence in our country, and because their blindness and failure in this crisis are a grief to me and to thousands of other persons who have looked to them for leadership. We find this idea of cosmopolitanism in the modern essayists, who are read in America, like Lowes Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, and Bernard Shaw. This doctrine has misled our social workers, our socialists, our radicals in social reform, our feminists – almost every element in our social movement. Our American radicalism is permeated with a vague cosmopolitanism, and its child, pacifism. At no point has "modern" thought exercised a profounder effect than on our social movement.
We need the check here of the Latin mentality. The clear Latin mind refuses to be misled by idealistic phrases, whose meaning does not permit of analysis into concrete terms. The French and Italians have recognized that the contribution of nationality is vital to the future. Their conception of social change is healthier than ours. It is Mazzini and not Karl Marx who was the prophet of a sane evolution. Mazzini says:
"Every people has its special mission, which will co-operate towards the fulfillment of the general mission of Humanity. That mission constitutes its nationality. Nationality is sacred.
"In laboring, according to true principles, for our country we are laboring for humanity. Our country is the fulcrum of the lever which we have to wield for the common good. If we give up this fulcrum, we run the risk of becoming useless both to our country and to humanity.
"Do not be led away by the idea of improving your material conditions without first solving the national question. You cannot do it.
"Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the idea to which it gives birth." It is "A common principle, recognized, accepted, and developed by all."
His thought is clear and consistent. How shall a man serve all humanity whom he has not seen, if he does not serve his nation whom he has seen? "The individual is too insignificant, and humanity too vast." The stuff of nationality is the sacrifice rendered by the people to realize their aspirations – "By the memory of our former greatness, by the sufferings of the millions." The limits of nationality will tend toward natural boundaries – the division of
"humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth, thus creating the germ of nationalities. Evil governments have disfigured the divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly marked out – as least as far as Europe is concerned – by the course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical conditions. They (the Governments) have disfigured it so far that, if we except England and France, there is not perhaps a single country whose present boundaries correspond to that design. Natural divisions, and the spontaneous, innate tendencies of the peoples, will take the place of the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by evil governments. The map of Europe will be redrawn.
"Then may each one of you, fortified by the power and the affection of many millions, all speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies, and educated by the same historical tradition, hope, even by your own single effort, to be able to benefit all Humanity. O my brothers, love your Country! Our Country is our Home, the house that God has given us, placing therein a numerous family that loves us, and whom we love; a family with whom we sympathize more readily, and whom we understand more quickly than we do others; and which, from its being centered round a given spot, and from the homogeneous nature of its elements, is adapted to a special branch of activity."
The method of strengthening the sense of nationality is by education. "Every citizen should receive in the national schools a moral education, a course of nationality – comprising a summary view of the progress of humanity and of the history of his own country; a popular exposition of the principles directing the legislation of that country."
That Mazzini's ideas are a living force to-day is proved by the response of the nations in this war. In the seaside town of Hove, Sussex, where I live, his book, developing these ideas, was drawn out from the public library thirty-eight times in the last four years.
There is a danger here of over-stressing nationality and inviting a return to the anarchy of war, and this is the difficulty one has in pointing out the psychologic unsoundness of Cosmopolitanism. The limitations of the Mazzini theory have been convincingly drawn by Graham Wallas.
"Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck ("We must not swallow more than we can digest") or by Mazzini, played a great and invaluable part in the development of the political consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it is becoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth century."
Wallas shows that Mazzini enormously exaggerated the simplicity of the question. National types are not divided into homogeneous units "by the course of the great rivers and the direction of the high mountains," but are intermingled from village to village. Do the Balkan mountains represent the purposes of God in Macedonia? And for which nationality, Greek or Bulgar? The remedy, as Wallas sees it, for recurring war between nations is an international science of eugenics which might "indicate that the various races should aim, not at exterminating each other, but at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial type." In this way the emotion of political solidarity can be slowly made possible between individuals of consciously different national types. A political emotion, if it is to do away with war, cannot be created by thwarting the instinct of nationality. It must be based, "not upon a belief in the likeness of individual human beings, but upon the recognition of their unlikeness." We in America have tried to deny the facts of psychology by calling all our newcomers Americans. We have sought to escape our problem by shutting our eyes to the infinite dissimilarity of the individuals in our population. The only direction for hope to travel is that the improvement of the whole species will come rather from "a conscious world-purpose based upon a recognition of the value of racial as well as individual variety than from mere fighting." This is the true internationalism, and it differs as widely from a cosmopolitan blur which "makes" Americans as from the bitter enforced nationality of blood and iron, or spiritual imperial arrogance.
I have found a perfectly clear statement of what lies loosely in the mind of modern Americans of mixed race and intense pre-occupation with the game of getting on. I have found it in the editorial columns of a Middle Western paper. The Cedar Rapids Gazette says:
EXTINCT AMERICANS
"The authorities who fear that the American race will 'die out' may not have noticed that all the ingredients of that race are still being born in Europe at about the usual rate. And, at the worst, if one American race dies out there will be another race as good or better in America to take its place.
"Several American races have already died to the extent that the members are no longer to be separately identified and their distinctive ideas no longer exert influence on the county. Among the vanished races are the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Huguenots, the Acadian voyagers, the Knickerbockers, the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Dutch, the pioneer forest tribes of Kentucky, Ohio and southern Indiana, the picturesque Yankee, the southeastern Cracker, the typical Plainsman and Cowboy, each of whom in his time and place was the representative of a small and distinct nationality.
"The Americans of two generations are unlike. To use an Irish epigram, change is the only established characteristic of the American. The American in whose veins flows the blood of half a dozen European races, whose grandparents may have been born in four states, his parents in two states; whose wife may have been born in a state other than his own and whose four children may be married to men and women of four nationalities, is not worrying greatly regarding the exact composition of the 'American race.' Individually he has on hand a rather complete stock of the ingredients and is satisfied with the idea that he is doing his best to help establish a representative order of humanity.
"There is no need to worry about the passing of a race. The world and humanity are the big ideas. The race that deserves to die will pass. The race that fights for its existence, whose members have pride in their kind, will live. A race is recruited only through the cradle. A race that disregards its young is doomed. But mankind will not be less numerous and that which is of value will survive. Not only the end of the race, but the end of the world is in sight for those who leave no children to perpetuate their bodies and their minds."
The trouble with that is that it is devoid of self-respect. It gives no foundation for ethics. It gives no sanction for religion. It gives no soil and roots for literature. It treats the life of man as if it were grass to flourish and perish. It treats men as mechanical units in a political and industrial system. They go to their lathe in the factory, attend a motion-picture show in the evening, and so on for a few years to dissolution. It is pessimistic with a dark annihilating quality. And it is a habit of mind that is growing among us. It is the inevitable reflex of our bright surface optimism, which drowns thought in speed and change, and believes that activity under scientific direction can satisfy the human spirit.