Proclaim Liberty! Part 12

In this new organization of our lives, money becomes purely a device of calculation, since the costs of the war exhaust all we have; we can now look back on America's "money-madness" with some detachment; without balancing the good and evil done to our souls by the effort to become rich, we should estimate how powerful the incentive still is--and then use it, or defeat it, for the best social advantage. For it has its advantages, if we know how to use them, and fear of money is not the beginning of a sound economy. People occasionally talk as if the desire for money is an American invention; actually our invention is the satisfaction of the desire, which we call prosperity.

For prosperity is the truth of which wealth is the legend, prosperity is the substantial fact and wealth the distorted shadow on the wall.

The economics implied in the Declaration of Independence and the Const.i.tution alike indicate a new intent in the world, to create a prosperous people. The great men who proclaimed liberty in 1776 have often been blamed because they did not create "economic freedom" to run beside their political freedom. Actually they did not create either, leaving it to the separate States to say whether one man with one vote was the true symbol of equality, whether he who paid ten times the average tax should have ten times the voice in spending it.

As for economic equality, which is what later critics really want, it would have been inappropriate to the undeveloped resources of the country and impossible in the political climate of the time. The people of the new nation had suffered from centralized government; they would not have tolerated the only practical way of establis.h.i.+ng economic controls--a highly concentrated government over a single, not a federated, nation. The men who fought the war of Independence did not even set up an executive, only a committee of thirteen to act while Congress was not in session; they erected no system of national courts; and Congress, with the duty of creating an army and navy, could not draft men to either, nor pay them if they volunteered. When this system of Confederation broke down, the Const.i.tution was carefully built up, to prevent Government from regulating the lives of the people; and the people, who were confident that they could make their own way, wanted only to be secure against interference. They did not ask Government to equalize anything but opportunity.

The "rich and well-born" managed to turn the Const.i.tution to their own advantage; their opportunities were greater than the immediate chances of the poor farmer and the city rabble; but government by the men of property was never made permanent, and the most critical historian of the Const.i.tution is the one who says that "in the long reach of time ... the fair prophecy of the Revolutionary era was surprisingly fulfilled."

The intention, so commonplace to us, was wildly radical in its time; poets and philosophers had imagined a world freed from want (usually also a world peopled by ascetics); the promise of the United States was a reasonable gratification of the desires of all men. That was the reason for giving land to migrants, and citizens.h.i.+p to foreigners, and Statehood to territories. When the French Revolution began to settle down, the people had acquired rights, they had been freed of intolerable taxes, the great estates had been cut up; but the expectation of steadily improving conditions of life did not become a _constant_ in the French character; nor did the upheaval in England in 1832 and under the Chartists leave a permanent hope for better things in the mind of the lower cla.s.ses. The idea of cla.s.s and the idea of a "station in life", a "lot" with which one must be content, persisted after _all_ the Revolutions in Europe in the 19th century. Only in America the Revolution set out to--and did--destroy the principle of natural inevitable poverty. We have not actually destroyed poverty, and this gap between our intent and our achievement has been publicized. But what we intended to do and what we accomplished and what we still have power to do are more significant than the part we failed to do. We created for the first time in history a nation which did not accept poverty as inevitable.

This had profound effects on ourselves and on the rest of the world.

We became restless and infected Europe with our instability. We became optimistic and Europe rather deplored our lack of philosophy. We enjoyed many things and became "materialistic", and Europe sent us preachers of renunciation and the simple life. It became clear that, for good and evil, our character was departing from any European mold, and parts of Europe were tempted to join the Confederacy in 1861 or Spain in 1898 in the hope of destroying us.

_Our Fifty Years of Cla.s.s War_

From about 1880 to 1930 we were moving into a new system of government; in the Midwest the children of New England and the children of Scandinavia agreed to call this system plutocracy--the system of great wealth which is based on poverty; it threatened to displace the system of almost equally great wealth which is based on prosperity.

The constant radicalism of America, based on free land, frequent movement, and belief in the future, flared up in the 1880's and for generations this country was engaged in a cla.s.s war between the rich and the poor (as it had been in Shays' time and in Jackson's). Our political education was won in this time, but Populism died under the combined effects of a war against Spain and a new process of extracting gold; it was revived under Theodore Roosevelt, under Woodrow Wilson, and under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom tried to s.h.i.+ft the base of wealth without cracking the structure itself.

Wealth had come into conflict with some other American desires, it had begun to _limit_ enterprise and, in its bad spots, was creating a peasantry and a proletariat. With some feeling that Europe must not repeat itself in America, the people on three occasions chose liberal Presidents and these men built on the "wild" ideas of the 1880's the safeguards of economic democracy which seemed needed at the time.

We are a nation in which the Continental European cla.s.s system has not become rooted; it is socially negated and politically checked; we are a democracy tempered by the special influence of wealth and, more important, by the special position of working-wealth; (inherited money counts so little that the great inheritors of our time fight their way back into production or politics, with a dosage of liberal principles). According to radicals we are still governed by ma.s.sed and concentrated finance-capital, and according to certain Congressmen we are living under a labor-dictators.h.i.+p. Very little perspective is required to see that we are living as we always have lived, our purposes not fully realized, our errors a little too glaring, our capacity to change and improve not yet impaired.

_Labor Troubles_

The reason we seem to be particularly unsure of ourselves now is that we are creating a national labor policy forty years late. We are hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we were told that change in our inst.i.tutions meant death to our "way of life"; the traditional American eagerness to abandon whatever he had exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests were too complex. So the changes we had to make all seemed revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through the Populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of organized labor was the beginning of cla.s.s warfare in America.

The forty year lag in the labor situation had evil effects on all concerned: the Government was too often uncertain, and the leaders of labor too often unfit. Like other organized groups, labor unions did not always consult the public good and criminals were found among them; but organized labor should be compared with organized production or organized banking or medicine or law; all of these have long traditions, all have the active support of the public; yet their ethics are quite as often dubious, they act out of basic self-interest, and the criminals among them, utility magnates stealing from stockholders, doctors splitting fees, manufacturers bribing legislators, are as shocking as the grafters and racketeers of the labor unions.

The temporary dismay over labor's advances and obstinacy will pa.s.s, the laws will finally be written; but we will still be a country backward in the _habits_ of organized dealing between management and labor. The advantage lies in the past; we did not create a basic hostile relations.h.i.+p because the laborer was always on the point of becoming a foreman or thought he would start his own shop; or a new wave of high wages "settled" strikes without any settled principles--to the dismay of the few statesmen among labor leaders.

Firm relations imply some permanence. The employer expected to retain his business; the worker expected to better it. Consequently, the basic American labor policy is not grounded in despair; it does not represent endless poverty, or cruelty, or a desire to revenge ancient wrongs. Nor does it represent fear. The disgraces of Memorial Day in Chicago and of Gate Four in Detroit will come again if the laws we create do not correspond to the facts; but the habits of Americans have not created two sullen armies, of capital with its bullies, of labor with its demagogues. These exist on the frontiers, where border clashes occur. The main bodies are not hostile armies, but forces capable of coordinated effort. Theodore Roosevelt was prepared to send the troops of the United States to take over the Pennsylvania coal mines, because the mine owners (with "Divine Right" Baer to guide them) refused to deal with the unions under John Mitch.e.l.l; as soon as that was known, the possibility of creating a labor policy became bright, because Roosevelt was, in effect, restoring the balance lost when Cleveland sent troops to Pullman. The position of Government as the impartial but decisive third party was sketched, and some forty years later we are beginning to see a labor policy in which the Government protects both parties and provides the machinery for the settlement of all disputes.

Our immaturity and peevishness about an established routine for labor disputes has to be counted on as a factor in our character, chiefly because we shall remain for some time behind the other great industrial countries in the smoothness of operation. In normal times a British contractor did not have to allow for strikes, an American did; and our present war effort, our propaganda, and our plans for the future, all have to take this element into consideration. The false unity of December, 1941, resulted in a serious pledge of "no strikes, no lockouts"; but within three months the National Labor Relations Board was admitting that it needed guidance to create a policy, and worse than sporadic trouble was in the wind. So much the more did we have to know what we were like in labor affairs, and without self-imposture, act accordingly. The war gave an opportunity for statesmen to make a new amalgam of the elements in the labor situation; but the war also made people hysterical about unrealities, and the labor situation was treated in two equally bad ways: as if we could have maximum production without any policy, or as if no policy could be evolved, and we would have to fight the Axis while the Administration destroyed capital and Congress destroyed labor.

_The Danger of G.o.dlessness_

I am listing certain actualities of American life, with notes on their sources, as a guide to conduct--particularly the conduct of the war (which should be built on our character) and the conduct of civilian propaganda which must, at times, effect temporary alterations in our habits. I have, so far, named those aspects of our total outlook which come from the size and many-sided wealth of the country, and from our confident, unskilled attempts to deal with wealth and labor and the s.h.i.+fts of power which are bound to occur in a democracy. I come now to items which are no less potent because they are impalpable. Any effort which counts on bringing the whole strength of America into play must count also on these.

We are a profoundly irreligious people. We are highly sectarian and we are a church-going people; but in the sense that religion rises from our relation to a higher power, we are irreligious. We are not constantly aware of any duty: to the state, to our fellowmen, to Mankind, to the Universal Principle, to G.o.d. We live unaware even of a connection between ourselves and anything we do not instantly touch or see or hear; we have grown out of asking for help or protection, and disasters fall on us heavily because we are separated from our fellowmen, having no common needs, or faith.

The coming together, in freedom, of many faiths, and the rise of material happiness in the great era of scepticism, left us without a functioning state religion; the emanc.i.p.ation of each individual man from political tyranny and economic degradation left us without any sense of the universal; we have been able to gratify so many private purposes, that we are unaware of any great purpose beyond. As for the mystic's faith, it never makes itself felt, and the name "mystic"

itself, far from connoting a deeper insight into the nature of G.o.d, is now a.s.sociated with flummery and hoax.

We are irreligious because we have set out to conquer the physical world and deliver a part of the spoils to every man. In our good intention to create and to distribute wealth, creating democracy in our stride, we approach a new relation to others. We are capable of cooperation; but religious people do not cooperate with G.o.d; they seek his will and bow to it. We exalt our own will.

This has to be taken into account, because it makes the creation of a practical unity difficult. If we had felt ourselves linked through G.o.d with one another, it would have been easier to join hands in any job we had to do. I do not know whether any of the western democratic countries had a remnant of this mystical religion; but the appeal to the "blood" and the "race" of both j.a.pan and Germany, the appeal to universal brotherhood in both China and Soviet Russia, indicate what a deep source of strength can be found in man if he can be persuaded to abandon himself. And as this is the fundamental demand of the State in war time, means must be found to compensate for the absence of deep universally shared feeling in America. We shall not find a subst.i.tute for religion and we will do well to concentrate on the non-religious actions and emotions which bring men together. Common fears we already have and we may rediscover our common hopes; common pleasures we are enjoying and preparing to sacrifice them for the common good. (Fear and hope and sacrifice and the common good all lie on the periphery of religious feeling; and point toward the center.) But I doubt whether the American people would accept "a great wave of religious feeling"

which would be artificially induced to persuade us that all our past was a mistake and that our childish pleasure in good things was as vain as our hope for better.

_The Alger Factor_

The end result of all the separate elements, the land, the people, the departure from Europe, the struggle for wealth, the fight against wealth, was to make us a people of unbounding optimism, which was our Horatio Alger subst.i.tute for religious faith. The cool realistic appraisal of man's fate which an average Frenchman makes, the trust of the Englishman that he will "muddle through", the ancient indifference of the Russian peasant, the resignation of the Orient, are matched in America by an intense and confident appeal to _action_, in the faith that action will bring far better things than have been known. The vulgar side of this is bustle and activity for its own sake and a childish confusion between what is better and what is merely bigger or newer or more expensive or cheaper; we have to accept all this because on the other side our faith in action has broken the vise of poverty in which man has been held since the beginning of modern history; it has destroyed tyranny and set free the bodies and the minds of the hundred millions who have lived in a new world. We have rejected some of the most desirable and beautiful creations of other peoples, the arts of Europe, the Asiatic life of contemplation, the wisdom of philosophers, the exaltation of saints--but we have also rejected the slavery on which these rest or the negation of life to which they tend.

The "materialism" of America is not as terrible as it looks; and it must be respected by those who want us to make sacrifices. What aristocratic Europeans call gross in us is a hundred million hands reaching for the very things the aristocrats held dear. In the scuffle, some harm is done; the first pictures reproduced on magazine covers were not equal to the Mona Lisa; within fifty years the Mona Lisa could be reproduced in a magazine for ten million readers, but the aristocrats still complained of vulgarizing. The first music popularized by records or radio was popular in itself; within fifty years records and radio will have multiplied the audience for the greatest music, popular or sublime, ten thousand fold; it is possible that on one Sat.u.r.day or Sunday afternoon music, good even by pedantic standards, is heard by more people than used to hear it in an entire year. And both of these instances have another special point of interest: each is creating new works on its own terms, so that pictures, very good ones, are painted for multiple reproduction and music, as good as any other, is specially composed for radio.

I shall return to the special field of creative work presently. On a "lower" level, note that some (not all) Europeans and all American expatriates condemn our preoccupation with plumbing. We multiply by twenty million the number of individuals who can take baths agreeably, without servants hauling inadequate buckets of hot water up three flights of stairs; and are materialistic; but the aristocrat who goes to an hotel with "modern comfort" is spiritual because he doesn't think constantly of plumbing. The truth is that the few can buy themselves out of worry, letting their servants "live for them"; and it is equally true that the only way, short of sainthood, to forget about the material comforts of life is to have them always at hand.

_The Morals of Plenty_

We have never formulated the morals of prosperity, nor understood that nearly all the practical morality we know (apart from religion) is based on scarcity; it is intended to make man content with less than his share, it even carries into the field of action and praises those who do not try too hard to gain wealth. This was not good morality for a pioneering country, so Poor Richard preached the gospel of industry and thrift, which is not the gospel of resignation to fate. (Industry clears the wilderness, thrift finances the growth of a nation; Franklin was economically right for his time; in 1920 we were preaching leisure and installment buying, the exact opposite; but we never accepted the reverse morality of working for low wages and living on less than we needed.) The morals of plenty, by which we are usually guided, have created in our minds a few fixed ideas about what is good: it is good to work and to get good wages, so as to have money beyond our instant needs; it is bad to be ill and to be inefficient and to disrupt production by demanding high wages. (Like most moralities, this one has several faces; like most American products it adapts itself to a variety of needs.) In a broader field our morality denies that anything is too good for the average man (if it can be made by ma.s.s production). Ma.s.s production put an end to the old complaint that the poor would only put coal into the bathtub--ma.s.s production of tubs and central heating in apartments. The morality of scarcity reserves all that is good for the few, who must therefore be considered "the best", the "elite" (which means, in effect, the chosen), the "civilized minority". Democracy began by declaring men born equal and proceeded in a hundred and seventy years to create equality because it needed every man as a customer. Incomplete this was, perhaps only two-thirds of the way; it was nonetheless the practical application of the Declaration, by way of the system of ma.s.s production; it was a working morality.

_Merchant Prince to 5-and-Dime_

We came a long way from nabob-morality, based on a splendor of spending; money is not our criterion of excellence, but the reverse; cheapness is the democratic equivalent of quality, and the five-and-ten cent store is the typical inst.i.tution of our immediate time. We may deplore the vanis.h.i.+ng craftsman and long for the time when the American will make clay pots and plaited hats as skillfully as the Guatemalan; but our immediate job is to understand that the process which killed the individual craftsman is also the process that subst.i.tuted the _goods_ of the many for the good of the few.

The five-and-ten had its parallels in Europe before the war, but it remains a distinguis.h.i.+ng mark of America, and whoever wants to enlist us or persuade us has to touch that side of our life. It is as near to a universal as we possess; I have known people who have never listened to the radio (until 1939) and never went to the movies, but I have never known anyone who did not with great pleasure go to the five-and-ten. It is a combination of good value and attractive presentation; it is shrewdly managed and pleasantly staffed. One finds cheap subst.i.tutes, but one also finds new commodities made for the five-and-ten trade. The chain five-and-ten is, moreover, big business.

In all these things the five-and-ten is a great American phenomenon; characteristic of the twentieth century as the crossroads general store was of the nineteenth. The hominess of the country store is gone and is a loss; but the gain in other directions is impressive. It is impressive, too, that a store should be so typical of American methods and enterprise and satisfactions. Small commerce is not universally held in esteem. When one remembers the fussiness of the average French bazaar and the ancient prejudice against trade in England, the five-and-ten as a key to our intentions becomes even more effective.

_Prosperity and Politics_

Our persistent intention is to make good the Declaration of Independence; often minor purposes get in the way, or we are in conflict with ourselves. We attempted equal opportunity (with free land) and at the same time contract labor in the mines; we fought to emanc.i.p.ate the Negro and we created an abominable factory system in the same decades; at times we slackened our check on abuses, because in spite of them we flourished; all too often we let the job of watching over our liberties fall into the hands of newcomers; sometimes we were so engrossed in the fact, the necessary work, that we forgot what the work was for; a ruling group forgot, or a political party, or a generation--but America did not forget. Each time we forgot, it seemed that the lapse was longer and it took more tragic means to recall us to the straight line of our purpose; but each time we proved that we could bear neglect and forgetfulness and would come back to create a free America. There was reason always for the years when we marked time; our prosperity increased so that the redistribution of wealth was harder to do, but was more worth doing; and even the black backward era of normalcy served us with proof that America could create the materials for a high standard of life, although we could not put them into the proper hands. We justified supremely Stalin's compliment to capitalism: "it made Society wealthy"; and we did it so handsomely as to leave questionable his further statement that Socialism will displace capitalism "because it can furnish Society with more products and make Society wealthier than the capitalist system can."

We planned and eventually produced the machinery for making our lives comfortable; our industrial methods interacted with our land and immigration policy, from the day Eli Whitney put the quant.i.ty system into action; and all of them required the same thing--equality of political rights, indifference to social status, a high level of education, the maximum of civil freedom. Our factories wanted free speech for us as certainly as our philosophers did; a free people, aware of novelties, critical of the present, antic.i.p.ating the future, capable of earning and not afraid to spend--these are the customers required by ma.s.s production. And the same freedom, the same intention to be sceptical of authority, the same eagerness to risk all in the future, are the marks of a free man. Our economic system with all its iniquities and stupid faults, worked around in the end to liberate men from poverty and to uphold them in their freedom. The fact that individual producers were afraid of Debs in 1890 and whimpered for Mussolini in 1931 is a pleasing irony; for these reactionaries in politics were often radicals in production; they had contributed to our freedom by their labors and our freedom was the condition of their prosperity. Only free people fulfill their wants, and it is not merely a coincidence that the freest of all peoples should be also the freest spenders.

The consequences of the Declaration are now beginning to be understood. The way we took the land and left it, or held it until it failed us; the way we brought men of all nations here and let them move, as we moved, over the face of a continent; our absorption in our own capacities and our persistent endeavor to create national well-being for every man; our parallel indifference to our fellowmen, our State, and our G.o.d; our wealth and our endless optimism and our fulfilment of Democracy by technology are some of the basic elements in our lives. Whoever neglects them, and their meaning, in practical life, will not ever have us wholeheartedly on his side; whoever starts with these, among other, clues to discover what America is, will at least be on the right way. All we have to do in the war will rise out of all we have done in our whole history; our past is in the air we breathe, it runs in our veins, it is what we are.

CHAPTER X

Popularity and Politics

There are some consequences of our history so conspicuous and so significant that they deserve to be separated from the rest and examined briefly by themselves.

In the United States every week 34 million families listen on an average four hours a day to the radio; 90 million individual movie admissions are bought; 16 million men and women go bowling at least once, probably oftener; thousands of couples dance in roadhouses, juke-joints, and dance halls; in winter 12 million hunting licenses are issued; millions of copies of the leading ill.u.s.trated magazines are sold; and, in normal times, some ten or fifteen million families take their cars and go driving.

These are not ma.s.s enterprises; they are popular enterprises; there are others: ma.s.s-attendance at sport, or smaller, but steady, attendance at conventions, lodge meetings and lectures. For the most part, all these can be divided into sport, games, fun; the search for information in entertainment; and entertainment by ma.s.s-communication.

Sport is pleasant to think about; after all the scoldings we have had because we like to watch athletic events (just as the ancient Greeks did), it is gratifying to report the great number of people who are actually making their own fun. The same ign.o.ble but useful desire for money which has so often served us has now built bowling alleys, dance halls and tennis courts, so that we are doing more sports ourselves.