Introducing the American Spirit Part 14

Those men now "rest from their labor" in that bit of rolling prairie saved from the plowmen and the harvester, and consecrated to hold our dead until the great day.

The morning after our arrival in Grinnell, the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin, who, during our travels, had little opportunity to indulge their fondness for exercise, walked out to the cemetery. It is a beautiful, well-kept spot, but half spoiled by crowding headstones. From it can be seen church steeples peeping through the elm trees which shelter the town; the ugly stand-pipe and the tall chimney of our one big factory. At our feet lay the little artificial lake where much fishing is done, and sometimes fish are caught. As far as we could see were prosperous farms with their comfortable homes, generous barns, turreted silos, and wide meadows where calves and colts grazed.

One of our virtues, the Herr Director thought, was that we do not boast about our dead. Whatever boasting we do, and we do not boast too much, it ceases when the earth covers us. He saw no fulsome eulogies carved upon the headstones; often nothing but a name and the two dates of birth and death.

In the face of that great and last achievement we are very humble and honest; although in our little cemetery lie buried men and women of whom I should like to boast. They were the great, real Americans who worked diligently, honestly and humbly, who left no huge fortunes to curse the next generation; but built their modest homes, and before the roof tree was lifted, had built a church and a schoolhouse. They put their t.i.thes into the Lord's treasury before they put money into a bank, and while they were still wading through mud, anch.o.r.ed the college upon a rock, making its growth and permanence their great extravagance.

They believed in an austere Christ, but believed in Him implicitly, followed Him consistently and left a legacy of simplicity, temperance and frugality.

Yes, I boasted of our dead to my guests. I boasted of that grim, fighting man whose name the town bears, who was the personification of the determined, American pioneer, the conqueror of mere circ.u.mstances.

I boasted of that firm, unyielding, controversial Calvinist, George F.

Magoun, who ruled the college in his own stern way. He was the last, but not the least of his kind, who built deep and strong and straight upon the foundations of morality and religion; so that others could build loftily and boldly.

I led them to the grave where rests the body of his successor, the two differing from one another in opinions and method at every point; for the younger man was the forerunner of a new dispensation, its prophet, disciple and martyr. Yet both men were made of the same stern, unyielding stuff, and both rested their lives and the hope of life's better things to come, upon the same foundation.

When the names of those Americans who prophesied the day of the Kingdom, who worked for it and suffered for it, shall be placed upon the honor roll, the name of George A. Gates, now carved upon a modest monument, will be found imperishably written there.

Near by, under the shade of slender white birches, we saw the simple shaft which marks the resting place of one of the Iowa Band, James J.

Hill, who holds his place in the annals of the college, not only because he gave the first dollar to help found it, but because of the continued loyalty of his sons.

I wished my guests could have come to us before we buried the man whose life spanned the old and the new--the white-haired, ever youthful, eloquent teacher, Leonard F. Parker, who smiled benignly upon us all until his eyes closed forever, and with their closing, a benediction was gone. He was the type of missionary teacher who began his career in a log cabin, who, whether he taught in a country school or in a great State University, taught with a pa.s.sion for men. The impress of his personality remained with his pupils long after they had forgotten his erudite lore.

As great as these great Americans were their wives, and no one can ever think of them as less than the equals of their husbands.

If the American woman occupies a unique place in the world, it is not only because the American man has been more generous than his European brother, but because she has proved her equality. She has attained the measure of rights and privileges still denied to most of her sisters elsewhere because she earned and deserved them.

We, the living, sons and daughters of these great teachers by birth and by adoption, cannot hold in too high esteem the legacy they left us. We do not know with as firm an a.s.surance as we ought to know, how much we owe to them, and that, if we waste our inheritance, we waste spiritual forces which we cannot generate.

They were all, in the true sense, provincial, narrow men. They thought of America and of the world and of the world to come, in the terms of their creed, their town and their college; while we who have circled the globe and think in world terms first, and boast of wider vision and larger faith, may be in danger of overlooking the fact that in our small place and places like it may be decided the fate of America, and through America, the fate of the world.

The Herr Director was astonished and the Frau Directorin pained to find that we lived in a servantless house and in practically a servantless town; that we were our own cooks and housemaids, butlers and gardeners.

When the Herr Director saw me mowing my lawn in broad daylight he wondered that I did not lose caste among my fellows.

The Frau Directorin was remarkably adaptable. She delighted in wielding the dustless mop (to reduce "the meat"), she dusted the bric-a-brac, and out of the kindness of her heart and in spite of our protests, became "first aid" to my wife.

One morning, just as I was waking, I heard the rattle of a lawn-mower under my window; not the quick, sharp, sustained noise which usually arouses the neighborhood, but a slow, measured sound, by fits and starts. In between I could hear puffing and panting, like that of a small steam engine. When I looked out of the window I saw something which my eyes could not believe. The Herr Director had begun mowing the lawn, and I let him finish it. It pretty nearly finished him; but after his bath and a generous American breakfast, he glowed from health and happiness.

"I never knew," he said, "the elevating power of physical labor. I think I will take a lawn-mower home with me."

The Frau Directorin put a damper upon his enthusiasm by reminding him that he would have to take a lawn home with him too, and more than that, the town itself; for in their environment he would not dare use the lawn-mower even if he had one.

I am quite sure now that the Herr Director would have liked to take my little town home with him, with the lawn-mower and the lawn. If he could have done so, he might have changed the course of empires.

I urged him, if he really wished to annex us, to do it soon; for there is no little danger that we, too, shall lose faith in the redemptive power of labor, the sufficiency of little things, the grandeur of plain living and high thinking, the exaltation of the humble, the inheritance for the meek and the reward of the righteous. When we lose those, we have lost that which, in our proud, provincial way, we call "The Grinnell Spirit"--an integral part of the American--the World-spirit.

XIV

_The Commencement and The End_

There are some aspects of our American life which I tried to hide from my guests. I kept as many of our national family skeletons as possible in their closets, and made sure that the doors were securely locked.

I was glad that the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin were to leave this country before our insane Fourth of July, which we are endeavoring to make sane. I did not care to have them here on Thanksgiving Day from which, through the superabundance of turkey and cranberry sauce, the element of Thanksgiving has been almost eliminated. I was profoundly grateful that during their visit there was no election day with its sordid partisanship, its ballot box, not yet sacred enough to make beautiful or place n.o.bly in some civic temple; but we did urge them to remain over Commencement day, that most happy, sweetly solemn occasion, unspoiled as yet by rich display. It is the great festival of our democracy, shared by town and gown, when we open the gates to rich and poor, to common opportunity and duty.

We made no mistake in thus planning. The town wore its holiday air. From farm and village, from many states, on every train, parents were arriving, walking proudly beside their sons and daughters, in academic garb.

"Old Grads" were being welcomed back by _Alma Mater_, grateful to her for having helped make life rich, and sweet, and worth living. They hoped to place under her care their children and their children's children, whom they had brought there to give them a foretaste of joys to come.

It was a wonderful experience for the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin to meet them. They were feted and feasted; they wore cla.s.s and college colors, and entered into the spirit of it all as if they, too, had been the children of Grinnell College.

Among the graduates they met editors, lawyers and doctors who had come back from the great cities; professors who had won academic renown, and are serving the great universities; teachers who had carried into the public schools the spirit of their college; preachers who have gained prominence, and those who minister in humble places, faithful in their obscurity and proud of their chance to serve. There were missionaries who came back from the ends of the earth where they had started centers of education, places of healing and temples of hope.

They listened to stirring messages from pulpit and platform, to the young dreams of minor poets who sang the lay of their cla.s.s; to historians who reviewed the four college years as a great epoch closed; to prophets who predicted failure and success, and a golden day of jubilee to the whole weary world, when this particular cla.s.s got back of it.

On Commencement day they watched the dignified President conferring the degrees of Bachelor, Master and Doctor.

At noon they attended the college banquet and suffered through the after dinner speeches.

That night on the crowded campus they enjoyed the Glee Club's joyful songs, and then, worn to the last shred of their highly emotional natures, walked home with us while the last strains of the Alumni Song faded away into the night.

The Herr Director talked until after midnight, telling of the many things which pleased him. The religious dignity, the fine simplicity, the natural, sweet, pure relationship between men and women; but above all else, the democratic spirit from which these other things emanate.

He had an apt way of singing s.n.a.t.c.hes of German song of which he seemed to command an unlimited supply; and as he mounted the stairs to his room he sang: "_Ach, wenn es nur immer so bliebe._" (Oh, if it would only remain so always.) Then followed the sad note which is the major one of the German lyric: "_Es war zu schon gewesen, es hatt nich sollen sein._"

(It was too beautiful and therefore could not be.)

I knew it might not remain so beautiful always; but if life is worth while at all, it is worth while struggling to keep it so.

I do not know what share one person may have in influencing the current upon which a nation is drifting; but I believe in the power of the individual, and I shall "fight the good fight"--and a hard one it is--and "keep the faith"--although it is not easy to keep it--faith in G.o.d and men and in the American Spirit.

Four weeks after the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin left us I received the following letter. I have had some difficulty in translating the involved and rather lengthy epistle into straightforward English, but have done so that I may share it with my readers.

MY DEAR FRIEND:

We arrived home in safety after a rather stormy and uneventful voyage.

On board the ship we met a number of Lake Mohonk acquaintances, and therefore the atmosphere which you tried to create for me surrounded me even in mid ocean, and consequently you ought to be happy and contented.

When we reached Washington half-cooked, for even your excellent provisions for our comfort were unavailing against your terrific summer heat, your friend and his automobile were at the station; just such a friend and such an automobile as met us dozens of times before.

If anything, this friend was a little more persistent than the other species, for we were taken up and down and in and out, to everything within fifty miles of Washington. We shook hands with half your congressmen some of them seem to be professional hand-shakers, and my hand aches at the thought of it.

State Secretary Bryan received me most affably and talked about his peace treaties. He didn't give me much chance to do any talking myself.

He seems so genuinely American; by that I mean simple and childlike in many things, and complex and difficult to understand in others.

He is neither a humbug as some of your papers say, nor a prophet as he thinks himself. His faith in humanity and in himself is pathetically colossal.