Proclaim Liberty! Part 11

We lack mathematics; our physical boundaries are fixed, but our social boundaries are fluid, our national "genius" escapes definition. Yet we can describe these imponderables even if we cannot force them into a diagram, and their vital significance is as great as any statistics can be. It is a fact that millions of people came to America in the hope of a better life--the number who came can be written down, the intensity of hope can be guessed; and only a compa.s.sionate imagination can say what this country gained by the hopes fulfilled or lost by those which ended in despair. Yet the elation and the disillusion of men and women are both reflected in our laws and customs; and so far as they did not occur in other lands, they are factors in defining the great complex of our national character.

We are defined by events--immigration was an event. But immigrants came to other countries as well, to Canada and Brazil and England.

When they came and in what numbers becomes the defining mark for us.

It is self-evident that we are different from all other nations both absolutely and relatively; no other nation lies within our boundaries or has all our habits, because none has had our history--that is the base of absolute difference; all other nations share something with us, but we differ from each relatively--in some degree. This would not be worth mentioning if chauvinism did not insist that we differed (and were superior) in all things, while a base cosmopolitanism insisted that we were alike in all things and should be made more so. The corrective for each of these errors is to see what we are.

_The Revolution in Property_

When this country was settled the ownership of land was the most important economic factor in the lives of all Western peoples. The ruling cla.s.s in Europe was a "landed aristocracy"; the poor had become poorer because they had usually been gradually driven off the land (as in England) or forced to pay outrageous rents (as in France). In the thirteen original colonies alone we had almost as many square miles of land as France and England together and this seemingly immeasurable area was only the fringe, the sh.o.r.e line, of Continental America; the Mississippi Valley had been explored, and the Southwest, so that the French and Spanish people shared, to an extent, in the hopes which unlimited land offered to the dispossessed.

Before the Declaration of Independence had been uttered, a revolution in the deepest instincts of man had taken place--land became a commodity of less permanence than a man's musket or horse. In Europe, land was to be built upon (literally and symbolically; ducal or royal Houses were founded on land); land was _real_ estate, everything else was by comparison trifling; land was guarded by laws, property laws, laws of inheritance, laws of trespa.s.s, laws governing rents and foreclosures; far above laws governing human life was the law governing property, and the greatest property was land; t.i.tle to property often carried with it what we call "a t.i.tle" today; count and marquis, their names signify "counties" and "marches" of land; and the Prince (or _Princeps_) was often the first man in the land because he was the first owner of the land. Land was the one universal permanent thing; upon it men were born; over it they slaved or rode in grandeur; in it they were buried.

The American pioneer began to abandon his land, his farm in the clearing of the wilderness, before 1776. He moved away, westward, and complained against King George's legal fence around the land beyond the Alleghenies. The European transplanted to America often founded a House, notably in the aristocratic tradition of the Virginia tidewater; but most of the colonists lacked money or inclination to buy land in quant.i.ties; they went inland and took what they needed (often legally, often by squatters' right--which is the right of work, not of law); and then, for a number of reasons, they left the land and went further into the wilderness and made another clearing.

There is something magnificent and mysterious about this mania to move which overtook men when they came to America. Perhaps the primal instinct of man, to wander with his arrow or with his flock, rea.s.serted itself after generations of the hemmed-in life of European cities; perhaps it was some uneasiness, some insecurity in themselves--or some spirit of adventure which could not be satisfied so long as a river or a forest or a plain lay unexplored. Romance has beglamored the pioneer and he has been called rude names for his "rape of a continent". I have once before quoted Lewis Mumford's positively Puritan rage at the pioneer who did not heed Wordsworth's advice to seek Nature "in a wise pa.s.siveness"--advice based on the poet's love for the English Lake district, about as uncivilized then as Northern Vermont is today. The raging pioneer, says Mumford, "raped his new mistress in a blind fury of obstreperous pa.s.sion". Our more familiar figure of the pioneer in a c.o.o.nskin cap, leading the way for wife and children, is the romantic counterpart of this grim raper who wasn't aware of the fact that Rousseau and Wordsworth didn't like what he was doing.

He was doing more to undermine the old order than Rousseau ever did.

The moment land ceased to be universally the foundation of wealth and position, the way was open for wealth based on the machine--which is wealth made by hand, not inherited, wealth made by the _industry_ of one man or group of men; it was wealth made by things in motion, not by land which stands still. The whole concept of aristocracy began to alter--for the worse. If wealth could be made, then wealth became a criterion; presently the money-lender (on a large scale) became respectable; presently money itself became respectable. It was divorced from land, from power, and from responsibility; a few generations later the new money bought up land to be respectable--but not responsible.

_The Consequences of Free Land_

This was the revolution in which America led the way and it had astounding consequences. The American pioneer did not care for the land--in two senses, for he neither loved it nor took care of it. The European peasant had to nourish the soil before it would, in turn, nourish him and his family; the American did not; he exhausted the soil and left it, as a man unchivalrously leaves an aging wife for a younger; there was so much land available that only an obstinate unadventurous man would not try a hazard of new fortunes. This may be morally reprehensible, but politically it had a satisfactory result: the American farmer exhausted the soil, but did not let the soil exhaust him; so that we established the tradition of waste, but escaped the worse tradition of a stingy, frightened, miserly, peasant cla.s.s. The more aesthetic American critics of America never quite forgave us for not having peasant arts and crafts, the peasant virtues, the peasant st.u.r.diness and all the rest of the good qualities which go with slavery to the soil.

So the physical definition of America leads to these opening social definitions:

we first destroyed the land-basis of wealth, position and power;

we were the first nation to exhaust and abandon the soil;

we were supremely the great wasters of the world;

we were the first great nation to exist without a peasant cla.s.s.

From this beginning we can go on to other effects:

our myths grew out of conquest of the land, not out of war against neighboring states;

we created no special rights for the eldest son (as the younger could find more and better land);

the national center of gravity was constantly changing as population moved to take up new land;

we remained relatively unsophisticated because we were constantly opening new frontiers;

our society, for the same reason, was relatively unstable;

we lived at half a dozen social levels (of comfort and education, for instance) at the same time;

we created a "various" nation, and when the conditions of owning and working land changed, we were plunged into a new kind of political revolution, known then as the Populist movement.

The effects of a century of fairly free land are still the dominant psychological factor in America; the obvious effects are that the land invited the immigrant and rewarded the pioneer--who between them created the forms of society and established half a dozen norms of character. In addition, the opportunities offered kept us ambitious at home and peaceful abroad. Once we felt secure within our territorial limits, we became basically pacifist, and it took the "atrocities" of the Spaniards in Cuba to bring us into our first war against a European nation since 1814. This pacifism was more intense in the more agricultural states and was fed by the settlement there of pacific Scandinavians whose country's record of avoiding wars was better than ours. Pacifism was constantly fed by other immigrants, from Germany and Russia and minor states, who fled from compulsory military service (for their children, if not for themselves). In revenge for this un-European pacifism we created a purely American lawlessness--and a toleration of it which is the amazement of n.a.z.i Germany, where the leaders prefer the sanctions of law for their murders; civilized Europe, having lived through duels and ma.s.sacres, is still shocked by our constant disregard of law, which began with the absence of law in pioneering days, and was met, later, by our failure to educate new citizens to obedience or adapt our laws to their customs.

_America on the Move_

One more thing, directly, the land did: it made us a mobile people and all the changes of three hundred years (since the first settlers struck inland from Plymouth and upland from Jamestown) have not altered us. The voyage which brought us here often lost momentum for a generation; but the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon was moving into the Northwest Territory as soon as the Revolution was over; then New England began to move to the west; the covered wagon followed trails broken by outriders to the western ocean; the Gold Rush pulled men through the wintry pa.s.ses or around the Horn, and by then our pa.s.sion for moving swiftly over great distances had given us the Clipper ship; after the Civil War the Homestead Act started a new move to the West, and the railroads began to make movement less romantic, but regular and abundant. If the 1870's were not marked by great migrations of men, they were scored into the earth by the tremendous drives of cattle, north from Texas in the summer, south from Wyoming as winter threatened, hundreds of thousands of them, herded across state lines and prairies and riverbeds, back and forth, until the last drive to the railheads at Abilene or Kansas City. We were moving a bit more slowly, chiefly from the country to the cities, but the far northwest was beginning to grow; then, when it seemed that we could move no more, the motor car, which had been a luxury for the few in Europe, developed as a common tool for the average family, and America was mobile again, first with naive pleasure in movement (and a satisfaction in the tool itself), then in an extraordinary outburst of activity which has not been sufficiently studied--the tin can tourist, the first middle-cla.s.s-on-the-march in history. This search for the sun, with its effects on Florida and California, broke the established habits of the middle-cla.s.s and of the middle-aged; it wrote a new ending to the life of the prudent, industrious American, it required initiative and if it ended in the rather ugly tourist camp, that was only a new beginning.

The great migration of Negroes to the north followed the first World War; since then the mobility of Americans is the familiar, almost tragic, story of a civilization allowing itself to be tied almost entirely to one industry, and not providing for the security of that one. Every aspect of American life was altered by the quant.i.ty-production of motor cars; the method of production itself caused minor ma.s.s-movements, small armies of unemployed marching on key cities, small armies marching back; and the universal dependence on trucks, busses and cars, which bankrupted railroads, shifted populations away from cities, slaughtered tens of thousands annually, altered the conditions of crime and pursuit, and, in pa.s.sing, made the country known to its inhabitants; moreover, the motor car which created only a small number of anti-social millionaires, made some twenty million Americans feel equal to the richest and the poorest man on the road.

Mobility which in the pioneer days had created the forms of democracy came back to the new democracy of the filling station and the roadside cabin.

"Everybody" had a car in America, but there was no "peoples' car"; that was left for dictators to promise--without fulfilment. The cars made in America were wasteful; they were artificially aged by "new models" and the sales pressure distracted millions of Americans from a more intelligent allocation of their incomes; these were the errors, widely remarked. That the motor car could be used--was being used--as a civilizing agent, escaped the general attention until the war threatened to put a new car into the old barn, beside the buggy which had rested there for thirty years--but might still be good for transport.

In one field America seemed to lag: aviation. Because the near frontiers of Europe made aircraft essential, all European _governments_ subsidized production; the commercial possibilities were not so apparent to Americans; no way existed for doing two things--making planes in ma.s.s production, and getting millions of people to use them. The present war has antic.i.p.ated normal progress in methods of production by a generation; it may start the motor car on a downward path, as the motor car dislodged the trolley and the train; but this will only happen if the aeroplane fits into the basic American pattern of machines for mobility.

"_The Richest Nation on Earth_"

From free land to free air, movement and change have produced a vast amount of wealth in America. Because land could not be the exclusive base of riches, wealth in America began to take on many meanings and, for the first time in history, a wealthy people began to emerge, instead of a wealthy nation.

We were, in the economist's sense, always a wealthy nation. The overpowering statistics of our share of all the world's commodities are often published because we are not afraid of the envy of the G.o.ds; of coal and iron and most of the rarer metals used to make steel, we have an impressive plenty; of food and the materials for shelter and clothing, we can always have enough; from South America, we can get foods we cannot raise but have become accustomed to use; of a few strategic materials in the present war economy, we have nothing; except for these, we are copiously supplied; but we should still be poor if we lacked ability and knack and desire to make the raw materials serviceable to all of us. So that our power to work, our way of inventing a machine, our habit of letting nearly everybody in on the good things of life, is specifically a part of our wealth.

We have a tradition about wealth, too. The Government, to some degree, has always tried to rectify the worst inequalities of fortune; and the people have done their share: they have not long tolerated any artificial bar to enterprise.

"_Rugged Individuals_"

Government's care of the less fortunate struck some twenty million Americans as something new and dangerous in the early days of the Hoover depression, and in the sudden upward spiral of the first New Deal. Perhaps the most hackneyed remark was that "real Americans"

would reject Federal aid--a pious hope usually bracketed with remarks about Valley Forge. It was forgotten that the men who froze and swore at Valley Forge demanded direct Government aid the moment the Republic was established; and that the c.u.mberland Road, the artery from Fredericksburg, Maryland to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, was built by the Government of the United States for its citizens. Government gave bounties and free land; Government gave enormous sums of money to industry by way of tariff, and gave 200 million acres of land to railroads. There was never a time when the Federal Government was not giving aid, in one form or another, to some of the citizens. The outcry when Government attempted to save _all_ the citizens indicated an incomplete knowledge of our history. In particular, the steady reduction of the price of land was a subsidy to the poor, a chance for them to start again. The country, for all its obedience to financial power, never accepted the theory of inevitable poverty. After the era of normalcy, when the New Deal declared that one-third of a nation was ill clothed and ill fed, the other two-thirds were astonished--and not pleased; the fact that two-thirds had escaped poverty--the almost universal condition of man throughout the world--was not enough for America.

It is an evil thing that we have not conquered poverty or the stupidity and greed which cause poverty; but our distinguishing mark in this field is the expectation of success. We are the first large nation reasonably planning to abolish poverty without also abolishing wealth. The Axis countries may precede us; on the lowest level it is possible that Hitler has already succeeded, for like the Administration in 1931, Hitler can say that no one dies of starvation.

Our intention has always been a little different; it is to make sure that no one lacks the essentials of life, not too narrowly conceived, and that the opportunity to add to these essentials will remain. This may betray a low liking for riches--but it has its good points also.

It has helped to keep us free, which is something.

"_Ye Shall Live in Plenty_"

Wealth--and the prospect of wealth--are positive elements in the American makeup. We differ from large sections of Europe because we take a positive pleasure in working to make money, and because we spend money less daintily, having a tendency to let our women do that for us; this evens things up somewhat, for if men become too engrossed in business, women make the balance good by undervaluing business and spending its proceeds on art, or amenity, or foolishness.

The tradition that we could all become millionaires never had much to do with forming the American character, because no one took it too seriously; the serious thing was that Americans all believed they could prosper. Those who did not, suffered a double odium--they were disgraced because they had failed to make good and they had betrayed the American legend. The legend existed because it corresponded to some of the facts of American life; only it persisted long after the facts had been changed by industrialism and the closing of the frontiers and our coming of age as a financial power had changed the facts. We were heading toward normalcy and the last effort to preserve equality of opportunity was choked off when Wilson had to abandon domestic reform to concentrate on the war.

Social security, a possible eighty dollars a month after the age of sixty-five, are poor subst.i.tutes for a nation of spend-thrifts; we accept the new prospect grimly, because the general standard of living and the expectation of improvement are still high in most parts of America. In spite of setbacks, the general belief is still, as Herbert Croly said it was in 1919, "that Americans are not destined to renounce, but to enjoy".

Normal as enjoyment seems to us, it is not universal. There have been people happier than ours, no doubt, with a fraction of our material goods; religious people, simple races, people born to hardship, have their special kinds of contentment in life. But with minor variations, most Western people, since the industrial revolution, are trying to get a share of the basic pleasures of life; in a great part of the world it is certain that most people will get very little; in America it is a.s.sumed that all will get a great deal.

The struggle for wealth is so ingrained in us that we hate the thought of giving it up; we are submitting reluctantly to rules which are intended to equalize opportunity, if opportunity comes again.

_America Invented Prosperity_