Proclaim Liberty! Part 3

_Losing a Generation_

We have to look into those twenty years before we can create an effective national unity; what we find there is a disaster--but facing it is a tonic to the nerves.

What happened was this: for the first time since the Civil War, progressivism--our basic habit of mind--disappeared from effective politics. The moral fervor of the Abolitionists, the agrarian anger of the Populists, the evangelical fervor of William J. Bryan, the impulsive almost boyish Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt, the studious reformism of Woodrow Wilson, all form a continuity of political idealism; from 1856 to 1920 a party, usually out of office, was bringing the fervor and pa.s.sion of moral righteousness into politics. The pa.s.sion was defeated, but the political value of fighting for morally desirable ends remained high; and in the end the wildest demands of the "anarchists" and enemies of the Republic were satisfied by Congresses under Roosevelt and Wilson and Taft.

This constant battle for progressive principles is one of the most significant elements in American life--and we have unduly neglected it. James Bryce once wrote that there was no basic difference in the philosophy of Democrats and Republicans, and thousands of teachers have repeated it to millions of children; intellectuals have neglected politics because the corruption of local battles has left little to choose between the Vare machine in Philadelphia, the Kelly in Chicago, the Long in Louisiana. For many years, in the general rise of our national wealth, politics seemed relatively unimportant and "vulgar"; and the figure of the idealist and social reformer was always ludicrous, because the reformers almost always came from the land, from the midwest, from the heart of America, not from its centers of financial power and social graces.

So constant--and so critical--is the continuity of reformist politics in America, that the break, in 1920, becomes an event of extreme significance--a symptom to be watched, a.n.a.lysed and compared. Why did America suddenly break with its progressive tradition--and what was the result?

The break occurred because the reformist, comparatively radical party was in power in 1918 when the war ended; all radicalism was discredited by the rise of Bolshevism in Russia, with its implied threat to the sanct.i.ty of property. Disappointment in the outcome of the war, Wilson's maladroit handling of the League of Nations, and his untimely illness, doomed the Democratic Party to impotence and the Republicans to reaction, which is often worse. So there could be no effective, respectable party agitating for reform, for a saner distribution of the pleasures and burdens of citizenship; in the years that followed, certain social gains were kept, some laws were pa.s.sed by the momentum gained in the past generation, but the characteristic events were the Ohio scandals, the lowering of income taxes in the highest brackets, the failure of the Child Labor Amendment, and the heartfelt, complete abandonment of America to normalcy--a condition totally abnormal in American history.

It is interesting to note that the only reformer of this period was the prohibitionist; the word changed meaning; a derisive echo clings to it still. The New Deal hardly ever used the word; and the reformers of the New Deal were called revolutionists because reform was no longer in the common language--or perhaps because reforms delayed _are_ revolutionary when they come.

The disappearance of liberalism as an active political force left a vacuum; into it came, triumphantly, the wholly un-American normalcy of Harding and Coolidge and, in opposition, the wholly un-American radicalism of the Marxists; the Republicans gave us our first touch of true plutocracy and the Reds our most effective outburst of debunking.

Between them they almost ruined the character of an entire generation.

For 150 years the United States had tried to do two things: first, allow as many people as possible to make as much money as possible and, second, prevent the rich from acquiring complete control of the Government. As each new source of power grew, the attempt to limit kept pace with it; under Jackson, it was the banking power that had to be broken; under Lincoln the manufacturing power was somewhat balanced if not checked by the grant of free land; the Interstate Commerce Commission regulated rates and reduced the power of the railroads; the Sherman Act, relatively ineffective, was directed against trusts; changes in tariff laws occasionally gave relief to the victims of "infant industries". Under Theodore Roosevelt the railroads and the coal mine owners were held back and a beginning made in the recognition of organized labor; under Wilson the financial power was seriously compromised by the Federal Reserve Act, and industrial-financial power was balanced, a little, by special legislation for rural banking; under Taft the Income Tax Amendment was pa.s.sed and an effort made to deduct from great fortunes a part of the cost of the Government which protected those fortunes.

_Robbers and Pharisees_

The era of normalcy was unique in one thing, it made the encouragement and protection of great fortunes the first concern of Government.

Nothing else counted. Through its executives and administrators, through cabinet members and those closest to the White House, normalcy first declared that no moral standard, no patriotism, no respect for the dead, should stand in the way of robbing the people of the United States; and so cynically did the rulers of America steal the public funds, that the people returned them to power with hardly a reproach.

The rect.i.tude of Calvin Coolidge made his party respectable; his dry worship of the money power was as complete a betrayal as Harding's. He spoke the dialect of the New England rustic, but he was false to the economy and to the idealism of New England; his whole career was an encouragement to extravagance; he was ignorant or misled or indifferent, for he watched a spiral of inflated values and a fury of gambling, and helped it along; he refused even to admonish the people, although he knew that the mania for speculation was drawing the strength of the country away from its functions. Money was being made--and he respected money; money in large enough quant.i.ties could do no harm. Even after the crash, he could not believe that money had erred. When he was asked to write a daily paragraph of comment on the state of the nation, he was embarra.s.sed; he had been the President of prosperity and he did not want to face a long depression; he asked his friends at Morgan and Company to advise him and they told him that the depression would be over almost immediately, so he began his writings, admitting that "the condition of the country is not good"; but the depression outlasted his writing and his life. By the usual process of immediate history, this singularly loquacious, narrow-minded, ignorant, and financially destructive President stands in public memory as the typical laconic Yankee who preached thrift and probably would have prevented the depression if we had followed his advice.

His successor was a reformed idealist. He had fed the Belgians, looked after the commercial interests of American businessmen, and promised two cars in every American garage. At last plutocracy was to pay off in comfort--but it was too late. Not enough Americans had garages, not enough cars could be bought by the speculators on Wall Street, to make up for the lack of sales among the disinherited.

_No More Ideals_

Normalcy was a debas.e.m.e.nt of the normal instincts of the average American; it deprived us of political morality, not only because it began in corruption, but because it ended with indifference; normalcy destroyed idealism, particularly the simple faith in ideals of the common man, the somewhat uncritical belief that one ought "to have ideals" which intellectuals find so absurd.

In the attack on American idealism, our relations with Europe changed and this reacted corrosively on the great foundations of American life, on freedom of conscience and freedom of worship, on the political equality of man. By the anti-American policy of Harding and Coolidge we lost the great opportunity of resuming communication with Europe; a generation grew up not only hostile to the nations of Europe ("quarrelsome defaulters" who "hired the money") but suspicious of Europeans who had become Americans. The Ku Klux Klan, Ford's and Coughlin's attacks on the Jews, Pelley's attacks on the Jews and the Catholics, and a hundred others--were reflections in domestic life of our withdrawal from foreign affairs.

_Left Deviation_

Parallel to normalcy ran the stream of radicalism, its enemy. Broken from political moorings by the collapse of Wilsonian democracy, progressives and liberals drifted to the left and presently a line was thrown to them from the only established haven of radicalism functioning in the world: Moscow. Not all American liberals tied themselves to the party line; but few found any other attachment. The Progressive Party of LaFollette vanished; the liberal intellectuals were unable to work into the Democratic Party; and, in fact, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected and called his election a victory for liberals, no one was more impressed than the liberals themselves. That the new President was soon to appear as a revolutionary radical was unthinkable.

What had happened to the constant American liberal tradition? What had rendered sterile the ancient fruitful heritage of American radicalism?

The apoplectic committees investigating Bolshevism cried aloud that Moscow gold had bought out the American intellectuals, which was a silly lie; but why was Moscow gold more potent than American gold, of which much more was available? (American gold, it turned out, was busy trying to subsidize college professors and ministers of G.o.d, to propagandize against public ownership of public utilities.)

It was not the gold of Moscow, but the iron determination of Lenin that captivated the American radical. At home the last trace of idealism was being destroyed and in Russia a new world was being created with all the harshness and elation of a revolutionary action.

The direction in America was, officially, _back_ (to normalcy; against the American pioneering tradition of forward movement); the direction of Russia was forward--to the unknown.

Few reached Moscow; few were acceptable to the stern hierarchy of Communism; but all American liberal intellectuals were drawn out of their natural orbit by the attraction of the new economic planet. Most of them remained suspended between the two worlds--and in that unhappy state they tried to solace their homelessness by jeering at their homeland.

The American radical's turn against America was a new thing, as new as the normalcy which provoked it. In the 19th century a few painters and poets had fled from America; the politicians and critics stayed home, to fight. They fought for America, pa.s.sionately convinced that it was worth fighting for. The Populists and later the muck-rakers and finally the Progressives were violent, opinionated, cross-grained and their "lunatic fringe" was dangerous, but none of them despised America; they despised only the betrayers of America: the railroads, the bankers, the oil monopolies, the speculators in Wall Street, the corrupt men in City Hall, the bribed men in Congress. It was not the time for nice judgments, not the moment to distinguish between a plunderer like Gould and a builder like Hill. What Rockefeller had done to _save_ the oil industry wasn't seen until long after he had destroyed a dozen compet.i.tors; what the trusts were doing to prepare for large-scale production and ma.s.s-distribution wasn't to be discovered until the trusts themselves were a memory.

So the radicals of 1880 and 1900 were unfair; they usually wanted easy money in a country which was getting rich with hard money; they wanted the farmer to rule as he had ruled in Jefferson's day, but they did not want to give up the cotton gin and the machine loom and the reaper and the railroads which were transferring power to the city and the factory. The radical seemed often to be as selfish and greedy as the fat Republicans who sat in Congress and in bankers' offices and juggled rates of interest and pa.s.sed tariffs to make industrial infants fat also.

Yet the liberal-radical until 1920 was a man who loved America and wanted only that America should fulfill its destiny, should be always more American, giving our special quality of freedom and prosperity to more and more men; whereas the radical-critic of the 1920's wept because America was too American and wanted her to become as like Europe as we could--and not a living Europe, of course. The Europe held before America as an ideal in the 1920's was the Europe which died in the first World War.

_Working Both Sides of the Street_

The radical attack on America completed the destruction begun by the plutocrats; they played into each other's hands like crooked gamblers.

The plutocrat and the politician made patriotism sickening by using it to blackjack those who saw skullduggery corrupting our country; and the radical critic made patriotism ridiculous by belittling the nation's past and denying its future. The politicians supported committees to make lists of heretics, and tried to deny civil rights to citizens in minority parties; and the intellectuals pretended that the Ku Klux Klan was the true spirit of America; the plutocrats and the politicians murdered Sacco and Vanzetti and the radicals acted as if no man had ever suffered for his beliefs in France or England or Germany or Spain. The debas.e.m.e.nt of American life was rapid and ugly--and instead of fighting, the radical critic rejoiced, because he did not care for the America that had been; it was not Communist and not civilized in the European sense--why bother to save it?

In 1936 I summed up years of disagreement with the fashionable att.i.tude under the (borrowed) caption, _The Treason of the Intellectuals_. Looking back at it now, I find a conspicuous error--I failed to bracket the politician with the debunker, the plutocrat with the radical. I was for the average man against both his enemies, but I did not see how the reactionary and the radical were combining to create a vacuum in American social and political life.

The people of the United States were--and are--"materialistic" and in love with the things that money can buy; but the ascendancy of speculative wealth in the 1920's was not altogether satisfying. More people than ever before gambled in Wall Street; but considering the stakes, the steady upswing of prices, the constant stories of success, the open boasting of our great industrialists and the benign, tacit a.s.sent of Calvin Coolidge--considering all these, the miracle is that eight out of ten capable citizens did not speculate. The chance to make money was part of the American tradition--for which millions of Europeans had come to America; but it did not fulfill all the requirements of a purpose in life. It wasn't good enough by any standard; it allowed a cla.s.s of disinherited to rise in America, a fatal error because our wealth depended on customers and the penniless are not good risks; and the riches-system could not protect itself from external shock. Europe began to shiver with premonitions of disaster, a bank in Austria fell, and America loyally responded with the greatest panic in history.

Long before the money-ideal crashed, it had been rejected by some of the American people. It would have been scorned by more if anything else had been offered to them, anything remotely acceptable to them.

The longest tradition of American life was cooperative effort; the great traditions of hardship and experiment and progressive liberalism and the mingling of races and the creation of free communities--all these were still in our blood. But when the plutocrat and politician tried to destroy them by neglect or persecution, the intellectual did not rebuild them; he told us that the traditions had always been a false front for greed, and asked us to be content with laughing at the past; or he told us that nothing was good in the future of the world except the Russian version of Karl Marx.

_We L'arn the Furriner_

The crushing double-grip of the anti-Americans of the Right and Left was most effective in foreign affairs. Normalcy wanted back the money which Europe had hired, as President Coolidge said; and normalcy wanted to hear nothing more of Europe. At the same time the radical was basically internationalist; the true believer in Lenin was also revolutionist. Sheer isolationism didn't work; we were constantly on the side lines of the League of Nations; we stepped in to save Germany and presumably to help all Europe; we trooped to the deathbed of old Europe (with the exchange in our favor); the sickness made us uneasy at last--but we could not break from isolation because normalcy and radicalism together had destroyed the common, and acceptable, American basis of friendly independent relations with Europe.

Internationalism, with a communistic tinge, was equally unthinkable; and presently we began to think that a treaty of commerce might somehow be "internationalist". Europe, meanwhile, broke into three parts, fascist, communist, and the victims of both, the helpless ones we called our friends, the "democracies". By 1932 economics had destroyed isolation and Hitler began to destroy internationalism. The American people had for twelve years shrunk from both, now found that it had no sh.e.l.l to shrink into--America had repudiated all duty to the world; it had tried to make the League of Nations unnecessary by a few pacts and treaties; it had flared up over China and, rebuffed by England, sunk back into apathy. It was uninformed, without habit or tradition or will in foreign affairs; without any ideal around which all the people of America could gather; and with nothing to do in the world.

The New Deal repaired some of the destruction of normalcy, but it could not allay the mischief and unite the country at the same time.

Loyalty to the Gold Standard and devotion to the principle of letting people starve were both abandoned; the shaming moral weakness of the Hoover regime, the resignation to defeat, were overcome. The direct beneficiaries of the New Deal were comparatively few; the indirect were the middle and upper income cla.s.ses. They saw President Roosevelt save them from a dizzy drop into revolution; a few years later the danger was over, and when the rich and well-born saw that the President was not going to turn conservative, they regretted being saved--thinking that perhaps the revolution of 1933 might have turned fascist, and in their favor.

These were extremists. The superior common man was not a reactionary when he voted for Landon or Willkie. After the Blue Eagle was killed by the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court was saved by resignations, the average American could accept ninety percent of the objectives of FDR--and ask only for superior efficiency from the Republican Party.

The newspapers of the country were violent; Martin Dies was violent; John L. Lewis was violent; but labor and radicals and people were _not_ violent. We were approaching some unity of belief in America's national future when the war broke out.

_Quarterback vs. Pedagogue_

The New Deal had no visible foreign policy, but President Roosevelt made up for it by having several, one developing out of the other, each a natural consequence of events abroad in relation to the state of public opinion at home. To a great extent this policy was based on the President's dislike of tyranny and his love for the Navy, a fortunate combination for the people of the United States, for it allied us with the Atlantic democracies and compeled us to face the prospect of war in the Pacific. So far as we were at all prepared to defend ourselves, we are indebted to the President's recognition of our position as a naval power requiring a friend at the farther end of each ocean, Britain in the Atlantic, Russia and China in the Pacific.

The President's policy, singularly correct, was not the people's policy. It was not part of the New Deal; it was not tied into domestic policies; it subsisted in a dreadful void. Mr. Roosevelt, who once called himself the nation's quarterback, never had the patient almost pedantic desire to teach the American people which was so useful to Wilson. The notes to Germany, scorned at the time, were an education in international law for the American people; by 1917 the people were aware of the war and beginning to discover a part in it for themselves. Mr. Roosevelt's methods were more spectacular, but not as patient, so that he sometimes alienated people, and he faced a wilier enemy at home; Wilson overcame ignorance and Roosevelt had to overcome deliberate malice, organized hostility to our system of government, and a true pacificism which has always been native to America. Racial, religious, and national prejudices were all practised upon to prevent the creation of unity; it was not remarked at the time that cla.s.s prejudice did not arise.

The defect of Roosevelt's method led to this: the American people did not understand their own position in the world. The President had appealed to their moral sense when he asked for a quarantine of the aggressors; he appealed to fear when he cited the distances between Dakar and Des Moines; but he had no unified body of opinion behind him. The Republican Party might easily have nominated an isolationist as a matter of politics if not of principle; and it was a stroke of luck that politics (not international principles) gave the opportunity to Wendell Willkie. Yet the boldest move made by Mr. Roosevelt, the exchange of destroyers for bases, had to be an accomplished fact, and a good bargain, before it could be announced. Even Mr. Willkie's refusal to play politics with the fate of Britain did not a.s.sure the President of a country willing to understand its new dangers and its new opportunities.

Nothing in the past twenty years had prepared America; and the isolationists picked up the weapons of both the plutocrat and the debunker to prevent our understanding our function in a fascist world.

The grossest appeal to self-interest and the most cynical imputation of self-interest in others, went together. There were faithful pacifists who disliked armaments and disliked the sale of armaments even more; but there were also those who wanted the profit of selling without the risk; there were the alarming fellow travelers who wished America to be destroyed until they discovered the USSR wanted American guns. There were snide businessmen who wanted Hitler even more than they wanted peace, and a mob, united by nothing--except a pa.s.sion for the cruelty and the success of the n.a.z.is.

The spectacle of America arguing war in 1941 was painful and ludicrous and one sensed changes ahead; but it had one great redeeming quality, it was in our tradition of public discussion and a vast deal of the discussion was honest and fair.

The war did not change Americans over night. The argument had not united us; but in the first days we dared not admit this; we began a dangerous game of hypnotizing ourselves.