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 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA
 
 LIBERALISM 
 IN AMERICA 
 
 Its Origin, Its Temporary Collapse, 
 Its Future 
 
 HAROLD STEARNS 
 
 BONT AND LIVERIGHT, INC. 
 
 Publishers New York
 
 copysight, 1919 
 
 By 
 
 boxi & llverigiit, ixc, 
 
 Printed in the U. 8. A.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 If I were reviewing this book — and in the last six 
 years I have reviewed a great many — I should be in- 
 clined to say that the volume was slightly uneven in tone, 
 and I should probably point out that it was somewhat 
 unfortunate that the first chapter of all others should be 
 the least unified in form and the least effective in struc- 
 ture. Then, after a paragraph or two about the stimu- 
 lating or pernicious quality of the arguments and opin- 
 ions (according to my sympathies), I should conclude 
 with an exhibition of my superiority to the author by 
 pointing out that no definite remedies were advanced for 
 the curing of the evils exposed. In any case, I am in- 
 clined to think I should call the point of view unconven- 
 tional and I am not at all sure I should not make use of 
 that extremely serviceable adjective *' provocative." (In 
 my early days as a reviewer I employed this method with 
 great success, at any rate as far as my editors were con- 
 cerned — I cannot speak for the authors.) 
 
 Now as a matter of fact such a review would strike me 
 as, on the whole, reasonably fair. The first chapter 
 wanders a trifle because the definition of liberalism which 
 I make — of a tolerant and rationalistic temper, best ex- 
 pressed, perhaps, by Voltaire's letter to Helvetius, ''I 
 wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to 
 the death your right to say it" — is so simple that I 
 prefer to a merely verbal discussion an attempt to put 
 concretely what this attitude implies in life. For that 
 reason I chose the fact of conscription in modern States, 
 
 y
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 first, because it is the clearest case in our industrial 
 civilization of the exercise of unwarranted power, and 
 second, because it is clouded in sentimentalism and 
 dogma that make it difficult for most of us to see our way 
 clear. On the Continent, for instance, where almost two 
 generations have been bred to accept it as inevitably as 
 one accepts good or bad weather, the movement towards 
 what is loosely called ''decentralization," which is only 
 a polite name for the ultimate destruction of the national 
 State in terms of a number of smaller local independent 
 units, is much stronger than today with us. They under- 
 stand better the evils of Federal authority ; the French, 
 for instance, are incurable and charming frondistes even 
 in matters of religion. But both in England and Amer- 
 ica, with our traditions of individual liberty and of a 
 laissez-faire government, which we define as best when it 
 governs least, the phenomenon of conscription is com- 
 paratively recent. (In the Civil War, of course, we did 
 not have conscription in the modern sense; practically 
 anyone could buy his way out; and the beginnings of 
 many of our modern fortunes are said to have originated 
 with those who did buy their way out and then laid the 
 foundations of their wealth by selling shoddy materials 
 to Union soldiers.) We are naive about it, and we actu- 
 ally think that to oppose conscription is somehow neces- 
 sarily unpatriotic, even when we do so on the grounds of 
 ultimate national, not to speak of international, ad- 
 vantage. That such opposition may be to our national 
 advantage is a possibility our editors do not seem even 
 imaginatively to have envisaged, and in the first chapter 
 I make the attempt to show that such a possibility can be 
 rationally and respectably advanced. The conflict be- 
 tween liberalism and conscription goes very deep, but we 
 shall never understand it if we put it in terms of senti-
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 mentalism versus hard reality; the conflict is really the 
 old one in new form of authority versus freedom, and 
 although freedom has its disadvantages, in the long run 
 it seems to work better for the general happiness of 
 mankind. 
 
 In the larger sense the book is one more appeal to 
 reason, and, in a time like the present of actual and 
 impending strife of all kinds, industrial, national, and 
 class, any contribution which may by ever so little miti- 
 gate the harshness and violence of that strife is worth 
 making. When I survey our America of the present and 
 immediate future, indeed, I am frankly frightened. Con- 
 sider: we have a reactionary and tory class, secure in 
 most of its exploitative privileges and in control of the 
 government, the press, and the great balance of unthink- 
 ing public opinion, determined to hold on at all costs. 
 (The other day a Wall Street broker calmly told me he 
 *' welcomed" the epidemic of strikes; let them all come 
 immediately, was his attitude, for we can starve the 
 workers out now and scotch the labor movement for a 
 generation.) We have an incipient militarism and our 
 propaganda for intervention in Mexico is very open. 
 Against this we have a trade union movement and 
 agrarian movement, still not united, but exasperated and 
 determined — a situation which practically invites eco- 
 nomic conflict on the worst possible level. Even on what 
 we might call the amenity side of life our Puritanism has 
 become intolerant and harsh. Like most sensible people 
 I regard prohibition as an outrage and a direct invitation 
 to revolution; after all, no one perhaps would have ob- 
 jected very strenuously to the prohibition of spirits, 
 although it is plainly silly to tell a grown man that he 
 must have a chocolate soda before his meals instead of a 
 cocktail. As Mr. Robert Dell says in his book on France,
 
 viii PEEFACE 
 
 ^ine gladdens the heart of man, spirits make him drunk, 
 and too much beer is likely to make him dull. We could 
 have been content with wine and probably better off 
 with it, but to make prohibition absolute is merely to 
 invite civic corruption of all kinds and to exasperate the 
 workingman who knows perfectly well that the cellars of 
 the wealthy are stocked with liquor. Yet after all, this is 
 only a minor exasperation, although it will tend to drive 
 away our imaginative and intelligent young men to 
 countries like France where they have not yet forgot 
 what living means, and who will hardly be content with 
 the American occupations of making money and playing 
 the gramophone before the perfectly correct jeune fille 
 who reads Harold McGrath. Overshadowing all is the 
 impending race conflict between the black and the white 
 which we diligently refuse to face — of course the ex- 
 ploiters of labor will try to divert the attention of 
 workers from their real enemies, the ruthless capitalists, 
 by obscuring the issue in terms of race hatred. The 
 identification of all agitators and radicals with ''for- 
 eigners" and '* un- Americans " today is only a precursor 
 of what is coming : very soon anyone who advocates even 
 the mildest form of social revolution will be known as a 
 "nigger-lover," as Eepublicans are called in the South 
 even to this day. 
 
 Yet there are one or two things in which we are fortu- 
 nate. "We hate servility and rank, and at heart, I think, 
 America hates militarism in all its forms, whatever may 
 be the drive of metropolitan newspapers for universal 
 service. Further, while we have a plutocracy the census 
 shows us it is a comparatively small one : we are not a 
 nation of small property holders such as France, where 
 small property has made the bourgeoisie — graduated 
 usually as small rentiers from the thrifty peasant class —
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 one of the most reactionary and unpopular (I mean with 
 the French proletariat) and unimaginative classes in 
 France, a class which, with Government servants, stifles 
 business initiative and has shown the harm that can be 
 wrought to a great people by inculcating the virtues of 
 making a httle money on which to hve without working. 
 We still gamble and fortunes are made and won in a week 
 
 — something much healthier than the ambition merely for 
 security and stagnation, for money should be spent as it 
 is made in any normal scheme of hfe and man should 
 work. But from the point of view of social revolution 
 we are in a more plastic and mobile position than even 
 France, for all her suffering under the war ; we have not 
 an intrenched bourgeoisie to make a bloody revolution 
 inevitable (as it is in France) and our plutocrats are so 
 few that they might be easily handled. I mean, in a 
 word, we have a chance to get through our social revolu- 
 tion peaceably and without \4olcnce; a slim chance, but 
 still a fighting one, for liberalism. 
 
 For the choices before us all are few. We can go 
 back to a more narrow nationahsm than before the war 
 
 — for the miscalled League of Nations is an aggressive 
 alliance to exploit the weak peoples of the world by three 
 or four strong powers and will endure in some form and 
 for some time (probably with Germany as an ally, if it 
 can be managed without arousing popular enmity) by 
 virtue of the spoils it offers — finally inducing another 
 war between Western Powers (including, of course, 
 Japan) which may well mean the suicide of our civiliza- 
 tion as we have known it. We can make the League a 
 "reahty," thus inducing a great race war between the 
 East and the West, in which the East, after it has been 
 properly militarized under our tutelage, will in all likeli- 
 hood exterminate us, for it has about five centuries of
 
 X PREFACE 
 
 oppression at our hands to pay off. Or finally, we can 
 have a social revolution in the Western Powers and join 
 hands in a real economic and industrial and political 
 brotherhood with the races of the world which differ with 
 us in color and civilization. 
 
 My own choice, under the circumstances which the war 
 has precipitated, is consequently for social revolution, if 
 only in self-defense, for I want to see Anglo-Saxon civiliz- 
 ation endure. But I want to see it a peaceable revolution ; 
 has not this younger generation had enough violence and 
 bloodshed"? Must our children also have to go through that 
 hell which so many of my friends went through (and for 
 some of whom I mourn) mainly to make it impossible 
 again? It is in the hope that this book may help a little 
 in making us all more tolerant and less inclined to vio- 
 lence that I offer it to my readers. 
 
 Haeold E. Steaens. 
 New York, November, 1919.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGB 
 
 Preface v 
 
 CHAPTEE 
 
 I. What Liberalism Is 3 
 
 II. The English Heritage and the American De- 
 velopment 32 
 
 III. American Liberalism to the Eve of the War . 55 
 
 IV. The Emotional Break-Down Before War- 
 
 Hysteria 80 
 
 V. Timidity and the Seductions of Office or 
 
 Career 102 
 
 VI. President Wilson: The Technique of Liberal 
 
 Failure 124 
 
 VII. Political Symbolism and the Mob 148 
 
 VIII. Debacle of Pragmatism 173 
 
 Note to Chapter Eight 190 
 
 IX. Leadership 192 
 
 X. The Future 212 
 
 Bibliography 233 
 
 V 
 
 XI
 
 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA
 
 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 
 
 II/HAT seems the most stifling thing about the pres- 
 ent-day world! Surely not its ignorance, nor its 
 materialism, nor its lack of aesthetic color, nor its eco- 
 nomic injustice. We all realize the evils of these quali- 
 ties, yet when we try to sum up the one quality which 
 appears most characteristic of what oppresses us in our 
 environment today, we are not likely to emphasize any 
 one of these evils. Instead, it seems to me, we are likely 
 to put our attention on a more intangible evil, the con- 
 temporary strident harshness of temper, the almost 
 fanatical intolerance of opposing leadership and doctrine. 
 For indubitably the worst evils of the war have been 
 the spiritual evils. We in America are in a better posi- 
 tion than other countries to realize this, because we have 
 suffered less than any but a few of the minor belligerent 
 powers — almost the entirety of our young manhood has 
 been returned to us. In fact, it sometimes seems as if 
 we had richly paid for our material good fortune in the 
 war by a progressive spiritual degeneration. Respect for 
 the individual has almost vanished; and Nietszche him- 
 self would be astonished at the transvaluation of values 
 in the world since 1914 which has made Power about the 
 only thing to be respected — and then not so much re- 
 spected as feared. 
 
 3
 
 4 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 But this mood, it may be said, has always been the 
 aftermath of extensive wars. To be sure it has : I am only 
 emphasizing that it is no less the aftermath of this war. 
 Indeed, one may legitimately ask if any war in history 
 ever produced this mood on so wide a scale. Probably 
 not: no war in history has touched intimately so many 
 people nor cast its shadow over so large a section of the 
 habitable globe. No war in history has been aided in its 
 course by such far-reaching and lying propagandas as 
 this war has been cursed with. No war in history has 
 witnessed such ruthless mobilization of power or such 
 ruthless crushing of individual ambitions for the pur- 
 poses — good or bad — of that bloodless Moloch, the 
 State. No war in history has destroyed the fabric of a 
 richer civilization than that civilization of Europe which 
 we have Balkanized by the war and reduced to despair 
 by the peace. No war in history has witnessed a more 
 pitiful degradation of public life and public men than has 
 this, nor a quicker growth on the part of the common 
 man of skepticism of all orderly processes of reform or 
 mere political action by which hitherto he usually hoped 
 to rescue himself from his wretched lot. 
 
 Exaggeration? Look at the world as it is today. In 
 Hungary and Russia men have been shot for refusing to 
 fight in a conscript Red Army. In America today men 
 have been sent to prison for ten and twenty years for 
 expressing sharp dissent at our present social and po- 
 litical order and if many of our so-called patriotic organ- 
 izations had had their way, these men would have been 
 hanged. In Soviet countries it is a serious crime for a 
 man to drink a glass of wine; in America it wall also 
 shortly become a serious crime to do the same thing. In 
 Soviet countries there is in fact no freedom of the press 
 and no pretense that there is. In America today there is
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 5 
 
 in fact no freedom of the press and we only make tlie 
 matter worse by pretending that there is. We pretended 
 — ah, how much we did pretend! — that the war was 
 fought, among other things, for the rights of small na- 
 tionalities, yet today in Korea and in Ireland and Egj'pt, 
 no less than in Bosnia and Alsace-Lorraine before the 
 war, men are imprisoned and vilely used when they ex- 
 press any strong nationalistic sentiment. At least in the 
 Middle Ages the Church might plausibly argue that it 
 mattered very much whether or not a man believed in 
 the mystery of trans-substantiation, and that if he denied 
 this mystery he ought to be drawn and quartered for the 
 good of the community and the glory of God. There was 
 a kind of dignity in being tortured for such a skepticism. 
 But what shall we say of a ci\dlization that imprisons 
 and tortures a woman — I am thinking of Mrs. Kate 
 O'Hare — because she says that the few ought not to 
 make money out of the misery of the many? 
 
 Everywhere we turn it is the same story — coercion, 
 force, force to the utmost without stint or limit. We do 
 not have to draw upon Lenin's or Bela Kun's frank dic- 
 tatorships of the proletariat for examples. Does Ger- 
 many hesitate to sign because the treaty revolts what 
 decent conscience the nation still possesses? Then she 
 win be forced to sign — and she is forced. Do we in 
 America abuse and deny fundamental rights to our own 
 subject race, the negro? Then he retorts with violence 
 and threats of violence. Does the English Government 
 palter over accepting the nationalization scheme advo- 
 cated in the Sankey mine report? Then the miners re- 
 tort that they will force acceptance by direct action. The 
 leaders of our domestic quarrels have learned a lesson 
 from the diplomats who conduct our foreign quarrels. It 
 is a simple lesson — if you cannot get what you want by
 
 6 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 peaceable persuasion, then get it by force, provided only 
 you have the power. Let no consideration of justice or 
 mercy for the weak restrain you. If you do not like the 
 form of government in Russia, then overthrow it by 
 starving the women and children of Russia who were no 
 party to its creation. If you do not like the wages de- 
 cision of a board of arbitration in an industrial dispute, 
 then go back on your agreements and call a strike. Any 
 end justifies the means, whether the end be prestige or 
 booty or even ideals. Granted the power, the accepted 
 1919 method of convincing your opponent is by cram- 
 ming your conviction down his throat. Political idealists, 
 diplomats, labor leaders, prohibitionists, reformers, revo- 
 lutionists, are largely of one kidney today : they are not 
 interested in rational persuasion and voluntary accept- 
 ance, they are interested only in their own propaganda 
 and the power to make you adopt it. Very few have time 
 to care about humanity as a whole; even less care about 
 the individual as such. Everyone is interested in his 
 sect, his class, his party, his particular creed. And every- 
 one is determined that the rest of the world shall also 
 be interested in it. These clashes of fanaticism, domi- 
 nated by the philosophy of power which the war and, 
 even more, the ungenerous peace that followed it have 
 done so much to make world-popular, are already becom- 
 ing ominous. That is what I meant when I said that the 
 mood which this war has left for its aftermath is a mood 
 of intolerance. I believe that no one can examine even 
 a few of the more salient facts of contemporary social 
 life without coming to the conclusion that it is a very 
 dangerous mood from which to expect the creation of a 
 stable and joyous civilization. 
 
 That is, no one can examine the salient facts and be 
 pleased, except the radicals. '*To be sure," they retort,
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 7 
 
 ''the picture which you draw of the actual situation is 
 fairly accurate. But there is another side to it. What 
 you call fanaticism we can as truly call creative energy. 
 The present clash of powers is merely the expression, 
 and a happy expression, of the common man's discontent 
 the world over with mere talk. He wants action; he 
 wants results. He is tired of theory, tired of the 
 'tolerance' which may he an ideal intellectual virtue but 
 which in cold fact puts no food in his stomach, gives him 
 no better clothes, and endows him with no more leisure 
 wherein to enjoy life. The war has arrayed class against 
 class and in an age of revolutionary turmoil everybody 
 has to take sides." 
 
 '*He (the Uberal)," writes that incisive and able revo- 
 lutionist, Mr. Max Eastman, ^' will have diflSculty finding 
 any place or any function whatever, for the depth and 
 force of the conflict compel all men to abandon them- 
 selves to one side or the other completely. They can 
 no longer exercise judgment between two parties, because 
 the underlying standards of judgment are in question. 
 The issue is no longer as to the weights of evidence, but 
 as to the acceptabiUty of the scales. This, I think, is 
 what we see indicated in the British elections — the dawn 
 of a revolutionary age, the forcing itself forward of a 
 conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as 
 absolute, the temporary twilight of liberalism."* 
 
 * The Liberator (New York), Volume 1, number 12, pages 5 and 6, 
 Mr. Eastman gives this interesting definition of liberalism : " To be liberal 
 is to be able to enter with one^ imagination into any point-of-view that 
 is proposed. This is a dangerous gift, but it is not fatal if one has the 
 courage to stand by one's own point-of-view to the end — if one has the 
 courage to suffer a personal defeat. A true liberal is one who when he 
 repudiates an idea does so as one who Tcnoxos what it is to believe it. And 
 when he accepts an idea, he liiows wJutt it is to reject it. He knows by a 
 sympathetic intellectual experience — he is to that extent gifted with 
 imagination and curiosity." Just how this attitude is incompatible with 
 taking sides m a^ion in a revolutionary or any other age Mr. Eastman 
 does not explain. The liberal constantly re-assesses and re-interprets events
 
 8 LIBEKALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 Later on I shall attempt to answer this argument of 
 the revolutionists, for I consider it an argument of in- 
 dubitable force. Furthermore, the discussion will lead 
 us to the central core of the ethical and philosophical 
 implications of the doctrine which we call liberalism, and 
 I prefer to give a preliminary definition of what I mean 
 by that doctrine before attempting to meet the attacks 
 upon it. Only, in passing, I should like to point out that 
 in his attitude — certainly an understandable one, as a 
 consequence of war experience, and in many ways a 
 creditable one — Mr. Eastman lets himself be beguiled 
 into a curious ideology for a so ordinarily realistic 
 thinker. A doctrine which is good only for a Utopian 
 future is not good for much; a doctrine which cannot 
 meet contemporary needs and throw light upon contem- 
 porary problems is hardly a doctrine to interest a gen- 
 eration which is not content with rendering unto Caesar 
 the things that are Caesar's. Furthermore, is it his- 
 torically accurate to call this a peculiarly revolutionary 
 age? In one sense, all ages are revolutionary, all ages 
 are ages of transition. Was the period following the 
 Peleponnesian War any less so? the period of the Ref- 
 ormation? the period following 1789 in France or 1840 
 in Germany? Only he can say so who believes that all 
 essential conflict is economic conflict and that all the sig- 
 nificant episodes of history are merely by-products of 
 economic forces — and I do not think in his heart 
 Mr. Eastman believes that. 
 
 on an intelligent estimate of the facts and with reference to a central 
 point of view and to a central conviction — the conviction of the supremacy 
 of human personality. But this does not prevent him from making decisions 
 and acting upon them. Action in life must always be taken upon incom- 
 plete evidence. Is not Mr. Eastman thinking the ennui of too much culture; 
 of the man who ever hesitates to move because he has the imagination to 
 perceive that any direction is equally attractive? We have to take our 
 chances on beliefs and convictions, just as we do on the result of our actions.
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 9 
 
 I have ventured, however, to call this in some respects 
 a creditable attitude on Mr. Eastman's part. By that 
 I mean only that it is creditable to grow impatient with 
 the hypocrisy of the reactionaries who preach a lip- 
 service to liberal ideals, w^ho bewail class war, yet who 
 themselves violate the elementary liberal principles they 
 preach and who themselves practice class war on a scale 
 and with a brutality which make the terrors of revolution 
 literally seem Sunday-schoolish. If liberals will preach 
 justice and fairness and become easy tools to the capital- 
 istic side of the present class wars, can they complain 
 that revolutionists prefer to be more frank and to de- 
 scribe war, their own class war, as it is, without justice, 
 without fairness, without mercy? In a choice between 
 hypocrisy and brutal honesty even Voltaire would choose 
 the latter. **You have taught us in the war," screams 
 Trotsky in one of his impassioned bits of vindictive elo- 
 quence, ''that the ultimate 'law and order' you know 
 finds expression in the rotten carcasses of the battlefield 
 and in the murder of men who had no quarrel "^vith other 
 men. Can you expect us now to respect the tenets and 
 shibboleths you preach when you yourself have taught 
 us what they mean?"* 
 
 * I am not here quoting any exact sentences of Trotsky, but am instead 
 attempting to give t^ie spirit of his last chapter, "The Revolutionary 
 Epoch," in The Bolsheviki And World Peace, Boni and Liveright, 1918. 
 On pages 225 and 226 Trotsky writes: "The hammer is wrenched out of 
 the worker's hand and a gun put into his hand instead. And the worker, 
 who has been tied down by the machinery of capitalist system, is suddenly 
 torn from his usual setting and taught to place the aims of society above 
 happiness at home and even life itself. . . . With the weapon in his hand 
 that he himself has forged, the worker is put in a position where the political 
 destiny of the state is dire;tly dependent upon him. Those who exploited 
 and scorned him in normal times, flatter him now and toady to him. At the 
 same time he comes into intimate contact with the cannon, which Lassalle 
 calls one of the most important ingredients of all constitutions. He 
 crosses the border, takes part in forceful requisitions, and helps in the 
 passing of cities from one party to another." A pretty example, Trotsky 
 hints, for the proletariat to imitate in its own class struggle in times of 
 ' ' peace ' ' I
 
 10 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 Yet, although the reaction is a natural one from the 
 excesses of the war, although an impartial observer will 
 admit that there is vitality in the very passionateness of 
 present-day partisanship and intolerance and will prob- 
 ably agree with Bertrand Russell that ''there is more 
 hope for a nation which has these impulses (impulses 
 which lead to war) than for a nation in which all impulse 
 is dead,"* yet it must be stated that the above-described 
 mood of intolerance is, from the liberal point of view, 
 repellant. The true liberal is skeptical of coercion,t no 
 matter for what purpose it is used; he doubts the per- 
 manency of any results achieved by it — even those 
 events in history, wars and rebellions, which are sup- 
 posed to mark progress in human freedom he would tend 
 to regard as events which contributed nothing to that 
 progress, that the progress came not so much because of 
 as in spite of them. I know this would be a difficult 
 thesis to defend and that many historians of the con- 
 ventional type would be skeptical of it, yet there has 
 been so much persistent mis-reading of history and so 
 much false idealization of past belligerency that I ven- 
 ture to say that no liberal today can be much impressed 
 at the stock of historical arguments. Certainly if we 
 confine our attention to the present war, it is difficult to 
 see exactly what liberal purposes have been accomplished 
 by the resort to arms — indeed when we survey the plight 
 of the world today we are tempted to agree with Anatole 
 France's epigram that a war for ideals is infinitely worse 
 than a war for material gain because in the first instance 
 one cannot count the cost. 
 
 The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of com- 
 
 *Why Men Fight. By Bertrand Russell. The Century Co., 1917. 
 Page 17. 
 
 t Not necessarily of force. Roughly, force may be employed either 
 aggressively or defensively — in the first case, it is coercion.
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 11 
 
 pulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual 
 and his conscience and reason which the employment of 
 coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in 
 the individual — faith that he can be persuaded by ra- 
 tional means to beliefs compatible with social good. 
 
 ''Liberalism," writes that able author, Mr. L. T. Hob- 
 house, ''is the behef that society can safely be founded 
 on this self-directing power of personality, that it is only 
 on this foundation that a true community can be built, 
 and that so established its foundations are so deep and 
 so wide that there is no limit that we can place to the 
 extent of the building. Liberty then becomes not so 
 much a right of the individual as a necessity of society. 
 It rests not on the claim of A to be let alone by B, but 
 on the duty of B to treat A as a rational being. It is not 
 right to let crime alone or to let error alone, but it is 
 imperative to treat the criminal or the mistaken or the 
 ignorant as beings capable of right and truth, and to lead 
 them on instead of merely beating them down. The rule 
 of Hberty is just the application of rational method. It 
 is the opening of the door to the appeal of reason, of 
 imagination, of social feeling; and except through the 
 response to this appeal there is no assured progress of 
 society.'' (Italics mine.)* 
 
 This insistence upon freedom as the core of liberalism 
 makes clear why no liberal can sanction conscription as 
 a national policy: perhaps the most discouraging thing 
 about the reaction of this country to its entrance into the 
 war was the complete apathy of the intellectual and so- 
 called liberal classes towards what President Wilson 
 described, with his usual exquisite and unconscious irony, 
 as "in no sense a conscription of the unwilling." The 
 
 * Liberalism. By L. T. Hobhouse, Holt. Number 16 in The Home 
 University Library. Page 123.
 
 12 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 reaction of a man towards this policy supplied an acid 
 test as to whether or not there was any real liberalism 
 in him or, indeed, as to whether or not he even under- 
 stood what the word meant — just as it is an acid test 
 today and can be applied to those radicals who sing 
 praises of the red, proletarian (but conscript) army. I 
 do not believe that anything in the war was more un- 
 pleasant in its hypocrisy than the argument for con- 
 scription — usually, of course, by people who stood little 
 chance of being drafted into the ranks themselves — on 
 the ground that the moral and social compulsions of a 
 recruiting campaign were more obnoxious and distress- 
 ing than the equitable methods of the draft lists. Of 
 course the point was that nothing really tested the met- 
 tle of a man's beliefs and convictions better than just 
 such a campaign. The argument was in fact nothing 
 but an instinctive act of self-protection on the part of 
 those whose social position and political influence made 
 them feel secure in taking their chances of exemption in 
 the draft or of easy officer berths and who dreaded 
 a campaign after the fashion of England's ''White 
 Feather" campaign.* 
 
 * In an article in The New Bepnhlie for July 14, 1917, Mr. John Dewey 
 shows what an able and alert mind can do when it tackles a problem 
 from the wrong end. Mr. Dewey calls his article "Conscience and Com- 
 pulsion," and it is guilty of a serious intellectual weakness which Professor 
 Dewey ought himself to be the first to recognize, namely, being unfair to 
 one's opponent. A man of Professor Dewey's calibre, under ordinary 
 circumstances instead of under the pressure of the nation-wide war senti- 
 ment, would have taken the strong instead of the weak side of his op- 
 ponent's case. The type of conscience-ridden "idealistic" youth whom 
 he describes did exist and in many respects was contemptible. Mr. Dewey 
 says: "The evangelical Protestant tradition has fostered the tendency 
 to locate morals in personal feelings instead of in control of social situa- 
 tions, and our legal tradition has bred the habit of attaching feelings to 
 fixed rules and injunctions instead of to social conditions and consequences 
 of action as these are revealed to the scrutiny of intelligence — giving 
 weight to considerations of the order now most neglected" and taking 
 "the problem out of the emotional urgencies and inhibitions of inner 
 consciousness into the light of objective facts." Now the implication here 
 is wholly false. There were just as many of this ' ' evangelical ' ' type who
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 13 
 
 As in many other instances of the relapse of secular 
 leaders the liberal had to turn for comfort and sanity to 
 the leaders of an older organization than the arrogant 
 new States of the 19th century — to the Catholic Church. 
 In a comment upon the Pope 's peace appeal to President 
 Wilson, Cardinal Gaspari, the able and historically in- 
 telligent Papal Secretary, pointed out that the war would 
 be fought ultimately to no purpose if in all States, at its 
 conclusion, the power of conscription were not abrogated 
 or destroyed. He explained, what ought to have been 
 obvious to anyone on a moment's reflection, that con- 
 scription was a curse because it practically gave a blank 
 check to a small clique of statesmen; that it made gov- 
 ernments irresponsible ; that the only limit to ambitious 
 diplomats became the actual man-power and industrial 
 resources of a country; that no governing clique could 
 be trusted with that degree of power; that governments 
 were absolved from the necessity of making a war popu- 
 lar to their peoples, that they had only to make it hu- 
 manly tolerable ; that conscription lengthened wars to no 
 good purpose. All these general considerations were in- 
 dubitably true, but the shrewdest part of the comment 
 was the hint that the Church, too, once had had the 
 power of conscription over men's bodies and that that 
 power had come very near to wrecking it. And certainly 
 
 went into the war under the influence of tliis pernicious moralism as who 
 stayed out of it; it is outrageous to pick out that particular type amonjij the 
 conscientious objectors and to identify the argument against conscription 
 with their weaknesses. If Professor Dewey could have but realized it, 
 the younger intelligent men who opposed conscription in this country dis- 
 liked this type even more vigorously than he did, if for no other reason 
 than that precisely this type discredited the opposition argument. On the 
 contrary, the intelligent objectors surveyed the objective facts and the 
 agencies of social control just as minutely and constructively as the 
 "tough-minded" political pragmatists, and judging by events, their survey 
 was considerably nearer correct. I have myself mdicated later in this 
 chapter how a rational argument against the principle of conscription can 
 be made without invoking conscience or morality or any other idealistic 
 shibboleth, but simply in terms of nationalistic advantage.
 
 14 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 the political considerations or obscure ends for which 
 modern States asked their subjects to die were of no 
 more transcendent importance than the spiritual ends of 
 the Church. The Cardinal could not fail to see that the 
 Catholic Church gets the bulk of what true and vital 
 strength it may possess today from voluntary allegiance 
 and not from coercion.* When will our temporal leaders 
 begin to see the same thing? How long before they will 
 agree with the simple truth of Nonnan Angell's descrip- 
 tion of the modern world! 
 
 *'We have struggled," he writes in that last brilliant 
 chapter, *'Why Freedom Matters,*' of his most recent 
 book, ''during these untold centuries for bread and free- 
 dom. With this result. That the great majority have not 
 yet enough to eat, suffer from insufficiency or overwork' 
 in one form or another. And our principles of Govern- 
 ment have been such that there is not now, in theory at 
 least, and very nearly in fact, in all the millions of Eu- 
 rope, one man physically able to kill, whose life and 
 conscience belongs to himself. From Archangel to Bag- 
 dad, from Carnarvon to Vladivostok, there is not one 
 to whom an impersonal entity known as THE STATE 
 may not suddenly come and say, 'You shall leave your 
 wife and children and the tasks to which you have de- 
 voted your life, immediately, and put yourself obediently 
 at my orders. The task which I assign to you is to kill 
 certain men ; as many as possible, whether you think them 
 right or whether you think them wrong. Kill or be 
 
 * See Associated Press Dispatch from Eome. Cardinal Gaspari said : 
 "President Wilson's proposal to reduce armaments and impose interna- 
 tional arbitration by force through a society of nations is a dream. . . . 
 All the other inconveniences and objections could be avoided by suppressing 
 conscription, with the proviso that it could not be re-established without 
 a law approved by the people, which in normal conditions would be improb- 
 able, indeed morally impossible. . . . Conscription is one of the hideous 
 burdens of a free people, both as regarding financial expenses and personal 
 liberty, besides being an inevitable breeder of war. ' '
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 15 
 
 killed. ' . . . These millions find themselves as much bereft 
 of freedom as were the slaves of antiquity. With this 
 difference: The slavery of antiquity, the slavery of 
 biblical times for instance, made you a slave to a person, 
 a human being, to whose ordinary human sentiments you 
 could appeal. But in the modern world you may at any 
 moment become the slave of an abstraction, a machine."* 
 We have been thrown so out of focus by the propa- 
 ganda of the war that even today it is difficult for most 
 Americans to realize how true was a sentence in an 
 article of Randolph Bourne's, written in June, 1917: 
 ^'They (the intellectuals) would have thought anyone 
 mad who talked of shipping American men by the hun- 
 dreds of thousands — conscripts — to die on the fields of 
 France, "t I have stressed the freedom side of the liberal 
 view so strongly simply because it is an extremely pain- 
 ful imaginative effort for us to throw ourselves back into 
 the dominant attitude of the Anglo-Saxon world of 1914 
 or the dominant American attitude of 1915 and 1916. By 
 comparison mth the spiritual apathy of today the pre- 
 war era seems an era of unexampled liberalism: men 
 were engaged in voluntary enterprises ; the international 
 net-work of economic and social relations seemed firm; 
 
 * The British Revolution and The American Democracy. Huebseh, ]919. 
 Page 271. Mr. Angell is one of the few liberals who stood steadfast under 
 the pressure of the war. His belief in the essential rationality of every 
 human being, in spite of the perversity and docility revealed in the mob 
 by the war, is invincible. He has a passion for reasonableness, "not," 
 as he once said to me, ' ' because I do not recognize the extent and massive- 
 ness of unconscious motives in the acts of people, but because the reason, 
 slight and capricious though it is, is all that we have. ' ' 
 
 t See article, "The War And The Intellectuals," in The Seven Arts 
 (New York) for June, 1917. I think many of my readers will agree with me 
 that the untimely death of Randolph Bourne was an irreparable loss to 
 American liberalism. He was about the only one of the younger American 
 writers and essayists who did not let himself be beguiled by the hypocrisies 
 and shibboleths of the war. His criticism of American policy in the war 
 and his predictions of where it would lead us read today like uncanny 
 prophecy.
 
 16 LIBERALISM IN xiMERICA 
 
 there was comparative freedom of assemblage and of 
 speech and of travel ; opportunity lay to everyone 's hand ; 
 the individual was respected. Most of this complex of 
 feeling was unconscious, but it was real and it was di- 
 rective of most of our energies. There was in our mood 
 then a kind of graciousness, of adventurousness, of opti- 
 mism. For most of us who were young then the world, 
 as for Barrie's hero, lay like a ball at our feet. 
 
 I think this mood and temper were the direct descend- 
 ants of the liberal doctrines of the 19th century; and 
 that they came to their temporary end on that fateful 
 first of August, 1914 — although for Americans we were 
 allowed almost three years more of what had already 
 become a fool's paradise. With no wish to burden this 
 chapter unduly with quotations, I believe excerpts from 
 the first chapter of Lord Morley's *' Recollections" give 
 perhaps the best extant description of the liberal attitude 
 to which, whatever the tragic interruption of the war, we 
 are the true successors and to which, if life is ever again 
 to become spiritually tolerable, we must return. 
 
 ''Alike for those who adore and those who detest it, 
 the dominating force in the living mind of Europe for 
 a long generation after the overthrow of the French 
 monarchy in 1830 has been that marked way of looking 
 at things, feeling them, handling them, judging main 
 actors in them, for which with a hundred kaleidoscopic 
 turns, the accepted name is Liberalism. It is a summary 
 term with many extensive applications; people are not 
 always careful to sort them out, and they are by no 
 means always bound to one another. . . . Respect for 
 the dignity and worth of the individual is its root. It 
 stands for pursuit of social good against class interest 
 or dynastic interest. It stands for the subjection to 
 human judgments of all claims of external authority,
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 17 
 
 whether in an organised Church, or in more loosely 
 gathered societies of believers, or in books held sacred. 
 In law-making it does not neglect the higher characteris- 
 tics of human nature, it attends to them first. In execu- 
 tive administration, though judge, gaoler, and perhaps 
 the hangman w^ill be indispensable, still mercy is counted 
 a wise supplement to terror. . . . The whole creed is a 
 good deal too comprehensive to be written out here, and 
 it is far more than a formalized creed. Treitschke, the 
 greatest of modern absolutists, lays it down that every- 
 thing new that the nineteenth century has erected is the 
 work of Liberalism. . . . It is worth noting that a strange 
 and important liberalizing movement of thought had 
 awakened the mind of New England with Emerson for 
 its noble and pure-hearted preacher in 1837. The duty 
 of mental detachment, the supreme claim of the individ- 
 ual conscience, spread from religious opinion to the con- 
 duct of life and its interwoven social relations. . . . But 
 if government and order are of the very essence, so, too, 
 are conscience, principle, the thinker, the teacher, the 
 writer. To treat these elements of the social structure 
 as strictly secondary and subordinate is the contradiction 
 of Liberalism. Napoleon was the master type. If 
 thinkers thought wrong, or gave an inconvenient ply to 
 conscience, or carried a principle to lengths that were 
 troublesome, it was like mutiny in the regiment. If the 
 spiritual power gave itself airs before the temporal, you 
 would lock it up at Savona or elsewhere until it came to 
 its senses. For all this today's name is Militarism, the 
 point-blank opposite of Liberalism in its fullest and pro- 
 foundest sense, whatever the scale and whatever the 
 disguise."* 
 
 * Recollections. By John, Viscount Morley. The Macmillan Co., 1917. 
 Pages 20 to 24.
 
 18 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 But is not this attack upon conscription just one aspect 
 of a pernicious pacificism? Now it is not because I am 
 trying to disarm such criticism in advance but because 
 the question is a confused one and involves many im- 
 portant distinctions that I here want to give considerable 
 attention to conscription versus liberalism. Our indiffer- 
 ence about this conflict and our lack of understanding it 
 go to the root of our spiritual failure in the war.* 
 
 In the first place, liberalism is not necessarily non- 
 resistant; it does not even condemn war as such. For 
 example, in case of an unwarranted and aggressive inva- 
 sion of one country by another, there is nothing in the 
 liberal philosophy to condemn the nation which takes up 
 arms in self-defense. It believes neither in the ' ' martyr ' * 
 nation theory, nor in the Tolstoyian ''turn the other 
 cheek" attitude which would make that theory, under 
 certain conditions, a fact. But it does frankly say that 
 such soldiers as a nation needs for its defense ought to 
 be raised by the method of voluntary enlistment. It does 
 maintain that the belief that the State ought to have 
 the power to conscript men to fight for it — the belief 
 that the State ought to be allowed to force its subjects to 
 engage in war even when they think the war unjustified — 
 liberalism does maintain that this belief is a superstition. 
 It was precisely this belief on the part of so many Euro- 
 pean folk which allowed militarism to develop during the 
 
 *In 1812, Daniel Webster said: "A free government with arbitrary 
 means to adminiBter it, is a contradiction. A free government wthout 
 adequate provisions for personal security is an absurdity. ^ A free govern- 
 ment with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is a solecism, at 
 once the most ridiculous and abominable that ever entered into the head 
 of man, ' ' One sometimes wonders if our present-day Supreme Court justices 
 ever read our early rebels. Is it possible that any one of them read Wendell 
 Phillips on free speech before rendering their decision on the Espionage 
 Act? Judging by the minority opinion of Justices Holmes and Brandeis in 
 the Abrams, Lipman, Lachowsky, Steiner case, these two have. It is good 
 to see these two Justices abandon war-hysteria and return to the old Ameri- 
 can tradition of liberty of opinion.
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 19 
 
 nineteenth century, especially in Germany. It allowed 
 nations to be mobilized and disciplined to an extent that 
 made them blind pawns under the fingers of intriguing 
 diplomats. 
 
 True, one may answer, but supposing, as certainly was 
 the case in this war, your opponent employs conscription 
 so rigidly and severely that in order to protect yourself 
 from defeat it becomes imperative to adopt conscription 
 yourself! Liberals did not approve of poison gas, but 
 when Germany adopted it, then the Allies too, if they did 
 not wish to put themselves at a serious military dis- 
 advantage, had to adopt it. Conscription, similarly, may 
 be an evil, but it certainly under some conditions becomes 
 a necessary one. Would liberalism be willing to let Ger- 
 many win the war in order that its precious principles 
 be preserved ? Would liberals expect or could they fairly 
 demand that nations commit suicide? 
 
 Now I happen to believe that a very strong case could 
 be made for the contention that if nations relied only 
 upon voluntary enlistment, they still would have ample 
 protection and would not have to fear defeat. Even in 
 the present war, it is really not paradoxical to say that 
 had all of the Allies, as England did for the first year of 
 the war, relied upon voluntary enlistment, and coupled 
 their military campaign with an honest and decent diplo- 
 matic and moral campaign as well as a vigorous economic 
 boycott, they could have won the war — in all essential 
 respects — much earlier than they did. Conscription did 
 not save Russia from going out of the war; in fact the 
 ruthless method with which it was employed was largely 
 responsible for her defection from the Allied cause, aided 
 by the clumsy, diplomatic handling of Russia from the 
 day of the first revolution. If one's cause is really as 
 holy and really appeals to the elementary moral judg-
 
 20 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 merit of the common man as impellingly as Allied diplo- 
 mats professed, then people do not have to be dragooned 
 into supporting it. Men have fought for what they be- 
 lieved to be just causes long before the conscription of 
 an entire people was ever thought of, and it is likely they 
 will do so again. But with conscription the leaders of 
 nations are under no necessity of convincing their peo- 
 ples of the justness of the cause ; they only have to pre- 
 tend that it is just. When one surveys the long list of 
 military and diplomatic blunders made by the Entente, 
 delaying peace for almost three unnecessary years, it is 
 a debatable point whether under the voluntary system 
 which would necessarily have kept them, under the lash 
 of public opinion, at a higher level of efficiency, they 
 might not have been aided rather than hampered by the 
 abandonment of conscription. It is certainly obvious in 
 our own case that we would have got a more democratic 
 peace, if we had not handed over the entire resources of 
 the country to President Wilson and then allowed him to 
 put through an Espionage law which prevented any effec- 
 tive public criticism of either his military or diplomatic 
 methods. If President Wilson had had to fight for men 
 to wage his war, had had to fight to make his ideals of 
 the settlement prevail, the chances are that the peace 
 settlement would not have seen quite so many broken 
 promises. Is it not remarkable how, when Lloyd George 
 after the armistice found he could not conscript men to 
 go to Russia and that a large military intervention there 
 was out of the question, he also found that perhaps cer- 
 tain aspects of his Russian policy had been based on 
 misinformation? It is the irresponsibility of military 
 and diplomatic leaders inherent in the conscription sys- 
 tem which more than offsets its other advantages. It 
 was precisely that irresponsibility of her military and
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 21 
 
 other leaders which led to Germany's defeat. Conscrip- 
 tion may make a nation formidable in the obvious mili- 
 tary sense: it weakens her at the core, for it gives too 
 much power to too few hands. Statesmen cannot be 
 trusted to handle whole nations as if they were their 
 private toys ; sooner or later they lead them to ruin, as 
 we have already seen in Germany's case and as we shall 
 see shortly in the case of many of her former enemies, 
 unless the peoples of the Entente countries put a limit 
 on their statesmen's powers. This argument that con- 
 scription is an instrument of inefficiency in the winning of 
 a war has never been honestly examined; most people 
 are unconscious apologists for the very power that may 
 ultimately destroy them. I shall not go into it further 
 here, for in one sense it is irrelevant to my main point. 
 But I mention it, because it is worth pointing out that the 
 bland assumption that conscription is a ''realistic" policy 
 and the liberal opposition to it a sentimental policy does 
 not bear candid examination. In fact, the war has 
 proved that many of the *' realistic" shibboleths only re- 
 veal a first-rate technique for sending a nation to its 
 ruin. 
 
 However, even from the liberal standpoint, this argu- 
 ment is not necessary. Let us grant that conscription 
 in the present war was justified because of the peculiar 
 conditions and the sudden emergency. Let us accept 
 the current justification. What are the implications of 
 this position? Why, exactly this: in the very act of 
 justification we use such words as '* exceptional," "emer- 
 gency," "a temporary measure," *'a necessary evil," 
 and so on, thereby indirectly saying that we are adopting 
 it only because we \^^sh to destroy it everywhere. In 
 fact, that is precisely what we did say during the war, 
 not once only but many times. Again and again Allied
 
 22 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 statesmen assured their people that after the defeat of 
 Germany, and the menace to the peace of the world was 
 removed, conscription would be aboHshed. Its evil was 
 recognized ; only bitter necessity compelled its temporary 
 use. Even in Germany foreign ministers in the Reichs- 
 tag stated that the inclusion of non-conscription and re- 
 duction of armaments in the treaty was no barrier to 
 peace, pointing out that the economic condition of Eu- 
 rope after the war would of itself force some such less 
 pretentious mihtary policy. I can remember with ma- 
 licious amusement how a gullible friend of mine assured 
 me that he wanted to join the army and defeat Ger- 
 many, ''only because by her defeat can we be sure that 
 conscription will never again be necessary in America." 
 We were assured that we only took the sword in order 
 that when Germany 's sword was broken we could cast our 
 own away. We were a pacific people ; it w^as to be ' ' the 
 war to end war ! ' ' And how many Allied propagandists 
 during the war pointed out that German militarism was 
 the direct result of the conscription system existing 
 in that country, the direct result of the militarizing of 
 the mind of the people by enforced military training and 
 by the consequent maintenance of a large officer class and 
 armament class with a vested interest in war. This hor- 
 rid thing, we were told, was exactly what we were out to 
 destroy. Once destroyed in Germany, it would be easy 
 to get the rest of the world to live together in a per- 
 manent peace which would remove the necessity for any- 
 thing but nominal military power — ''just a small world 
 police," we were told! This was the hope held out to 
 us ; it was what intrigued many good liberals into active 
 support of the war. They accepted these promises at 
 their face value. Did not our own leaders acknowledge 
 in their very urging of this war exactly what the liberals
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 23 
 
 had always been preaching — the terrible evils of 
 militarism? 
 
 "Well, it is almost ungenerous to point out how these 
 promises were broken. At the peace conference the 
 Clemenceau party actually fought the proposal that con- 
 scription be made forever impossible in Germany on the 
 ground that to establish such a principle for Germany 
 might unhappily give an example to the Entente coun- 
 tries. As I write this chapter, Secretary of War Baker, 
 who actually has the effrontery to describe himself as a 
 liberal, has introduced into the House a bill for universal 
 military training — the very thing, he once told us, we 
 were fighting to make everywhere impossible. Not a 
 single country has given up this sovereign right of con- 
 scription; nowhere in the League of Nations Covenant 
 is it even mentioned. In England, of all countries the 
 most jealous of personal liberty, Lloyd George has again 
 and again delayed the execution of his election promise 
 of immediate abandonment of conscription; in France 
 and Italy, of course, the proposition is not thought even 
 debatable. But we have done much more than fasten the 
 principle of conscription upon ourselves; by our inter- 
 vention we have fastened it upon Soviet Russia ; by our 
 terms of peace we have justified the German militarists 
 in their cynical disbelief in the Allied promises. The 
 German militarists can now say, "To be sure, w^e lost 
 the war. But the next time we may have better luck : the 
 Allied peace is no worse than what a German peace would 
 have been had the fortunes of war been ours instead of 
 theirs. They have acted on precisely our philosophy of 
 life, thereby justifying it. Let us continue as usual. At 
 present we are at low ebb, but hope is not gone. We can 
 set the Allied nations at each other's throats by intrigue. 
 We can possibly cook up an alliance with Russia (has she
 
 24 LIBERiVLISM IN AMERICA 
 
 not been as badly treated by lier so-called Allies as we 
 ourselves?) and organize Russia for our own advan- 
 tage." And tliey are saying just that — and are acting 
 upon it. Instead of less of spirit of militarism, at the 
 close of the glorious crusade to end it, we actually find 
 that never in the world's history has the spirit of mili- 
 tarism been so rampant. 
 
 Why did we fail to achieve our ends in a war fought 
 supposedly for the furtherance of liberal views ? Partly 
 because our leaders were not genuinely liberal in prin- 
 ciple ; partly because the so-called intellectual class, most 
 of the world over, was content to become a hired attorney 
 for their particular nation's cause; partly because the 
 peoples of the world were duped from beginning to end. 
 In a real war for democracy and liberalism and the 
 crushing of military arrogance, we should never have 
 allowed our own leaders to become intoxicated with mili- 
 tary power; we should never have allowed the chauvin- 
 ists to preach hatred of the enemy ; we should have wel- 
 comed opposition because we should have realized that 
 we were employing a dangerous weapon and that we 
 needed criticism ; we should constantly have done our best 
 to convince Germany of the sincerity of our aims instead 
 of doing everything in our power to convince her of the 
 opposite ; we should never have rushed with the furious 
 heedlessness into conscription w^ith which we did rush. 
 But we did none of these things : we crushed German mili- 
 tarism only to find that we ourselves had adopted many 
 of its worst features. The w^ar ended, as most wars 
 have ended, in bitterness and disillusion and economic 
 chaos. 
 
 I believe it is the bitterness of the disillusion which 
 has made revolutionists, like Mr. Eastman, whom I quoted 
 above, skeptical of the whole liberal pliilosophy. The
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 25 
 
 political impotence of liberalism during the war is un- 
 deniable. And this impotence has been further accented 
 by the economic developments arising out of the war 
 itself. 
 
 Before the war, for example, liberalism was for a con- 
 siderable time regarded as a definite political party 
 slogan — the Cadets in Russia, the progressives in Ger- 
 many, the followers of Asquith in England, the progress- 
 ives in America, the Left Centre in the French Chamber, 
 all would have spoken of themselves as "liberals," and 
 liberalism would have been defined as the general body 
 of political and social principles which they held in com- 
 mon. In some countries, England for instance, the po- 
 litical aspects of liberalism would have been more 
 stressed than the social aspects. In general, liberalism 
 connoted humanitarian and ameliorative doctrines rather 
 than sharply radical ones. 
 
 However, there is no use denying that the tests of the 
 war have brought it pretty thorough discredit as a body 
 of political doctrine. Its principles have been too vague 
 and shadowy — in fact so vague and shadowy that tho 
 most diverse types of leaders called themselves liberal. 
 As a body of political doctrine it suffered chiefly from 
 lack of any definite economic opinions. The war tended 
 to divide the field of action more and more between two 
 parties and only two, sheer reaction on one side and 
 laborism and proletarian communism on the other. There 
 were, to be sure, intermediary parties, "Socialistic'* and 
 tlie like, that did not go to the whole communistic path, 
 yet which vigorously fought certain of the economic ac- 
 tions of different governments. But the so-called "lib- 
 eral" was to be found almost anywhere. In a few cases 
 he was to be found on the side of the communists, in a 
 few cases on the side of the reactionaries, in most cases
 
 26 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 somewhere in between. What has been happening, of 
 course, was merely that politically speaking the liberals 
 had been left without a home. The emergence of clashing 
 economic interests, which the war has done so much to 
 further, has made mere "Constitutionalism" and even 
 what we call "political democracy" more and more ir- 
 relevant in the field of action. The centre of gravity, 
 both of leadership in the affairs of the State and even of 
 actual sovereignty, had been turning more and more 
 from parliamentarism to industrial organization. Lord 
 Rothermore* speaks of the growing impatience of the 
 English people with Parliament, bewaihng it of course, 
 although this impatience is only a reflection of the con- 
 tempt into which all merely political governments are 
 f alHng. When the Daily News of London says in a rather 
 .despairing tone that it is better to be governed badly by 
 Parliament than well by trade unions it merely reflects 
 the fright of the old-time liberal at the new orientation 
 in the conduct of the State. Yet as a matter of fact 
 everyone knows that the parties of the future, both 
 abroad and in America,t will not be built upon any other 
 
 * Quoted in the New York Times, Monday, August 4, 1919. 
 
 t For example, at the present time in America the real nucleus of a 
 radical "third" party which may cause an amalgamation of the^ two 
 old parties into a single conservative organization is not in the Socialist 
 party, small minority groups like the "splits" of right and left in the 
 Socialist party, Committees of 48 or Leagues of Free Nations Associations, 
 or in a vague progressivism. It is first, last and all the time in the trade 
 unions. In a word the radical party of the future in America is the Labor 
 Party which will derive its strength from the same sources from which 
 orthodox trade unionism today derives it. I am told that in New York 
 City, for instance, the C. F. U. leaders (the Central Federation), the con- 
 ventional old style American Federation of Labor unionism by crafts, who 
 three years ago scoffed at the idea of a separate Labor party saying that 
 they could win all the political concessions they wished by playing the old 
 parties off against each other with threats of "throwing" the vote, today 
 are heart and soul for a Labor Party. Perhaps the Non-Partisan League 
 has taught them a lesson. At all events today they want a political ally 
 they can trust — their own party — to help them win by political battle, 
 what heretofore they believed could be won by industrial methods alone. 
 It is the beginning of a movement of which we shall probably see the first 
 tangible signs by l'>24 or before.
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 27 
 
 ''principles" than those of specific economic doctrines. 
 The conflicts between parties will be disguised under gen- 
 eral old-fashioned political terms only as long as the eco- 
 nomic conflicts within the nation do not become press- 
 ing — and for most of Europe they have already become 
 desperately pressing just as they are becoming increas- 
 ingly so for America. Exactly as liberalism proved itself 
 impotent in the field of foreign conflicts, so in the field 
 of domestic economic conflicts it is fast becoming mori- 
 bund. As a body of political and international doctrine 
 hberalism has practically collapsed, and in that sense 
 Mr. Eastman is justified in his use of the phrase, ''the 
 t"\\ilight of liberalism." 
 
 But this does not mean that liberalism is to be cast 
 overboard. Quite the contrary. AVhat remains of value 
 in liberalism is exactly what was always valuable in it : 
 namely, its emphasis on a certain attitude of mind 
 towards events, a certain temper, a certain philosophy of 
 life in terms of wliich all contemporary proposals of so- 
 cial and political policy are to be assessed and either 
 encouraged or criticized. Liberalism is something much 
 bigger than partyism or economic doctrinairism. It is, 
 as Lord Morley says, its marked way of "looking at 
 things, feeling them, handling them, judging main actors 
 in them." It is concerned primarily, not with any spe- 
 cific doctrines, but with the creation of a certain temper 
 and attitude in society at large — a temper and attitude 
 of tolerance especially valuable in a time of bitter par- 
 tisan strife such as the present and immediate future. 
 Liberalism assumes that the end of all reasonable activity 
 is to produce a certain quality of human society, which 
 depends upon the quality of the men and women who 
 compose it, which, in turn, depends upon the existence of 
 an atmosphere of freedom and tolerance just as definitely
 
 28 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 as it does upon an economic situation wherein the ma- 
 terial needs of the great majority can be decently and 
 adequately gratified. We all know there are certain 
 imponderables upon which human happiness depends: 
 the liberal attitude of mind is one of them. 
 
 What is that attitude and what are some of its implica- 
 tions in the field of practical action? 
 
 I have already tried to show that the core of liberal 
 philosophy is respect for the individual and his freedom 
 of conscience and opinion. That is why a liberal must 
 fight conscription on principle ; it does not mean he may 
 not allow himself to be conscripted if he believes the 
 cause just. And whether a cause is just or not is to be 
 determined only on a liberal interpretation of the facts. 
 Consequently, for example, during the present war it 
 would not have been necessarily illiberal for a young man 
 to be drafted. Whether he should submit or take his 
 medicine was a question for him to settle with his own 
 mind and conscience after every attempt at intelligent 
 interpretation of the facts. But if he did not become a 
 conscientious objector himself, he would be forced by 
 principle to fight the theory of conscription on all occa- 
 sions and to do everything in his power to mitigate the 
 punishment inflicted on men who refused to fight. In a 
 blundering and rather bewildered way that is precisely 
 what a group of Americans did try to do during the pres- 
 ent war. It was a real service to liberalism, and nothing 
 was more discouraging and revelatory of the spiritual 
 bankruptcy of President Wilson and his administration 
 than the fashion in which he allowed government agents 
 to hamper and destroy the work of these truly public- 
 spirited citizens. Please do not misunderstand me as 
 making synonymous a liberal and a conscientious ob- 
 jector. On the contrary a conscientious objector may be
 
 WHAT LIBERALISM IS 29 
 
 just a fanatic or a religious prig; we had many of that 
 kind from the Middle West where all sorts of queer, 
 mystical dogmatisms flourished in that arid, intellectual 
 soil.* Yet personal dislike for this kind of objector no 
 less absolved the true liberal of his duty of helping him 
 and fighting for his freedom to make his own decision on 
 the question of taking human life or of being a party 
 to it. 
 
 The second principle of liberalism is toleranc^, belief 
 in real freedom of speech and expression. For that rea- 
 son a liberal does not get frightened at radical economic 
 experiments, and does not blindly fight them when a 
 majority of people want to try them out. For liberalism, 
 after all, rests fundamentally upon the conviction that 
 man does not live by bread alone. 
 
 * See The Conscientious Objector. By Major Walter Guest Kellogp;, 
 .J. A. Boni and Liveright, ]919, "The objectors examined by the Board 
 professed membership in an astonishing number of different sects and de- 
 nominations, tlie names of most of which are unfamiliar to the average 
 layman. The different denominations include: Mennonites, The Society 
 of Friends or Quakers, Plymouth Brethren, The International Bible Stud- 
 ents Association or Eussellites, Dunkards or German Baptist Brethren, 
 Seventh Day Adventists, Church of God and Saints of Christ, Disciples 
 of Christ, Church of Christ, Church of Daniel's Band, Church of the 
 Living God, Pentecostal Church of the Nazareue, True Light, ^Metropolitan, 
 Molokans, Christians, Brethren in Christ, Christadelphians, Church of the 
 First Born, Israelites of the House of David, Church of the Holiness, 
 Koreshan Unity, Zionists and a score of others." Major Kellogg writes as 
 impartial a book — for instance, he says "the frankness of the Socialists 
 was impressive. They appeared, in the main, to be telling the thing exactly 
 as they saw it" — as probably could be written by a man who misses the 
 whole liberal point of view towards conscription. Secretary Baker, how- 
 ever, contributes an introduction to tlie book which is a masterpiece of 
 jiious fatuity. Let me repeat. The core of the liberal point of view is 
 just this: since respect for the individual is its root, a liberal will make 
 every effort humanly possible to find some other method of defending his 
 country than the method of conscription ; he will sanction it only as a 
 last resort, as a desperate remedy for immediate and pressing danger. 
 And even when he does justify its temporary use he will throw every bit of 
 protection possible about those who even after he has beome convinced of its 
 necessity cannot personally themselves be convinced. In any event the 
 true liberal will examine and exhaust every possible alt<>rnative before 
 justifying conscription ; be will try to see the policy in the light of its 
 ultimate and permanent rather than its immediate effects. The genuine 
 pragmatic analysis of what it does to a nation will make him skeptical
 
 30 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 But liberalism is much more than tolerance in temper : 
 it is a whole philosophy of hfe. It is scientific, curious, 
 experimental. It is willing to face opposite views; it 
 welcomes them. It tries to base its beliefs on genuine 
 historical background. It believes in the validity of the 
 cultural claims of Hfe. It is urbane, good-natured, non- 
 partisan, detached. It is in a way frankly au-dessus de 
 la melee, although not through arrogance but simply 
 from a conviction that liberalism's best service can be 
 performed through creating a certain tolerant temper in 
 society at large. Yet back of that attempt to look at life 
 rationally it puts the drive of passion of conviction. We 
 can thank our modern psychologists for explaining to us 
 the truth of the paradox that the impulse to rationality 
 and to thought has no less its emotional quality than the 
 more obvious and grosser impulses. If I were to try to 
 sum up in an epigram the spirit of liberalism, I could do 
 no better than to quote Matthew Arnold's question in 
 his book on Celtic literature, defending the Welsh fond- 
 ness for their old language.* When shall we learn. Lord 
 Morley quotes from the book, ''that what attaches people 
 
 of its use. Such an analysis might lead to the conclusion that it was 
 always a mistake — even from the nationalistic and militaristic point of 
 view itself — and above I suggest how such a conclusion might rationally 
 be reached. I do not claim this conclusion is valid ; personally I think it ia. 
 The criticism I am making of so-called American liberals is that they made 
 no attempt whatsoever to examine alternative policies; that after the 
 declaration of war they almost fell over themselves in eagerness to justify 
 conscription; that except for a few pious words they did nothing whatso- 
 ever to lighten the load of the man caught in the toils. Today, months 
 after the war is over, there is no concerted attempt to have released those 
 objectors still in the hell of military prisons. In a word, too many Ameri- 
 cans talked like liberals and acted like militarists. It was as if their 
 liberal conscience was salved by a few words — after that, they could 
 throw themselves joyously into the intoxicating activity of the war. Ean- 
 dolph Bourne told the bitter ironic truth about them when he wrote, 
 "The task of making o'lr own country detailedly fit for peace was aban- 
 doned in favor of a feverish concern for the management of the war, advice 
 to the fighting governments on all matters, social and political, and a 
 gradual working up of the conviction that w^i were ordained as a nation 
 to lead all erring brothers towards the light of liberty and democracy." 
 * Quoted by Lord Morley in Kecollections, Volume 1, page 129.
 
 WHAT LIBERALI&M IS 31 
 
 to us is the spirit we are of, and not the machinery we 
 employ"? When shall we learn it indeed? It is the 
 inculcation of that lesson among the rasping factions of 
 today which is the contemporary task and duty of every 
 true liberal. And in this America of 1919 we are in more 
 need of that lesson than ever before in our history as a 
 nation.
 
 CHAPTER TWO 
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE AXD THE AMEEICAN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 t~\ UR notions of property rights, our concepts of justice 
 and free speech, our system of law, even our tradi- 
 tion of rebellion — all are English. Outside of New York 
 and Delaware the beginning of all the original colonies 
 was English, and even after 1680, when a new stream of 
 immigration set in of French Huguenots, Germans, 
 Welsh, and a few Jews, the main current in that stream 
 was the Scotch-Irish who by 1760 were in Pennsylvania, 
 New Jersey, Virginia, and North Carolina, and the sons 
 of whom crossed the Alleghanies to create Kentucky and 
 Tennessee. It is the fashion nowadays to lay all our 
 troubles to the Puritans, and the New England early 
 fanaticism is depicted as crossing the Hudson and find- 
 ing lodgment in the Middle West during the pioneering 
 days of Ohio and Illinois, where in the later 19th century 
 up to our own day we can watch a sort of recrudescence of 
 the early *'Blue Laws** spirit. Although I believe this 
 emphasis on the peculiar Puritan psychologj^ is some- 
 wliat strained,* it would be idle to deny that the Puritans 
 have dominated American life more than any subsequent 
 sect, and being shrewd in real estate speculation as well 
 as a narrow logic, have, by capturing the strategic eco- 
 nomic positions throughout the country, more or less 
 
 * Waldo Frank, for example, in Our America, Boni and Liveright, 1919, 
 seems to me somewhat to overestimate their psychological influence; not 
 their practical — hardly anyone could do that. 
 
 32
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE 33 
 
 imposed their standards and attitude on a heterogeneous 
 popuhition which today far exceeds them numerically. 
 
 It is true that our individualism, our intolerance, our 
 contempt for law, our economic ruthlessness, our thin 
 but intense and doctrinaire moralism, all find their 
 origins in the early pioneering Puritan. Our literature 
 and art and our general social life have developed for 
 the most part under his shadow. The current emphasis 
 is extreme, yet it is an emphasis in the right direction. 
 
 But from almost the very day of the landing of the first 
 settler the Puritan fanaticism was tempered by a conflict- 
 ing liberal spirit. Even as early as 1700 — only a short 
 eight years after the burning of wdtches at Salem — 
 Harvard, founded to preserve the faith, and with Increase 
 Mather, President, was regarded as identified with the 
 religious liberals. Even Yale, originally believed to stand 
 for conservative opposition and so founded in fact, had 
 by 1750 swung so far to the theological left that in its 
 later stages ''The Great Awakening" — the insistence 
 upon the necessity for conversion, begun by Jonathan 
 Edwards and continued by George Whitefield — was con- 
 demned by both Harvard and Yale. In 1689, the British 
 Toleration Act was passed and it was later reenacted 
 in Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia, as well as 
 other colonies. By this year, too, the early settlers had 
 died and the new generation, American-born, naturally 
 did not share their fathers' deep personal bitterness to- 
 wards the Anglican Church. During all the period of 
 religious strife, moreover, Rhode Island, under the lead- 
 ers hip of Roger Williams, remained an island of refuge 
 for the persecuted.* Founded by a fanatical sect, during 
 
 * For references in dates and the more familiar facts of pre-Civil War 
 American liistory, I have made use of John Spencer Bassett's A Short 
 History of the United States, Macmillan, 1913.
 
 34 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 aU our colonial history, in spite of its harshness, its in- 
 dentured servants, its rapacity towards the Indians, its 
 highly limited democracy, America moved steadily for- 
 wards towards religious toleration. In fact, by the time 
 of the Declaration of Independence that primary victory 
 for liberalism was taken for granted. 
 
 Similarly, we can trace the growth during colonial 
 times of the two great liberalizing institutions — the 
 franchise and the school. As early as 1647, Massachusetts 
 passed an act which ordered each town of 50 families 
 to support an elementary school and each of 100 families 
 to support a grammar schooh The act provided for fines 
 in case of unwilhngness to meet with its conditions; it 
 has, indeed, been called "the mother of all our school 
 laws." New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, 
 and the Southern States lagged behind New England 
 in the development of public school systems, but the Mid- 
 dle Western States, perhaps, because of the many New 
 Englanders there and also because of the Federal Gov- 
 ernment's liberal land grants for school purposes, were 
 speedier in their development of general public instruc- 
 tion. There is no need recounting here the many acade- 
 mies and colleges founded during colonial days and later, 
 after the Revolution, during the period of *' philosophic 
 doubt" which followed 1789 in France. Most of these 
 institutions had religious origins of one kind or another. 
 But as early as 1825 Jefferson founded the secular and 
 democratic (examinations were open to all) institution, 
 the University of Virginia, the influence of which in 
 spreading the idea of a State University, divorced from 
 any particular sect affihation, was enormous. Democratic 
 reform of the franchise, however, was not carried for- 
 ward so rapidly as the educational advance during the 
 colonial period. Indeed, until the Civil War itself many
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE 35 
 
 of the States allowed only a limited, property franchise, 
 and as late as 1840 to 1845 we find Rhode Island — during 
 the period of fighting for Dorr's ''People's Constitution" 
 — clinging stubbornly to the old system which gave the 
 vote only to freeholders in spite of the fact that the 
 development of manufacturing there had given rise to a 
 large workingman class who were not property holders. 
 Yet summing up, we can safely say that by the Civil War 
 three great victories for liberalism in America had been 
 achieved — religious toleration, a general public school 
 system, and a democratic franchise. Whatever the de- 
 fects of administration, the crudeness of the pioneer tech- 
 nique in applying them, these cardinal principles were 
 universally recognized. 
 
 Now it is illuminating, especially if we wish to under- 
 stand the characteristically American mixture of shrew^d- 
 ness and idealism, but it is hardly to the point to adopt 
 the realistic economic interpretation of American his- 
 tory. In a limited sense this interpretation is correct. 
 No instrument of government has been so ludicrously 
 sentimentalized over as our Constitution — a document 
 plainly devised to keep power from the people rather than 
 to extend it to them, a document fearful of what we under- 
 stand by democracy today, a charter of national control 
 by the privileged and wealthy of their day.* Our Revo- 
 lution itself was an economic protest. Our pioneering 
 enthusiasm was, in balder terms, the drive of necessity. 
 The War of 1812 was a trade war, as the Mexican and 
 many of the Indian wars were simply land robbery. 
 Even the much advertised great "First Democrat," 
 Thomas Jefferson, was a political trickster and a stalwart 
 defender of his own notions of privilege. What severer 
 
 *An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. 
 By Charles A. Beard. Macmillan.
 
 36 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 indictment of the romantic nonsense of too many of our 
 history books has been written than this description of 
 .lefferson's principles ])y Charles A. Beard? ''Jeffer- 
 sonian Democracy did not imply any abandonment of the 
 property, and particularly the landed, qualifications on 
 the suffrage or office-holding ; it did not involve any fun- 
 damental alterations in the national Constitution which 
 the Federalists had designed as a foil to the levelling 
 propensities of the masses; it did not propose any new 
 devices for a more immediate and direct control of the 
 voters over the instrumentalities of government. Jeffer- 
 sonian Democracy simply meant the possession of the 
 federal government by the agrarian masses led by an 
 aristocracy of slave-owning planters, and the theoretical 
 repudiation of the right to use the Government for the 
 benefit of any capitalistic groups, fiscal, banking, or 
 manufacturing."* Even the freeing of the slaves, from 
 this point of view, becomes merely a contest between 
 those who wished to cling to the economic profiteering of 
 slave-labor and the wealthy Northerners who disliked 
 this subsidized competition. A cynical Marxian could 
 easily have much ironic amusement at the expense of our 
 conventional school history. We beclouded all our ac- 
 tions in high-sounding myths. 
 
 Yet behind the myth was a reality, too. We are gifted 
 with a peculiar dualism, which our friends might call 
 unique versatility and our enemies hypocrisy : I think it 
 is neither, for the American impulse to idealism is no less 
 a fact than the American impulse to practicality. We 
 simply throw both of these human traits into a much 
 sharper contradiction than most people. No one has 
 described this American dualism with more precision and 
 
 * Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. By Charles A. Beard. 
 MacmiUan, 1915. Page 467.
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE 37 
 
 delicacy and understanding than Mr. Van Wyck Brooks : 
 * ' So it is that from the beginning we find two main cur- 
 rents in the American mind running side by side but 
 rarely mingling — a current of overtones and a current 
 of undertones — and both equally unsocial: on the one 
 hand, the current of Transcendentalism, originating in 
 the piety of the Puritans, becoming a philosophy in Jon- 
 athan Edwards, passing through Emerson, producing the 
 fastidious refinement and aloofness of the Chief Ameri- 
 can writers, and, as the coherent ideals and beliefs of 
 Transcendentalism gradually faded out, resulting in the 
 final unreality of most contemporary American culture ; 
 and on the other hand the current of catchpenny oppor- 
 tunism, originating in the practical shifts of Puritan life, 
 becoming a philosophy in Franklin, passing through the 
 American humorists, and resulting in the atmosphere of 
 contemporary business life."* I believe this distinction, 
 certainly as far as it concerns our cultural and social life, 
 is a sound one. In our political life, the distinction also 
 holds to a certain extent and in President Wilson we 
 have seen its ultimate culmination in a man who talks like 
 a Transcendentalist and wlio bargains like any huckster, 
 although even in this extreme case, probably, without 
 conscious hypocrisy.f 
 
 But in politics it is much more dangerous to announce 
 ideals than in philosophy — unless blatantly at odds with 
 the facts, as in our present war, when a natural reaction 
 against idealism sets in — for such announced ideals have 
 a way of becoming social myths for which men will fight 
 and struggle and ultimately attain, if attainable and in 
 line with, the normal historical and economic development 
 of a nation. (Even in the present war, announced as a 
 
 * See America's Comiu}:^ of Age, by Van Wyck Brooks (Huebsch, 1915), 
 page 9. 
 
 t See last part of Chapter 6.
 
 38 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 war for democracy, wliicli it obviously — now, at any rate 
 — is not, unexpected consequences are likely to follow 
 from this mere announcement, irrespective of whether 
 the originator of the phrase wishes those consequences 
 or not. Probably President Wilson, for instance, would 
 have made no personal effort to dislodge the Archduke 
 from Hungary, but President Wilson's preaching of a 
 war for democracy so caught the American idealism of 
 Mr. Herbert Hoover that he was spontaneous and sincere 
 when he forced the Paris Council to dislodge the Arch- 
 duke, and he was really angry when he said, ''It is beyond 
 the endurance of any red-blooded American to see his 
 Government tolerate the restoration of the Hapsburgs, 
 as the United States entered the war to banish from the 
 world that for which the Hapsburgs stood." Tran- 
 scendentalism in politics, in a word, is much more un- 
 comfortably related to action than Transcendentalism in 
 philosophy, although of course just the opposite from 
 what is expected may result from indulging in it. How- 
 ever, the main idealistic shibboleths of American politics 
 have been, on the whole, in line with our economic de- 
 velopment and history. For that reason, the purely eco- 
 nomic interpretation of the growth of liberalism in 
 America seems to me just a trifle irrelevant. Of course 
 the fathers did not believe in equality or in the dubious 
 proposition that all men are created free and equal. But 
 exactly such a belief was natural to an individualistic, 
 pioneering nation which was fighting for trade emancipa- 
 tion from a titled ruling class. Of course the early Presi- 
 dents were truly skeptical of too quick extension of the 
 franchise. But such extension was in line with the nor- 
 mal economic development of a country founded on free- 
 hold grants of land. (Even indentured servants in colo- 
 nial times, when their term was served, often went out
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE 39 
 
 pioneering for land of their own.) Of course many 
 leaders who mouthed the phrase so unctuously did not 
 believe in free speech. But that did not prevent the 
 American masses, at the time of the alien and sedition 
 laws, from making a martyr of Dr. Thomas Cooper who 
 was fined $400 and sent to prison for six months for 
 saying that President Adams was incompetent and had 
 influenced the course of justice. Of course many of the 
 sturdy Tories of colonial days believed with Voltaire 
 that education spoiled the laboring masses. But that did 
 not stay the onward course of the American public school, 
 academy, and university system. And finally, the belief 
 that negroes were by natural right free and equal with 
 white men was not held at all in the South (with an ex- 
 ception I shall point out later) and only won its way 
 very slowly in the North, even Emerson being reluctant 
 to commit himself on the issue. But that failed ulti- 
 mately to arrest the making of that principle a part of 
 our Constitution and an underlying assumption of our 
 whole political theory. In fact, all through American 
 history the materialistic and idealistic motives were al- 
 most inextricably intertwined, exactly as they are in life. 
 It is only safe to say that the economic and geographical 
 and commercial and racial situation of the United States 
 made certain broad liberal doctrines in politics the nat- 
 ural expression of its history and development. I fail 
 to see, nevertheless, how that fact makes the liberal doc- 
 trines any less liberal or how it in any way destroys their 
 validity. The doctrines are what they are, and are either 
 valuable or worthless on their own account. That we 
 adopted them is more or less an historical accident, even 
 if a fortunate one. 
 
 Now no one can study the record of our country up to 
 the time of the Civil War — for our whole American
 
 40 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 problem changed then with the introduction of the negro ' 
 problem and beginning of a new type of immigration — 
 without coming to two pretty definite conclusions about 
 the then developed American temper. The first is a 
 happy conclusion; the second, not so happy. And the 
 first conclusion is this : that the quality of servility was 
 steadily taken out of us as a nation. Unlike the Euro- 
 pean nations, with the later exception of France, we had 
 abolished rank and social distinction based on mere 
 family. We were too young not to remember who had 
 persecuted us and driven us to these shores for escape, 
 and in externals, at all events, we did not intend to — and 
 did not in fact — imitate the hierarchies with which we 
 connected our misfortunes. We carried our hatred of 
 servility so far, in fact, hatred of fawning and agreeing, 
 that it came perilously close to intolerance. Indeed, it 
 was fanatical intolerance of servility to the established 
 religious order in the Puritans of New England, although 
 generally speaking the growth of tolerance in religious 
 and other matters was a genuine growth up to the tragic 
 interruption of the Civil War. Certain things we could 
 not forget. We had all of us come to America on some- 
 thing like equal terms ; to escape some oppression in our 
 earlier environment and to try our fortunes in a new 
 world. It was a very large world, and even the unluckiest 
 of us, the indentured servants when our term was up, had 
 a chance to explore it and possibly to discover a new 
 El Dorado of our own. There were class distinctions, of 
 course, but the whole rhythm and sweep of our life with 
 its vast opportunities was towards the steady breaking 
 down of class distinctions. We felt at no time so truly 
 American as when we were able, to use the Western 
 expression, "to look any man in the eye and tell him to 
 go to Hell!" Mark Twain endeared himself to us almost
 
 TPIE ENGLISH HERITAGE 41 
 
 as much by his jeers at European royalty as by that 
 rough, pioneer humor which today, we know, covered a 
 profound disillusion. Up to the present day we have 
 had only a few first-class high comedies to our theatrical 
 credit precisely because high comedy is dependent upon 
 a subtle caste system, such as in England, w^hich we have 
 never known. When Mayor Gaynor borrowed that 
 famous chew of tobacco from the laborer on Brooklyn 
 Bridge — and never returned it — the only sport our 
 newspaper humorists derived from the incident was the 
 expression of a pious wish that the tobacco was a good 
 brand. During the war many of the men in the ranks 
 confessed that the one thing which galled them the most 
 was the eternal and unnecessary salute, and w^e know now 
 that the abortive attempt to introduce a rigid caste sys- 
 tem into the army only succeeded in bringing militarism 
 into a general contempt. (This is one of the forces our 
 present reactionaries have got seriously to reckon with.) 
 The word ''Sir" does not belong in the native American 
 vocabulary. When we look forward to the day when we 
 shall be aroused from the hypnotic docility of war-time 
 and inquire what force ^Yi\\ arouse us, perhaps this 
 nation-old tradition of hatred of sei-vility will be our 
 strongest instrument. At all events it is not unreason- 
 able to hope so. 
 
 The second conclusion prompted by a survey of our 
 history up to the Civil War is this : we are a violence- 
 loving people. It is ironical today to hear our big news- 
 paper editors piously bewail ''direct" action and exhort 
 us to return to the peaceable and democratic political ac- 
 tion of our fathers. As a matter of historical fact, Amer- 
 ica is almost the home of direct action. We are the nation 
 of witch-burners, rotten egg throwers, lynchers, rioters, 
 and — in the raw industrial era after the Civil War —
 
 42 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 plain murdering strike-breakers. And we enjoy it. No 
 myth is more sedulously cultivated than that we are a 
 law-abiding people, although nothing could be further 
 from the truth. Insurrection is in our blood, and the 
 episode of the Boston *'Tea Party" may well be taken as 
 a symbol of the popular American way of attacking a 
 difficulty when it has become intolerable. The deporters 
 of the I. W. W. at Bisbee are no less the spiritual chil- 
 dren of our early settlers than the crowds of Brooklyn 
 Rapid Transit strikers intimidating the * 'scabs'* with a 
 few well-directed bricks. During the war, of course, it 
 was a facile generalization of discouraged radicals that 
 we were the most easy-going, gnillible, and docile people 
 that ever allowed itself to be made the victims of minority 
 tyranny. I shall return to this point later, but I am con- 
 vinced that the docility was chiefly on the surface, 
 *' hypnotic," I have called it :* the war really was popular 
 after it got started and it gave us one of the most enjoy- 
 able emotional holidays we had had for a generation. 
 Consequently we disliked to have our pleasure disturbed. 
 That is the fundamental reason for our ruthless sup- 
 pression of minority opinion in war-time and the very 
 violence with which we treated objectors bodes exceeding 
 ill for those reactionaries who oppose any radical policy 
 in the future, after it has become genuinely popular. 
 They will be paid with their own medicine, and our radi- 
 cals like Mr. John Reed who gets so much romance out of 
 revolution, can afford to sit back and chuckle at the 
 trouble our present-day Security Leaguers and the like 
 are laying up for themselves. No honest liberal can read 
 the story of the innumerable petty civil wars which took 
 place in the colonies and early States or the story of the 
 violence and intimidation which preceded the Civil War 
 
 * I.e., in the previous paragraph.
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE 43 
 
 without a discouraging conviction that if we ever have a 
 second big ci\dl war — say a class war — it will be about 
 the bloodiest domestic struggle the nations of the earth 
 have ever witnessed. 
 
 Precisely because the comer-stone of liberalism is a 
 belief in the power and desirability of effecting changes 
 by peaceable and rational persuasion the American lib- 
 eral of today ought to survey this violence-lo\ing tradi- 
 tion with misgivings. Of course it is not all e\il; it is 
 a sign of healthy vitality, similar to the horse-play of a 
 well-fed boy of strong animal instincts. And curiously 
 enough this American *'scrappiness" does not influence, 
 at least in theory, our attitude towards war and peace in 
 international matters where our pacifism is a very 
 strong and genuine thing. Yet it is an extremely danger- 
 ous force. No one can yet say with assurance in what 
 direction it may ultimately be turned. As an example of 
 the damage this violent tendency once accomplished when 
 unchecked I wish to point out the special case of the Ci\il 
 War, which in my opinion is persistently more misunder- 
 stood by our historians than any other episode in our 
 national life. Liberals might w^ell restudy that episode, 
 for it illustrates sharply that false sentimentalizing of 
 past belligerency to which I referred in my first chapter 
 when I stated that the true liberal was naturally inclined 
 to believe that war never paid. If ever a great war has 
 confirmed such skepticism, our own Ci\41 War has. 
 
 Of course the conventional defense is the simple and 
 romantic one. The Civil War freed the slaves. The Civil 
 War saved the Union. The Civil War established the 
 supremacy of the Federal Government. My answer to 
 that defense is first, that it did not free the slaves ; second, 
 that as time goes on it is very likely to wreck the Union ; 
 third, that the supremacy of the Federal Government is,
 
 U LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 liumanly speaking, a curse rather than a blessing. And 
 the worst tragedy of all is that it might have been 
 avoided. How many school children are taught the sig- 
 nificance of the 1800 to 1830 period in the South when 
 contrasted with the later period of thirty years before the 
 actual conflict ? During the early part of the century the 
 best Southern opinion openly bewailed slavery and manu- 
 mission was encouraged both in the press and on the 
 platform. Had the South been let alone, it is more than 
 likely that in the course of time it would have given 
 freedom to the negroes on its own account. Probably it 
 would not have granted the suffrage, but the moral vic- 
 tory of defeating the principle of bondage would have 
 been won. Slavery per se would have been destroyed — 
 and the only real achievement of the Civil War would 
 have been attained without its awful cost. Furthermore, 
 this solution would have been infinitely preferable to the 
 violent and dramatically sudden one which in fact took 
 place. The South could have adjusted itself to the change 
 gradually and naturally; relations between the blacks 
 and the whites might easily have continued amicable. 
 After all, it was the South, not the North, which was con- 
 fronted mth the problem of living with the negro; it 
 was far better equipped, psychologically, to find a work- 
 able method of adjustment. Unfortunately, this process 
 was practically reversed. From 1830 on the Abolitionist 
 campaign in the North became more and more severe 
 in its condemnation of the principle of slavery; 
 the Churches were divided ; secession was openly talked ; 
 the energies of nearly all the able men of this period 
 were turned into political channels, for in politics one 
 of the great, ever-recurrent American dramas of right 
 and wrong was being staged. The older, benevolent atti- 
 tude of the first three decades of the century disappeared.
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE 45 
 
 The South lived in a genuine fear, not unfounded on 
 fact, of a general negro uprising, fostered by Abolition- 
 ist money and given leadership by such moral fanatics 
 as John Brown. Naturally enough those who aplvocated 
 extremely repressive measures towards the negroes sup- 
 planted the older leaders in direct proportion to the de- 
 gree of anti-slavery agitation in the North. Ultimately 
 they gained complete power. The harshness of their 
 treatment of the slaves aroused the North to even greater 
 intolerance of what it came more and more to consider 
 as a clear case of moral wrong. By 1860 the scene was 
 set for a conflict which produced incredible bitterness, 
 ruined the South economically for a generation, per- 
 verted the w^hole course of our system of representative 
 government, and, most ironical of all, solved none of 
 those problems in terms of which it was ostensibly w^aged. 
 For the Civil "War did not "solve" the negro problem. 
 It produced it ; made the nation conscious of its difficulty. 
 I am not going to make the conventional radical's com- 
 ment that the mere granting of political democracy is 
 nothing when the grantee is robbed of his social and eco- 
 nomic equality of opportunity. For the fact is, the negro 
 in the South is not given even political democracy today 
 as everyone knows. His theoretical right to the ballot 
 remains strictly theoretical. And this open flouting of 
 one of the amendments to the Constitution, which we 
 fought four years to secure, has brought the law, even 
 the highest law of the land, into a popular contempt 
 which bodes ill, by the bye, for the present enthusiastic 
 legislature-coercers, the members of the Anti-Saloon 
 League. But the fact that the slave is not '' freed" in 
 any sense democratically acceptable is really unimport- 
 ant compared with the psychological effects of the Ci\il 
 War. It is here that the real harm has been wrought.
 
 46 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 The arrogance of the negroes during the carpet-bagging 
 period of the South presented the racial problem in its 
 simplest form : "Was a minority race, which considered it- 
 self racially superior, to allow itself to be dominated by 
 a numerically larger but racially and intellectually in- 
 ferior type f Ku Klux Klan was the inevitable answer to 
 that question. The lynchings of today are but an ex- 
 tension of that answer. And there will continue to be 
 lynchings in the future until we have solved the race 
 problem the Civil War bequeathed to us. 
 
 Observe that the negro was not — is not today — a 
 "problem" as long as he is content to "remain in his 
 place," which means in practice of course an inferior 
 place. I sometimes suspect that Northern enthusiasts 
 who send monej^ to the South for educational purposes 
 hardly realize that they are not helping to "solve" the 
 negro problem and that in fact they are merely making 
 it more acute, bringing it to a focus, making the race 
 conflict inevitable.* Because as long as the negro re- 
 mains blissfully content with an inferior status, whether 
 of slavery in name or servitude in fact, one can get along 
 charmingly with him — witness the negro "mammies" 
 who nursed the children of the early rich planter fami- 
 lies. One's affection for him, to put it brutally, is like 
 one's affection for a loyal and good-natured dog. He is 
 even petted. The race problem consequently stays latent, 
 for there is nothing to evoke it. On the other hand the 
 moment the negro assumes an equality, social or intel- 
 lectual or economic, or worse still, works thriftily, studies 
 hard, behaves decently in order actually to achieve that 
 
 * This, of course, must not be construed as an attack upon negro educa- 
 tion. No one would liko to see tlie negro attain his full intellectual and 
 cultural stature sooner than I. Here I am merely trying to point out that 
 until the basic race conflict probleni ivS solved in psychologically acceptable 
 terms the increase of education in the negro renders that problem more 
 acute.
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE 47 
 
 equality or even (as certainly is the case when we com- 
 pare some of the South 's ''poor whites" with a Tuskegee 
 graduate) to become superior — then the race antagon- 
 ism comes out in all its fury. This attitude is a chal- 
 lenge: if the negro is as well-educated as we, if he is as 
 able a craftsman or professional man, if he is socially as 
 adaptable, if he is a real equal, then what reason remains 
 that he may not act as one? Why may he not compete 
 •with us in business, in our profession, in social prestige, 
 even (and here we go to the root of the powerful but 
 obscure race antagonism) in lovef* The answer is, of 
 course, no reason at all — except instinctive race hatred 
 which his assumption of equality challenges and which 
 we do not accept. I realize that there are sentimentalists 
 who claim to accept this challenge,! but I have observed 
 that in most cases they are people who have little actual 
 contact with the negro in a competitive, as distinguished 
 from a patronizing, sense. Does the South accept the chal- 
 lenge? We know it does not. Does the North? We 
 might perhaps have thought so until the AVashington and 
 Chicago race riots taught us our lesson. 
 
 I cannot here go into any extensive discussion of the 
 nature and sources of the instinctive race antagonism 
 between black and white. How much of it is ''natural,'* 
 how much merely the result of education and association, 
 
 * A study of American Intolerance. By Alfred B. Kuttner. TTie Dial 
 (Chicago), Volume LXIV, pages 223 and 282. This exceptionally able 
 article traces the development of our severe domestic intolerance during the 
 war back to the unacknowledged race antagonisms engendered and made 
 bitter by the Civil War. I am much indebted to it. 
 
 t As in the case of Eandolph Bourne. Poor Bourne — although his own 
 brave spirit would have resented the adjective — himself was under a severe 
 physical handicap and knew the bitterness of unjust social discrimination. 
 I often thought it explained his particularly Avarm espousal of the doctrine 
 that race hatreds were the result of mere bad education and false ideals 
 of superiority. In this one respect, it seems inevitable that his thinking 
 should have been warped by his sympathies. One could understand it. 
 But it is really difficult to understand the expansiveness of the romanticists 
 ■who have never spent ten consecutive minutes talking to a negro.
 
 48 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 lias not yet been determined by psychologists. In his 
 ''Human Nature In Politics" Graham Wallas writes, 
 ' ' The future peace of the world largely turns on the ques- 
 tion whether we have, as is sometimes said and often 
 assumed, an instinctive affection for those human beings 
 whose features and colour are like our own, combined 
 with an instinctive hatred for those who are unUke us. 
 ... I am inclined to think that those strong and ap- 
 parently simple cases of racial hatred and affection which 
 can certainly be found, are not instances of a specific and 
 universal instinct but the result of several distinct and 
 comparatively weak instincts combined and heightened 
 by habit and association." Certainly in one sense the 
 war has justified this optimism. We have seen how West- 
 ern civilized nations during four years of war by arti- 
 ficially cutting contact between themselves, by propa- 
 ganda, by playing upon a multitude of complex instincts 
 not themselves related to the race-hatred instinct, have 
 each evolved in their national consciousness a concept of 
 the enemy only remotely connected with the truth. Dur- 
 ing the war, in America in many parts of the country 
 we certainly hated the German worse than we hated the 
 negro. And conversely, with the collapse of the arti- 
 ficialities of war-time we have seen the balloon-hatreds 
 disappear over night almost. Superficially, at all events, 
 it may not be Utopian to look forward to an era when 
 diversity of national types, in a world set free of the 
 economic and political rivalries of the present order, may 
 actually be regarded as a diversity to be desired and even 
 encouraged. Liberals ought to put psychologists to work 
 on this supremely important problem. Yet I ventured 
 above to use the hard word sentimentalist because what- 
 ever the future, the present is a fact. Race-hatred exists 
 today, and to call it ''unreasonable" is merely piously to
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE 49 
 
 avoid the immense psychological and sociological difficul- 
 ties required for its pressingly necessary solution. 
 
 Facing those difficulties in a patient and scientific 
 spirit, however, is exactly what American liberals have 
 never done. They have contented themselves with per- 
 haps an occasional contribution to some negro educa- 
 tional institution or more frequently — and as f utilely — 
 with editorial condemnation of the immorality of lynch- 
 ing. Foreign observers have not failed to notice this 
 anomaly, and for our refusal to face the negro problem 
 realistically have invented the caustic term, ''the Ameri- 
 can blind spot." The effects of this "blind spot" in our 
 national life are many and they are all disastrous and 
 disintegrating. The first effect is the contempt for law 
 aroused by the existence of a Constitutional Amendment 
 which no one even pretends is enforced. The second is 
 the political disintegration and chaos brought about by 
 the "Solid South," which makes political division ac- 
 cording to principle and economic interest impossible. 
 All we do when we vote under our — practically — two- 
 party system is to vote for one party, the party of power, 
 wealth, conservatism, vested interest. All we decide by 
 our ballot is whether the predominantly Northern or the 
 predominantly Southern section of that party shall be 
 given the patronage and spoils of office.* There is no 
 other genuine difference. But perhaps the third conse- 
 quence is the worst of all, the subtle way in which this 
 unacknowledged and unsolved race hatred of the negro 
 has worked for the increase of intolerance towards all 
 ahen groups within the national body. Our original 
 Puritanism, our large geographical sweep which made it 
 
 * It will be extremely interesting to note if any aggressive new * * third ' ' 
 party can out into the solid Democratic vote of the South, splitting it, 
 80 to speak, vertically. Tlie present outlook seems dubious, although 1920 
 is likely to see a strong ' ' Third Party ' ' movement.
 
 50 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 possible for groups or individuals disagreeing with the 
 people with whom they found themselves to ''move on'* 
 (as they were usually encouraged to do in such cases), 
 were sufficient to promote a high degree of domestic in- 
 tolerance. Until the country filled up — and in one sense 
 it has not done so yet — we had never had the disciphne 
 of living in close contact with those who disagree with us, 
 something which makes unerringly for tolerance. But 
 added to these natural causes for American intolerance 
 was the intrusive negro problem. The period following 
 the Civil War was also a period of immigration by South- 
 eastern Europeans and Slavic races of a lower type in 
 their standard of living and literacy than the ante-bellum 
 immigrants. The reason why we made so bad a job of 
 "Americanization" of thousands of them was because 
 we carried over to them the psychology of the dominant 
 race which we had unconsciously adopted towards the 
 negro. Founded by pioneers, the truth was that by 1880 
 the word ''foreigner" was a word of contempt. The in- 
 dustrial boom follo"wing the war, the feeling of strength 
 and success in our republican experiment (it was our 
 braggart age), combined to make us intolerant of all im- 
 migrants who ventured to contribute any of their native 
 culture to what we considered was a highly admirable 
 American culture not requiring any amendment. We 
 isolated them and secretly a little despised them. How 
 strong that intolerance was of any but Anglo-Saxon 
 standards and ideas was illustrated tragically in the 
 present war, and even as I write this chapter we have 
 not seen its end. The intolerance which stained our 
 record in the domestic handhng of the war would never 
 have reached its disastrous extent and depth had it not 
 been reinforced by our attitude towards the negro. As 
 the author of the article of "A Study of American In-
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE 51 
 
 tolerance" (see note above) succintly says: "Our certi- 
 fied Americans, educated in the theory that the world war 
 was a struggle for Anglo-Saxon prestige and bitterly 
 concerned to preserve their own domestic prestige, were 
 quick to see the issue. Their sure instinct discovered 
 the 'enemy within,' a phrase which in itself shows an 
 intuitional genius of no mean order. Balked in their 
 desire to get at the foreign enemy, they turned upon those 
 whom they had long sensed as hostile forces in their very 
 midst." 
 
 I do not pretend that the negro problem in all its essen- 
 tial phases would not have arisen had the Civil War 
 been avoided. The whole challenge of that problem must 
 inevitably have come to the front as soon as it was 
 formally recognized that no man had the moral right to 
 enslave another. Once men of any color are free, they 
 look for ways and means to put themselves on a plane of 
 social and economic equality with their neighbors. Once 
 having eaten of the tree of knowledge, there is no way 
 of preventing the desire for more fruit. One single edu- 
 cated and ambitious negro would have been enough to 
 make thousands of his kind discontented and ambitious. 
 With the increase of intercommunication and the exten- 
 sion of general education of the modern world the rest- 
 lessness of the negro would have come of its own accord. 
 We could not have escaped the negro problem even had 
 we so desired. Yet we could have escaped the Civil War, 
 and looking back now to that era and the sixty odd years 
 preceding it we can see how great would have been the 
 advantages had we done so. We can see now exactly in 
 what a mess our itch for violence landed us. We can 
 see now that the real American liberal then should have 
 preached tolerance, peaceful reimbursement of the slave- 
 owners, encouragement of the older benevolent Southern
 
 52 LIBEEALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 attitude towards the negro. He would not have allowed 
 himself the costly luxury of moral fanaticism — costly to 
 the negro himself, to the South, and to the national de- 
 velopment of the country. That to me is the plain lesson 
 of the violence and brutality of the Civil War, which is 
 still revealed to our impressionable youth in the school 
 history books as a glorious mile-post on the path of 
 human progress towards liberty and self-government. 
 And as we did not learn the lesson of the Civil War, it 
 is hardly to be wondered at that American liberals were 
 caught unprepared by the present war. Today they pre- 
 tend that at least in tliis case they have really learned 
 the lesson. Yet I sometimes doubt it ; perhaps my chief 
 human impulse in writing this book is the wish to see that 
 the reasons why the present war for "freeing the world" 
 has become such a ghastly mockery to American liberals 
 should not be forgotten or overlooked. For unless we 
 are wilHng to fight hard and consistently for a few old- 
 fashioned principles, we shall find that the next genera- 
 tion will be looking upon this war with the same glasses 
 of rosy mythology with which we were supplied in our 
 youth. We shall find them solemnly lisping in the gram- 
 mar schools that it was a war to make the world safe for 
 democracy at the very time Congress is appropriating 
 money for some punitive, imperialistic expedition against 
 a weak — and rich — neighbor. 
 
 This emphasis upon the Civil War has been justified by 
 its classic illustration of one of our fundamental and per- 
 haps most dangerous defects, our willingness to resort to 
 violence for purely abstract moral ends. (It is im- 
 material here whether economic ends are coincidently 
 encompassed; the popular driving force certainly is not 
 conscious consideration of economic ends.) This is both 
 an off-shoot of our early Puritanism and of the peculiar
 
 THE ENGLISH HERITAGE 53 
 
 dualism of the American character, a kind of mystical 
 practicality, in which Puritanism resulted. As a result 
 of the degree to which this attitude was aroused during 
 the Civil War, when the particular issue of slavery was 
 closed, it became harsh and intolerant and developed 
 what one might call a moralistic will to power, for as 
 time went on the leaders in this movement were only 
 nominally connected with the Church. It was merely a 
 sort of aimless braggadocio during the carpet-bagging 
 period, preaching Americanism rather stridently, and 
 sharply individualistic. Very quickly, however, having 
 no other devils to conquer, it attacked the liquor traffic 
 and later what it was pleased to term '^obscenity" in 
 literature and art. These campaigns speedily developed 
 more vitality than purely religious awakenings, and by 
 the beginning of the great war had become as popular 
 for the mass of people who had no other outlet for their 
 moralistic fervor as the great right and wrong contests 
 every four years, othei^se called Presidential elections. 
 This was the darker side of American character. The 
 early and healthy hatred of servility, however, remained 
 to a great degree unaffected except in the industrial 
 mushroom towns where the division between foreign 
 cheap labor and the native landholders and professional 
 and business men created rather sharp class divisions. 
 Unfortunately even this healthy instinct, towards the end 
 of the 19th century, became perverted into contempt for 
 art and literature — aided of course by the moralistic 
 campaign — contempt for scientists (who were always 
 depicted as absent-minded "nuts"), intellectuals, college 
 professors, in fact for anything or anybody who laid 
 claim to more intelligence and culture than the lajmian 
 of the street. It developed into what Mr. Van Wyck 
 Brooks has so aptly called, "The Apotheosis of the Low-
 
 54 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 Brow." Literature, from the Civil War on, went 
 througli what one might term a period of deliquescent 
 Transcendentahsm, and emerged lifeless and arid. All 
 this blend of strains which made up the American char- 
 acter — the strain of idealism, of practicality, of harsh 
 intolerance, of hatred of servility turning into contempt 
 of the fine arts, of ardor for moralistic abstractions, of 
 violence coupled with a sincere international pacifism, 
 of pioneer ingenuity and economic energy, of pietistic 
 reformism like the "muck-raking" era — all this inevi- 
 tably had its influence on the background of American 
 liberalism before the war. Our liberalism could not have 
 escaped, even had it wanted to, the pressure of the cul- 
 tural and social and political miheu. The composition of 
 this American blend, the direction of these pressures, the 
 emergence of new forces help us to understand both the 
 fragihty and the strength of American liberalism as it 
 stood before the test of 1914. That analysis I reserve for 
 the next chapter.
 
 CHAPTER THREE 
 
 AMERICAN LIBEKALISM TO THE EVE OF THE WAB 
 
 "Puritanism was a complete philosophy for the pioneer and hy 
 making human nature contemptible and putting to shame the clvarms 
 of life it unleashed the possessive instincts of men, disembarrassing 
 those instincts by creating the belief tlmt man's true life is altogether 
 within him and tlmt the imagination ought never to conflict with the 
 law of the tribe. It was this that determined the character of our old 
 culture, which cleared the decl'S for practical action by draining away 
 all tlie irreconcilab''e elements of the American nature into a tran- 
 scendental upper sphere." — Van Wyck Brooks in "The Culture of 
 Industrialism," The Seven Arts (New York), for April, 1917. 
 
 "Men's impulses and desires may be divided into those that are 
 creative and those that are possessive. Some of our activities are 
 directed to creating wliat would not otherwise exist, others are directed 
 towards acquiring or retaining what exists already. The typical cre- 
 ative impulse is that of the artist; the typical possessive instinct is 
 tliat of property. The best life is that in which creative impulses play 
 tlie largest part and possessive impulses the smallest. The best institu- 
 tions are those which produce the greatest possible creativeness and 
 the least possessiveness compatible with self-preservation." — Bertrand 
 Bussell. 
 
 IT is related of Lord Northcliffe that when he was visit- 
 ing this country an American friend asked him if he 
 believed there would ever be a revolution here. At the 
 time, they were in a do\\Titown office building of New 
 York during the lunch hour. Lord NorthcHffe led his 
 friend to the window and asked him to look at the crowd 
 below. ' ' Do you see all those people ? " he said. * ' Ever>'- 
 one is wearing exactly the same hat. Everyone looks the 
 same. Everyone is the same. There will be no revo- 
 lution." 
 
 Perhaps if Lord Northcliffe were better acquainted 
 with our native itch for violence, he would not have been 
 so certain. But there was a basic justice in the remark; 
 
 55
 
 56 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 one has a legitimate right not to expect anything except 
 docility from a people so standardized as we have become 
 since the industrial revolution reached its climax. The 
 process of standardization has been carried further in 
 America than in any other country. The jokes which 
 San Francisco laughs at this week will be New York's 
 own jests the next. You can go into any one of a thou- 
 sand of American cities and find a uniformity of opinion 
 as to the merits of Ty Cobb as a baseball player or Mary 
 Pickford as a photo-play star or Harry Leon Wilson 
 as a writer of fiction. Our superficial opinions, like our 
 shirts and collars and straw hats, are all relentlessly 
 machine-made. Our newspapers' *' syndicate" cartoon- 
 ists, and one of Rube Goldberg's engaging *'I'm The 
 Guy" 's or ''Boob" 's will appear simultaneously in 
 several different cities. Even editorial opinion is ma- 
 chine-made, quite literally I mean. In a central office one 
 editorial will be printed and set up. Copies of this edi- 
 torial — boiler plates, they are called — will be dis- 
 tributed to all the newspapers included in the "service." 
 Foreign correspondents during the war and after do not 
 write, in nine cases out of ten, for a single newspaper 
 but for several, and when they come home their summing 
 up is printed in one of our popular magazines. "William 
 Allen White, for example, was the correspondent not 
 only of the powerful New York World, but also of the 
 Kansas City Star, and when he came home he summed 
 up in the Saturday Evening Post, which boasts a circula- 
 tion of over a million a week and is probably read by 
 three times that number. It is the same story with the 
 amenities of life as it is with political opinion. Los 
 Angeles will be singing "Smiles" within a week after it 
 has become a popular hit in New York. If you find Chi- 
 cago doing the "shimmy," you will find Boston doing
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 57 
 
 the same; if it is the fox trot which is then in favor, 
 both cities will be fox trotting. Literally millions of 
 people the country over see the same ''News of the 
 Week" films, w^ith their highly propaganda-like captions, 
 and the humors of Silk Hat Harry and Happy Hooligan, 
 with all this signifies for American taste, are flashed 
 from coast to coast with unfailing regularity. The citi- 
 zens of Philadelphia, New Orleans, Atlantic City, and 
 Boston, no less than those of the West, have their jaded 
 senses titillated by the charms of Mr. Mack Sennett's 
 ''Bathing Beauties," and it is safe to say that there is 
 hardly a single one of Miss Annette Kellerman's charm- 
 ing curves with which the entire American public is not 
 well acquainted. 
 
 In whatever direction you turn, you will find this same 
 standardization. In furniture, for instance, I believe we 
 have passed through the late "Mission" period and the 
 arbiters of elegance at Grand Rapids have not settled 
 definitely upon the ante-bellum style, but during the 
 height of this period it was well nigh impossible to go 
 into an average American home without discovering at 
 least one example of that pathetic burlesque upon crafts- 
 manship. Cement villas in the suburbs, city flats with 
 their inevitable bedrooms, kitchen, living-room, dining- 
 room, and bath — there may be minor variations, but 
 how indistinguishable thousands upon thousands of them 
 are! Even our wall papers are made by machines, and 
 for a considerable time the Middle West suffered horribly 
 from green wall paper in the dining-room simply be- 
 cause green was the accepted aesthetic "thing." On the 
 aesthetic plane, in fact, we are drearily uniform in our 
 timidity. The average American ^vill go into hysterics 
 at a primary color — outside the theatre and the art 
 gallery — and it is creditably narrated that when one of
 
 58 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 the more daring of the artists on the South Side of 
 Washington Square, in New York, painted his attic win- 
 dow and surrounding wood-work a gay vermilion, a 
 conservative resident of the North Side of the same 
 Square threatened to have him arrested for disturbing 
 the peace! No conviction is firmer in the American 
 mind than that certain tastes and likes and dislikes are 
 ''correct" or "the thing." Aesthetically, even more 
 than socially and politically, our consuming desire is, to 
 use our own inelegant phrase, ''to get on the band- 
 wagon." 
 
 It is, however, an ungracious task to describe the vast 
 average of American life. For after all when we describe 
 it we are but describing, in an exaggerated instance, a 
 degradation of life common more or less to all the 
 AVestern nations who have fallen under the spell of 
 large-scale industry. In Europe, to be sure, there have 
 been during the half-century preceding the war great 
 protesters against the benumbing influence of untempered 
 industrialism; the strands between the individual ex- 
 cellences in the past and the perhaps majority excellences 
 of a possible future were never severed. The tradition 
 of what fine, creative living could be like was never 
 totally lost. Men like Nietszche in Germany, Ibsen in 
 Norway, Morris in England, in different terms and from 
 different points of view, fought bitterly against the great 
 evil of the later nineteenth century — the machine, the 
 machine which encouraged the possessive instincts of 
 men almost to the exclusion of all others. In America, 
 special circumstances made the machine complete king 
 of all it surveyed. The creative tradition was submerged 
 in a flood of mechanical achievement. Why? 
 
 Well, the pioneer psychology was still dominant at the 
 close of the Civil War. There were still railroads to
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 59 
 
 build, wildernesses to subdue, cities to erect, rivers to 
 span, vast areas to colonize. Our conquering of a conti- 
 nent was not completed. The Puritan, of course, had 
 been able to put all his practical energies into the severe 
 material problems confronting him because he evolved 
 the ingenious theory that any deflecting instincts, for 
 color or leisure or thought, were crimes against God him- 
 self. His thin creative life could be satisfied by con- 
 templation of narrow tenets of his creed, or, as expressed 
 by the quotation which heads this chapter, ''by creating 
 the belief that man's true life is altogether within him 
 and that the imagination ought never to conflict with the 
 law of the tribe." And what was the law of the tribe 
 at the time! Why, to survive in an extremely harsh 
 environment of hostile Indians, bleak winters, late har- 
 vests, drouths, uncultivated soil. Similarly, the law of 
 the tribe at the close of the Civil War was to expand, to 
 fill up the country, to become rich and strong, to make 
 the republican experiment succeed in terms of strictly 
 material success. Any turning aside from this immediate 
 and primary task was treason to the brotherhood of men 
 engaged in a great trial of strength. The whole Ameri- 
 can emphasis was upon the posc. ssive instincts of man. 
 
 Even a brief survey of the history of that period estab- 
 lishes the main point. It was the era of colonization of 
 the West, of the development of the great steel industries, 
 of the expansion of the railroads (in 1860 we had 30,000 
 miles of railroad and in 1910 242,000, or almost one 
 hundred times as much), of "combinations," of the 
 foundation of immense fortunes, of incredible real estate 
 speculation, of political grafting and intrigue for money 
 ends, of great inventions, of rapid rise in population, of 
 incipient imperialism, of financial growth. It was our 
 boom period. Anyone who ventured to interpose any
 
 60 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 claims of the creative spiritual life in the torrent of that 
 Gargantuan rush of achievement was swept aside.* 
 Whitman was a success and a failure symbolically — a 
 success, a genius who did express his period, but pre- 
 cisely because he swallowed the whole heterogeneous 
 mass of material accomplishment hook, line, bait and 
 sinker, yet a failure because he did not stand out against 
 his period with a clear philosophy of protest. 
 
 In fact, who could? Mark Twain himself, all-too- 
 human to endure what would have been inevitable isola- 
 tion, kept his protests to himself. Publicly, he was the 
 great American buffoon, justifying us implicitly in his 
 salHes at Europe and art and culture and all that did not 
 relish native Yankee shrewdness. The transcendental 
 school in New England made our polite literature an ex- 
 position of the wholly false theory that one hit the 
 centre of creative life only when one turned one's back 
 wholly and completely on the real world. Philosophy 
 and culture were thought of in purely individualistic 
 terms, not in social or tribal terms. Emerson preached 
 the duty of self-reliance at a time when men were eager 
 to have some scholarly and cultural justification for their 
 pioneering, acquisitive, objective instincts. The Ameri- 
 can world was then on two levels (which is what I meant 
 when I spoke of our peculiar dualism) — the level of 
 material effort and striving in the outer world, the level 
 of justification of our mundane virtues in the inner world 
 of ideas. Creative effort was popularly thought of only 
 in the money-making sense, where it was applied to liter- 
 ature and the arts it was meant to designate the gilding 
 of the **real" world. Literature and art, consequently 
 became not an instrument for understanding life, but a 
 
 *A picture of that whole period is contained in Mr. Charles A. Beard 'a 
 Contemporary American History, 1877-1913 (Macmillan), 1918.
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 61 
 
 method of escape from it. Philosophy turned out to be 
 an exercise in harmless abstractions, which — when they 
 could be apphed to life — were applicable only in the 
 sense that they completely applauded everything that 
 men were then doing. They applauded thrift, activity, 
 acquisition of money, rigid discipline of the more way- 
 ward impulses. Thus during this era, whatever may be 
 said of our crudeness, we were fairly "integrated" 
 people. Our possessive and creative impulses did not 
 clash with each other. They off-set each other. They 
 cooperated. And the fruit of that cooperation was the 
 physically prosperous America which we know today. 
 
 What all this meant for our spiritual life must now be 
 fairly obvious. "When the reaction against industrialism 
 came, as it was bound to do sooner or later, our prepara- 
 tion for it was about as complete as our preparation for 
 war in 1917. We had just begun to find out how unpre- 
 pared we were, how our literary men and philosophers 
 (James excepted), had left us in the lurch by dallying 
 in a Transcendental world which satisfied us spiritually 
 as long as we were content with the daily life of pros- 
 perous acquisition, but which became singularly un- 
 palatable when we grew fundamentally skeptical of our 
 acquisitions. When our heart was really on activity, 
 transcendentalism did very well as a temporary vacation 
 from it. It was like our Sunday clothes and good senti- 
 ments — excellent in their place but of no use on week- 
 days. AYhen, however, our faith in activity became under- 
 mined, when there was no longer any blinking of the 
 horrible devastation our uncritical materialism and doc- 
 trine of success had wrought, then in tnith Transcen- 
 dentalism was a weak reed in time of affliction. We 
 found that we were, for all our triumphs, a rudderless 
 nation. We had no philosophy, no convictions, no man
 
 62 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 with a rallying-cry. We were just discovering our weak- 
 ness. It made us uneasy and restless. The ferment of 
 new ideas and rebellion from 1900 on was but a reflection 
 of our disquieting discovery. The younger generation 
 was completing the discovery for us and was shouting 
 extremely unpleasant things in our ears. Then came the 
 war in Europe which drew our minds away from our 
 own problems. Finally came our own entrance into it, 
 and after a few weeks of hesitation, we plunged forward 
 almost joyfully. Here was something we understood — 
 doing something. No more unpleasant spiritual intro- 
 spections ! No more self-depreciations ! No more uneasy 
 conscience to tell us that perhaps there was something 
 radically wrong in the whole tone of our national lifel 
 Here w^as something to summon from us our best tradi- 
 tional efforts of achievement and accomplishment. Better 
 still, it seemed plausible to wrap our activity in the midst 
 of a vague, yet genuine idealism. Thus the cycle was 
 complete ; we disliked self-analysis, the war gave us our 
 chance to return whole-heartedly to action; yet we also 
 disliked to think that we were not also serving some in- 
 ner, noble purpose in this activity, the war gave us our 
 chance for idealism. And just when the false integration 
 of the reconstruction and later days was beginning to be 
 questioned and in fact, under the blows of our critics and 
 our dissenters to disappear, along came the war to re- 
 integrate us in our traditional terms of activity and 
 accomplishment.* 
 
 Now from the very time the philosophy of New Eng- 
 land — either the early rigid Puritanism or the later 
 Transcendentalism, both individualistic to the core — 
 
 * With the disintegration which must necessarily follow the close of the 
 war, the blows of our critics and dissenters will in all likelihood become even 
 more severe. Most of our youn^'cr nnos, unlike the European nations, wo 
 forunately did not lose on tlie battlefield.
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 63 
 
 began to be weakened in its appeal, the impulse which 
 had created that philosophy took a new form. Unfortu- 
 nately it was a very debased form. After all, we were not 
 complete barbarians, yet the somewhat thin creative ac- 
 tivity of surveying the Over-Soul was hardly sufficienl 
 spiritual satisfaction for so sturdy and active a people 
 as ourselves. Was there not some other ''disinterested" 
 end we could pursue idealistically? some end that offered 
 more satisfaction in terms of \dsible accomplishment and 
 social prestige and power? Could we not be as spectacu- 
 larly successful in achie^dng some moral purpose as our 
 business men were in making money? One has to re- 
 member that this transference of moral activity from 
 inner wrestling with the spirit to outer wrestling with 
 the visible forces of the De^dl was something which par- 
 ticularly appealed to the American temperament. The 
 transference is happily illustrated in two common words, 
 both used in connection with our campaign for the sup- 
 pression of the liquor traffic — the words abstinence and 
 prohibition. As early as 1824 total abstinence societies 
 were being formed. Abstinence, of course, is an indi- 
 vidualistic phenomenon, the compulsion it implies is a 
 purely personal one. Its emphasis is upon persuasion 
 by argument resulting in a voluntary and self-imposed 
 pledge. But the satisfactions of winning a triumph over 
 one's own temptations is seldom sufficient unless it can 
 receive social approval, and from the desire of prestige 
 for one's restraint it is an easy step to the desire to 
 restrain other people in a like manner — in a word, to 
 prohibit.* Thus by 1851 Maine, through a succession of 
 laws, committed herself to prohibition. The movement 
 which had begun as a voluntary grouping of people who 
 
 •See the illuminating article by Eandolph Bourne, "The Puritan's 
 Will to Power," in The Seven Arts (New York), for April, 1917.
 
 64 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 personally were abstemious had developed into au ag- 
 gressive organization admittedly devoted to imposing its 
 standards upon other people. The growth of the Anti- 
 Saloon League in later times is an illuminating example 
 of the rise of the ''will to power" in the Puritan tem- 
 perament when it turns its emphasis from purely 
 religious problems, such as sin and forgiveness and con- 
 version (which like all genuine rehgious problems are 
 in essence individualistic), to specific moral problems 
 of general social life. From pleading with church leaders 
 to support their cause the members of the Anti-Saloon 
 League soon progressed to the point of dictating to them, 
 from lobbying in legislative halls they progressed to the 
 point of intimidating individual legislators. They de- 
 veloped an enormous organization and they had plenty of 
 funds. Humanly speaking, the members of the organiza- 
 tion derived not half so much satisfaction from seeing 
 the world become virtuous as they did from the exercise 
 of power. Also there was the deep and subtle satisfaction 
 of observing what you had denied yourself forcibly 
 denied to others, the strain of proselytism in all of us 
 which demands that when we have seen the evil of certain 
 ways we must not rest until all the world has likewise 
 seen it. 
 
 Unhappily, the world of the flesh and the Devil was not 
 confined merely to whiskey and rum. There were fallen 
 women, obscene pictures, ''suggestive" books, cigarettes 
 and other pernicious forms of that evil weed, tobacco. 
 From the Civil War on the growth of organizations dedi- 
 cated to the task of saving other people's souls is perhaps 
 the most remarkable as it certainly is the saddest chapter 
 in American social history. What "Comstockery" 
 meant in stultifying American art and letters is admirably 
 exposed in Mr. H. L. Mencken's witty and discerning
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 65 
 
 article, '* Puritanism As A Literary Force."* The 
 *' clean up" campaigns in the big cities, the hounding of 
 prostitutes, the drastic adultery and fornication laws, 
 the closing of performances such as ''Salome" and 
 ''Sapho," the persecution of novelists who might write 
 a line calculated to embarrass any pure maiden of tender 
 years, the regulation of women's bathing suits at our 
 beaches, the passage of anti-cigarette laws, the arrest 
 of those who sought to give out information on birth 
 control — all are merely extensions of the same perverted 
 moralism. Except for the Anti-Saloon League, which, 
 with its usual underhand methods, contrived to "put 
 over" the Prohibition Amendment during the excitement 
 of war time, most of these organizations necessarily had 
 to retire gracefully from the stage during the war. But 
 with the advent of peace they are again in the foreground. 
 The Anti-Saloon League, as I write, is debating whether 
 to put its money and energy into enforcement legislation 
 in America or to devote most of its time to an amiable 
 campaign to make the entire world dry. Yesterday in an 
 evening newspaper a Lucy Page Gaston, who signs 
 herself, ''Founder and Superintendent Anti-Cigarette 
 League," concludes a letter to the editor, after stating 
 that the League is out to destroy tobacco all over the 
 world, with this sentiment: "Associated with the boys 
 and girls, in whom is the heroic spirit waiting only to be 
 roused, will be men every^vhere whose personal example 
 is helpful to the growing youth, w^omen of high and holy 
 ideals," — of whom, observe, the writer must necessarily 
 be one — "and young people of noble purpose. Only by 
 some such far-reaching and soul-inspiring movement will 
 it be possible to save America's ideals and early tradi- 
 tions. The world looks to us for leadership, and habits 
 
 * A Book of Prefaces. By H. L, Mencken. Knopf; 1917.
 
 66 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 of self-indulgence, like cigarette smoking, must not hold 
 in their grip the rank and file of Americans, or the doom 
 of the Benjamin among the nations is sounded." 
 
 This pecuhar American zeal for making everyone pure 
 of mind and body has been the impulse back of many 
 queer faddisms and heresy hunts which so impress a 
 foreign observer. It is really difficult to understand the 
 peculiar temptations to which the liberal in America is 
 subjected, if this highly developed Puritan ''will to 
 power" is not kept in mind. There is excuse for the 
 analyst of the American reform movement who confuses 
 the liberal suggestions in that movement with the many 
 idealistically phrased compulsions of what might be 
 called enforced meliorism, with which true liberalism is 
 perpetually at war. In other countries, too, there are 
 the Wellsian **for Gawd sakers" who think the road to 
 Utopia is paved with the ''Thou shalt not" 's of legis- 
 latures, but in our morals, as in most everything else, 
 we are much more intolerant than other countries and 
 consequently our reformers who believe in mehorism by 
 enactment are proportionately larger in numbers. Tbey 
 infect us all to a certain extent. As Mr. Walter Lipp- 
 mann shrewdly pointed out,* even so temperate and fine 
 a character as Miss Jane Addams w^hen confronted with 
 the great human evil of prostitution could really think 
 of no better remedy than to call for a policeman. 
 
 Liberalism, from its very philosophy, cannot and does 
 not sypathize with this method of making the world a 
 better place to live in. What the liberal ever seeks is 
 voluntary allegiance, not enforced allegiance. His whole 
 method of attack is fundamentally different; the liberal 
 is far more interested in education than he is in the 
 criminal code. For surely if there is one point in ethics 
 
 *A Preface to Politics. By Walter Lippmann. Kenerley; 1913. Page 79.
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 67 
 
 which has been made clear by man's experience during 
 all the centuries of struggle over the problem of good 
 and evil it is that reform of any kind which comes from 
 outer compulsion instead of inner discipline is not worth 
 a penny. Not only that: the free man is not afraid to 
 trust his impulses and, granted the intelligence which 
 itself acts as a disciplinary force, he is not afraid that if 
 he is spontaneous he will get into trouble. In reahty it is 
 the man who is a slave to his own impulses who invari- 
 ably feels the necessity for an artificial code, for wall 
 mottoes, resolutions, "schedules," and symbolical strings 
 tied around his finger for moral reminders. Similarly a 
 free nation is not afraid to trust its own impulses ; it does 
 not in an hysterical panic rush to its legislatures and 
 plead for new laws to suppress every real or imaginary 
 evil. If anything were needed to convince us that as a 
 nation we are unsure of ourselves, in fact a little afraid 
 of ourselves, our doubts Avould vanish before the unde- 
 niable fact that we are afflicted with legalism. We make 
 laws for ever^^thing and every occasion. A law student 
 once told me after reading the criminal code of New York 
 State and the local enactments of Now York City that he 
 was certain no normal God-fearing respectable citizen 
 of Manhattan went through an average week without 
 violating at least fifty different laws of greater or less 
 stringency. That reformism of this kind is worse than 
 useless and that it often results in the particularly Ameri- 
 can hypocrisy of enacting a law with our right hand 
 while we deliberately break it with our left will hardly 
 need to be argued further. 
 
 Yet it remains a significant fact that the liberals of 
 America, those to whom this whole compulsory morals 
 campaign is instinctively distasteful, have on the whole 
 done so little to fight it. To be sure, there is the *'Volun-
 
 68 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 tary Parenthood League," composed of thousands of citi- 
 zens with otherwise conflicting opinions, which through 
 intelHgent propaganda hopes ultimately to have the laws 
 against the dissemination of knowledge of birth control 
 repealed, although this organization is of comparatively 
 recent origin. There have always been intermittent pro- 
 tests against the stupidity and intolerance of our dif- 
 ferent Comstocks and occasionally even the newspapers 
 poked fun at some new absurdity of the censorship, for 
 here every intelligent person instinctively felt we were 
 making ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of the world. But 
 in the far better test case of prohibition — far better 
 because it required considerable courage to fight it and 
 because one's motives easily came under popular sus- 
 picion — the liberals did practically nothing. During 
 the period when the various State Legislatures were 
 hastily ratifying the Amendment — and in some cases, 
 as particularly in California, in direct violation of a 
 popular mandate — the self-consciously liberal journals 
 of New York, such as The New Republic, The Nation, 
 The Dial, The Public, and The Survey, confined their 
 notice of the prohibition campaign to polite gibes at its 
 absurdity, when indeed they condescended to notice it at 
 all. 
 
 There was, I suspect, a temperamental reason for this 
 in addition to other timidities. American liberals are, 
 on the whole, a rather bloodless lot, and on Armistice Day 
 — or rather on the more spontaneous mistaken Thursday 
 previous — I fancy very few of them were to be found 
 reeling through the streets of New York or even fighting 
 for a chance to buy a holiday cocktail. There is a kind 
 of Young Men's Christian Association background to 
 their mind ; there is a touch of the Chautauqua in them ; 
 they are just a trifle too self-consciously good and pure.
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 69 
 
 The ordinary man who, like the ordinary man of all ages, 
 preserves something of the healthy Rabelaisian sub-soil 
 in him, is usually a trifle embarrassed in talking with 
 them, as a street-walker might be embarrassed in her 
 first encounter with an angel. Of course this is the more 
 or less natural result of the American tradition, which 
 instinctively couples virtue with abnegation and restraint 
 instead of identifpng it with activity and fighting for 
 certain good ends. Yet it is a real pity, for it has in the 
 popular mind tended to bring discredit upon all "re- 
 formers." They are too frequently envisaged as kill-joy 
 Dinwidies in black frock coats, and the average citizen 
 of whom they are so solicitous cannot quite escape the 
 conviction that they are a little less than men. Unfor- 
 tunate, however, as this semi-saintliness may be, the 
 liberal's real quarrel with them is on a question of 
 principle rather than on the score of an unfortunate na- 
 tional tradition in morals. Coercion for the sake of 
 virtue is as repugnant as coercion for the sake of vice. 
 If American liberals are unwilhng to fight the principle 
 of coercion in the case of the Prohibition Amendment 
 simply because they personally are not much interested 
 in whether the country is dry or not, then they are dis- 
 credited the moment they fight coercion in those cases 
 where they are interested. Either they believe in coercion 
 or they do not. If they do not, then they are under bonds 
 to fight it wherever it appears and under whatever dis- 
 guise it cloaks itself. One cannot expect to be taken 
 seriously in arguing for the right of self-determination 
 of the inhabitants of the Saar Valley, when one com- 
 pletely ignores the violation of one aspect of that right 
 in the case of the inhabitants of New York City. One 
 cannot be a liberal like President Wilson and pick and 
 choose where principles shall apply without sooner or
 
 70 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 later coming to grief. There is another unfortunate side 
 to it also, namely, loss of popular confidence. Precisely 
 because the ordinary man in New York is not much in- 
 terested in what happens to the inhabitants of the Saar 
 Valley whereas he is extremely interested in whether 
 he is going to be deprived of the right to buy a drink, 
 he will be more inclined to follow the advice of the New 
 York World or the American than he will be to follow 
 the New Republic. In the first instance he feels that 
 these papers have been fighting for him, and consequently 
 he is disposed to accept their judgment in matters he 
 knows little of. In the second case he feels that he has 
 been left in the lurch ; he is not interested and does not 
 care what is the magazine's opinion of foreign affairs. 
 If American liberals ever w^ant to exercise a genuine in- 
 fluence over popular opinion, they will have to study a 
 little more carefully the human side of the history of 
 Tammany Hall. 
 
 I have dwelt on this tradition of enforced morality 
 because it has colored and shaped so many of the reform 
 movements in the United States and because it is in no 
 sense a part of the tradition of American liberalism. On 
 the contrary, American liberalism has been steadily at 
 war with it, even if, as we have seen in the specific case 
 of prohibition, the liberals themselves have been intimi- 
 dated by it or apathetic towards it. For the sources of 
 liberal strength in America are not to be found here. 
 Indeed it is exactly this perverted Puritanism, together 
 with the heritage of race-hatred psychology which the 
 Civil War bequeathed to us upon which I laid emphasis 
 in my last chapter, that have made the development of a 
 vital and influential American liberalism so extraordi- 
 narily difficult. Both heritages have worked for intoler- 
 ance and coercion.
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 71 
 
 And they partly explain why the intellectuals of 
 America, certainly during the last half of the 19th cen- 
 tury, preferred to put their energies into the sciences 
 or purely academic speculation instead of attempting to 
 bring their knowledge into working relations with the 
 practical social world. The social and political world 
 was so raw and crude that the intellectuals, too, followed 
 the Transcendental technique of escaping to an ivory 
 tower of their own. Politics was considered something 
 which a '^gentleman" would, as he valued his reputation, 
 diligently shun; the scholar turned from practical life 
 with a kind of instinctive repugnance, which William 
 James has satirized with more "vsit and insight than any 
 other American writer.* In fact pragmatism itself, if 
 we judge more by the temperament of its chief exponent 
 than by its technical articles of creed, arose as a protest 
 against the seclusion of American culture and scholar- 
 ship in general. It was an invitation to face experience, 
 and no bit or parcel of the world was considered too 
 humble or too insig-nificant for inquiry and study. This 
 was an exceedingly healthy reaction, but the ferment has 
 worked too slowly to break down the barriers completely 
 between the world of affairs and the world of the quad- 
 rangle. Even on the eve of the war the American intel- 
 lectual world was singularly remote, as compared with 
 the English and European intellectual world, from its 
 contemporary national social life. The life of the scholar 
 normally makes for tolerance — especially when the 
 scholar's conclusions are challenged by practical men 
 and contacts between them and inevitable compromises 
 are frequent, all of which, unfortunately, was not the case 
 with us — and it is a pity that his influence upon the more 
 immediate aspects of American social life was so slight, 
 * See his essay ' ' The Ph.D. Octopus ' ' in Memories and Studies.
 
 72 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 The result consequently was that most of the work of 
 practical "reform" and active campaigns for social bet- 
 terment was handed over to the incompetent and the 
 fanatical. Liberalism in action was left without the sup- 
 port of its strongest ally. And worse still, perhaps, its 
 strongest ally, the scholar, was by this reticence himself 
 weakened and rendered emotionally unprepared for the 
 test of war, as we shall have occasion to see in the next 
 chapter. 
 
 Nevertheless, in spite of these handicaps I have men- 
 tioned, American liberalism did develop. The sources of 
 that development, moreover, were in the direction we 
 should normally expect to find them — in the emergence 
 of labor as a self-conscious class, in the revolt at the 
 stark injustices of the existing economic order, coming 
 first to articulate expression, I should say, in the cam- 
 paign of 1896, in the first naive but self-conscious protest 
 at imperialism following the acquisition of embarrassing 
 possessions during the Spanish war, in the awkward age 
 of self-criticism known as the ''muck-raking" era, in the 
 growth of settlement houses such as Hull House in 
 Chicago (here again, however, the true liberal impulse 
 was overlaid with considerable enforced moralism), in 
 the rise of realistic economists and sociologists and the 
 spread of reahstic attempts to better the Civil Service 
 and to put municipal administration on a scientific basis, 
 in the challenges made audible by the later radical immi- 
 grants, and in the beginnings of political parties of dis- 
 sent from the early ''Mugwumps" through the Populist 
 and various agrarian bodies of protest to the later full- 
 fledged Socialist parties. Concomitantly, along with all 
 other countries where the industrial revolution had 
 thrown so many laborers in contact with the technical
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 73 
 
 processes of production,* there began the growth among 
 American workers in factories and mills of that rational- 
 istic skepticism of mythological values that invariably 
 accompanies any continued intimacy with the machine 
 process. Religious dogmas concerning the recompenses 
 of a future world for the misfortunes of this suffer less 
 from the attacks of avowed agnostics than from the 
 subtle undermining of faith in revealed authority which 
 of necessity is experienced by the man who day by day 
 sees cause and effect in terms of scientific correlation. 
 In factories much more than on farms, where rain may 
 seem providential and the absence of pests and plagues 
 divine interposition, consequences, either of increased 
 production or of inefficiency due to defective machinery 
 and poor technical supervision, are seen as the calculable 
 results of definite assignable causes controlled by human 
 intelligence. In America, exactly as in other industrially 
 developing countries, an increasing proportion of labor- 
 ing men and women were huddled together in the indus- 
 trial centres to imbibe the spirit of this illuminating 
 skepticism. Perhaps with us this increase of skepticism 
 concerning conventional values was stronger than else- 
 where, for the American tradition of hatred of servility, 
 which never has been wholly lost, fitted in admirably with 
 this new discovery. If it also turned in the direction of 
 skepticism of all scholarship and towards hatred of 
 scientific management, this reaction was at bottom an 
 economic protest at the plain fact that the fruits both of 
 scholarship and scientific management seldom found their 
 way to the workers* hands. Yet in spite of the many 
 reactionary cross-currents, I have put this increase of 
 skepticism among the industrial proletariat on the liberal 
 
 * The best analysis of the growth of this skepticism is in Thorstein 
 Veblen's The Nature of Peace.
 
 74 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 side of the ledger because in the main it was an impulse 
 towards one of the main beliefs of liberalism in its best 
 estate, the impulse towards rationality. It was an im- 
 pulse — it is a growing impulse today — towards re- 
 jection of dogma, irresponsible authority, moralistic 
 mythology. It was an impulse — it is a growing impulse 
 today — towards a resolute facing of the world as it is, 
 and towards a demand that the world in its fullness shall 
 be enjoyed by us all. 
 
 It is obvious that the basis of most of the forces to 
 which, in the above paragraph, I have given the chief role 
 in the development of American liberalism lay in eco- 
 nomic protest. This was more or less inevitably the 
 case. We have seen how the spiritual or idealistic im- 
 pulses back of American life, originally confined to re- 
 ligious problems of the individual, became, on their 
 cultural side, shunted into the abstractions of the Tran- 
 scendental point of view, and on their social and political 
 side largely acquired the accomplishment — technique of 
 the big business man. In the one case, these impulses 
 were impotent to aid the growth of a genuine liberalism, 
 and in the other, they were a constant hindrance to that 
 growth. It is no paradox to say that our liberalism arose 
 from the materialistic side of the American dualism in 
 character, from the Benjamin Franklin tradition of 
 shrewdness and pioneer ingenuity. The vital origins of 
 American liberalism were, so to speak, sui generis. The 
 harshness of competition, the tangible physical results of 
 ruthless materialism, were too dramatically apparent to 
 pass by unnoticed. Our leaders of dissent did not have 
 to go to theoretical cases to illustrate their arguments. 
 Everybody was only too familiar with the actual cases 
 of injustice and economic oppression, and the defenders 
 of the existing order could justify our native national
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 75 
 
 optimism only by the expedient of calling their oppo- 
 nents' examples exceptional. Of course to a great extent 
 this defense of the status quo succeeded, for the scattered 
 wrecks of lost opportunity on every hand only empha- 
 sized the fact that the field of opportunity was still open 
 to the young and adventurous. Slowly and almost im- 
 perceptibly, as the country began to fill up and the range 
 of opportunity became narrower and narrower, the 
 inexorable facts in the case offset this originally valid 
 appeal to our congenitally acquisitive instincts. Protest 
 became articulate and critical in exact proportion as an 
 increasing number of men discovered this appeal to the 
 possessive instincts a fraud. Large numbers of men even 
 today can be chloroformed into acquiescence of things 
 as they are by the dazzling bait of possible millionaire- 
 dom, but for the hundreds of thousands of farmers won- 
 dering how they are going to pay off the mortgage * 
 and get an adequate price for their product and for the 
 hundreds of tliousands of laborers in industry wondering 
 if their trade unions can get them w^ages high enough to 
 meet the cost of living — for these increasing classes of 
 men the old appeal has entirely lost its seductiveness. 
 New doctrines had to be invented to meet new conditions. 
 New doctrines, however, imply a background of a certain 
 degree of inventiveness and flexibility, both conducive 
 to the liberal spirit, and furthermore, since the parties 
 of protest in the beginning were necessarily in the mi- 
 nority, that position of itself made them partly tolerant 
 of opposing views, something also conducive to the liberal 
 spirit. 
 
 * In Edward Alsworth Ross 's grotesque book •, grotesque because he can- 
 not seem to understand the very facts he himself sets down; he is writing 
 optimistic nonsense apparently to reassure himself), "What is America?" 
 (Century, 1919), are these figures: "In 1880 tcnjint farmers constituted 
 25.6 per cent of all farmers — in 1010, 37 per i-ont of all farmers."
 
 76 LIBEEALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 In all tMs, however, the creative side of life was prac- 
 tically ignored: we might say truthfuly that the human 
 drive back of this development of American liberalism 
 was rather the thwarting of the possessive instincts by 
 the hard facts of our economic life than a positive stimu- 
 lus towards creative activity. This was hardly to be 
 wondered at. Our literary men, our scholars and philoso- 
 phers, our artists, preferred to go on their own abstract 
 holiday rather than come to grips with the harsh forces 
 actually at work in the American national life. They 
 instinctively avoided what should have been their primary 
 task, the fertilizing of the blind and unexpressed creative 
 forces immediately around them. The artists and 
 writers tended to become aesthetes daintily sampling the 
 tid-bits of foreign excellence; the scholars tended to be- 
 come meticulous experts. Even the church left the ordi- 
 nary man, secretly aching for some creative life more 
 stimulating than membership in a trade union or a lodge, 
 rather in the lurch. I do not need here to dwell upon the 
 lush growth of all sorts of compensatory mysticisms 
 (compensatory, I mean, of the barrenness of the every- 
 day church), such as ''New Thought," ''Psychical Ee- 
 search," and par excellence "Christian Science," all of 
 which flourished so vigorously around the beginning of 
 the 20th century, for the broader truth of the matter is 
 that the church in the traditional sense gave small oppor- 
 tunity for expression of the creative spirit in man. On 
 the Evangelical side, the church was split into all sorts 
 of warring sects, most of them narrow and intolerant in 
 spirit (even today, for instance, the Methodist Church's 
 ban upon dancing has not been lifted), and where liberal 
 inevitably tending towards a more and more thinly 
 rationalistic creed, culminating in Unitarianism of good- 
 mil and no beliefs worth fighting over. On the other
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 77 
 
 side, the Episcopal Church became more or less a fashion- 
 able instrument for exhibiting Anglo-Saxon snobbery, 
 while the Catholic Church seemed to put more of its 
 energy into politics and proselytism and the winning of 
 the right to parochial schools than into preaching the 
 richer aspects of its spiritual traditions. From Emer- 
 son's day on the decline in the quality of the ministry 
 was sharp and severe, and in later years most ministers 
 of ability abandoned their original function of spiritual 
 advisers for the more congenial tasks of large-scale 
 church organization or frank social service.* The 
 Church, too, failed the American in his desire for a fuller 
 creative life. 
 
 Yet the voice of the creative conscience would not be 
 stilled. The false integration of our national life in 
 terms of mere activity began to yield before persistent 
 attacks about ten years before the world war began. 
 Some of the attacks took amusingly disguised forms. 
 Our millionaires, for instance, tired of just accumulating 
 money, devoted their leisure time to all sorts of patron- 
 izing activity — to the building of libraries, endowing 
 of institutions, collecting of foreign art masterpieces, the 
 founding of newspapers and magazines, the encouraging 
 of the native theatre and native artists. I have called 
 this activity patronizing. A fairer description of it 
 would be to show it as a method, even if a clumsy method, 
 of discovering a substitute for suppressed creative 
 energy which the normal life of acquisitive business had 
 never left unhampered. Men of good will in the indus- 
 trial world disgTiised their desire of creating something 
 by adopting the eminently respectable word '^efficiency'* 
 to characterize their interest in industry which went be- 
 
 * "Prelates acd missionaries are hardly sincere or conscious of an honest 
 function, save as they devote themselves to social work," writes George 
 Santayana in "Winds of Doctrine," Scribner's, 1913.
 
 78 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 yond interest in profits. Even the business man himself 
 spoke more and more of his ''trusteeship," taking a 
 palpable pride in professional excellence in adminis- 
 tration which was not to be judged only in terms of in- 
 come. In government itself technical ability to handle 
 difficult problems became something to be proud of, al- 
 most commensurable with the pride of personal popu- 
 larity. American life contained many tentative attempts 
 to exercise the creative as opposed to the purely posses- 
 sive instincts. 
 
 The real attack, however, was reserved for the younger 
 generation. From 1904 to 1914 was a decade of rebellion 
 on the part of many youngsters. H. G. Wells was begin- 
 ning to be read; the ferment of the ''1890's," as Hol- 
 brook Jackson called that period of revolt on the Conti- 
 nent and in England, had crossed the Atlantic. Our girls 
 were often aggressively feministic; the influence of Shaw 
 and Ibsen and Nietzsche, for all the grotesque and imita- 
 tive aspects of it in the American scene, had become a 
 genuine thing in most of our colleges. Critics like Hune- 
 ker and Mencken, and younger ones like Francis Hackett 
 and Walter Lippmann (especially before he joined the 
 staff of the New Bepuhlic) and Waldo Frank and Van 
 Wyck Brooks, eager spirits Uke Randolph Bourne, new 
 writers at war with the whole commercialized scheme of 
 fiction — all these were joining in the assault on our 
 pioneer assumption that activity and objective accom- 
 plishment were enough. They boldly were at war with 
 the dominant possessive impulses of the day, boldly ques- 
 tioned the assumptions of our national life. Our poets 
 were also in revolt at the academic and the unreal, and 
 in spite of excesses and absurdities, many a new and 
 fresh creative note was struck. Our artists likewise 
 flirted with the latest new modes from the boulevards,
 
 AMERICAN LIBERALISM 79 
 
 and back of this imitativeness was a pathetic attempt to 
 escape from the severe limitations of the American 
 environment into an atmosphere where the creative spirit 
 had free play. Innumerable were the young Americans 
 who hoped through a ''new" drama to change the entire 
 tone of our national life. The yeast of the younger gen- 
 eration's discontent with the American philosophy of 
 practical success had begun to stir the whole doughy mass 
 of sluggish acceptance of a merely outward active life. 
 To sum up: American liberalism developed partly 
 from our traditional hatred of servility, which well served 
 the skepticism of dogma and consequent impulse towards 
 rationality that simultaneously arose after the machine 
 era. Its next source of strength was in the good sense 
 and practical straightforwardness of our temperament, 
 which more and more reacted from the harsh realities of 
 our economic ruthlessness to dissentient minority views 
 and to increasingly critical analyses. All that, on the 
 materialistic side. On the creative side, although left in 
 the lurch by the universities and literature and the 
 Church, the impulse of the younger generation just be- 
 fore the war was far-reaching and healthy. We were 
 becoming increasingly self-critical and dissatisfied vdth. 
 mere acquisition. Both our intellectuals and our creative 
 literary men w^ere emerging from their Transcendental 
 towers of isolation. But American liberalism had t\\o 
 bad heritages to fight against, both going back roughly 
 to the period of the Civil War — one the heritage of race- 
 hatred psychology of the unacknowledged negro problem, 
 making for intolerance; the other the heritage of per- 
 verted moralism or the attempt to use a native idealism 
 for specific prohibitions, making in its turn for coercion. 
 Such, in brief, seems to me the strength and the fragility 
 of American liberalism as it met the challenge of 1914.
 
 CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 THE EMOTIONAL BEEAK-DOWN BEFOEE WAK-HYSTEEIA 
 
 ''What I come to is a sense of suddenly being left in the lurch, of 
 suddenly finding that a philosophy upon which I had relied to carry us 
 through no longer works. I find the contrast hetween the idea that 
 creative intelligence has free functioning in wartime, and the facts 
 of the inexorable situation, too glaring. The contrast between wluit 
 liberals ought to be doing and saying if democratic values are to be 
 conserved, and what the real farces are imposing upon them, strikes 
 too sternly on my intellectual senses. I should prefer some philosophy 
 of war as the grim and terrible cleanser to this optimism-haunted mood 
 that continues unweariedly to suggest that all can yet be made to 
 work for good in a mad and half-destroyed ivorld. I wonder if James, 
 in the face of such disaster, would not have abandoned his 'moral 
 equivalent of ww' for an 'immoral equivalent' which, in swift and 
 periodic saturnalia, would have acted as vaccination against the sure 
 pestilence of war. ' ' — Eandolph Bourne, October, 1917. 
 
 IN London during the first few weeks of the war I 
 remember that the spontaneous impulse of Americans 
 when we met each other was to offer silent congratula- 
 tions. Whatever else happened in a world which had 
 fallen to pieces, we were out of it. We were safe behind 
 the broad stretches of the Atlantic ; we had a sanity and 
 a sense of humor that contrasted only too sharply with 
 the strain and nervousness of our foreign friends. It 
 seemed literally impossible that we should ever get into 
 the war ourselves. The very notion was grotesque. We 
 conceived America's natural function as that of a medi- 
 ator, the great neutral to whom both sides would appeal, 
 and not in vain, for an impartial settling of their claims 
 when the passions of fighting had exhausted themselves. 
 Coming home on the liner this notion was confirmed. 
 Rumors flew thick and fast when we went on board at 
 
 80
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN 81 
 
 Liverpool, but it was then too early for the submarine 
 menace. There was talk, of course, of mines, although 
 once past the Irish coast, there could possibly be no dan- 
 ger. Random German raiders had no terrors for us. We 
 were an American ship. Other friends on English boats 
 had told us gloomily that they had a dull voyage ahead 
 of them — no lights at night, no music, curtains covering 
 all the port holes, reprimands if you lighted a cigarette 
 on deck after nightfall. With us, after the first day, it 
 was a gay voyage. We danced and flirted and after din- 
 ner crowded the smoker to exchange experiences over a 
 friendly glass. We were flying the American flag and 
 nothing could happen to disturb our security. For after 
 a fashion our boat was itself a symbol of American isola- 
 tion and self-complacency. 
 
 Of course this was naive and of course it was an atti- 
 tude which reckoned too lightly upon the economic inter- 
 lacing of the world which had taken place since the Span- 
 ish war. Intellectually it was an attitude difficult to de- 
 fend. Yet it was an attitude which had its emotional 
 roots very deep in our national traditions. In spite of 
 the terrific pro-Entente propaganda which was immedi- 
 ately let loose upon the United States, in spite of our 
 sympathy with France and Belgium as invaded countries 
 (in our international traditions there has always been an 
 element of sportsmanship that led us spontaneously to 
 back what we considered the losing side), in spite of the 
 atrocity stories which were certain of a popular appeal, 
 the genuine emotional neutrality of the country could 
 hardly be doubted. As Walter Weyl correctly says: 
 "While helping the Allies, partly from inclination and 
 partly from necessity, we sincerely protested our neutral- 
 ity. At one moment Mr. Lansing refused merchantmen 
 permission to arm, although we were already committed
 
 82 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 to a policy of fighting the submarines . . . We were 
 willing to accept any semi-reasonable settlement in 
 Europe rather than ourselves take part in the contest. 
 And this not from timidity. What restrained us was a 
 deep conservative instinct; a jealous desire to hold 
 America apart from these struggles. We hesitated to 
 commit our bark to untried waters. We wanted to live 
 our old life, develop our democracy at home, protect with 
 the aid of Latin America the isolation and immunity of 
 the two Americas. Not wishing to coerce other nations 
 nor endure their coercion, preferring our interdepend- 
 ence narrow and free, to a wider, more exacting and 
 more perilous interdependence, we were as regards 
 Europe separatist. Even as late as March, 1917, we 
 sought to establish an armed neutrality instead of going 
 to war. Anything but war. ' '* 
 
 In trying to understand the emotional break-down 
 before the war-hysteria of 1917, it is necessary to realize 
 our spiritual unpreparedness for the war when it actually 
 came, and, indeed, our actual hostility to it. Although 
 our official policy as a nation began to swerve towards a 
 ''benevolent" neutrality policy with respect to the En- 
 tente as early as 1914, the great mass of American citi- 
 zens were wholly unaware of it. The Middle West in 
 particular, aside from the interested German- Americans 
 and the Irish who could never espouse a cause of Eng- 
 land's, was completely indifferent to what poHcy we were 
 pursuing so long as that policy kept us prosperous and 
 at peace. Furthermore, from time to time the news- 
 papers would publish our diplomatic protests against 
 violation of our trade rights by Great Britain, and ed- 
 itorial comment against that country's flagrant and un- 
 warranted interference with our mails was usually 
 
 * The End of the War. Macmillan; 1918. Pages 56 and 57.
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN 83 
 
 severe, even the most Anglophile metropolitan news- 
 papers not venturing to defend it. Consequently it was 
 easy to persuade the average citizen that we were neutral 
 in fact as well as in popular inclination. Even the dullest 
 reader of the daily press had had it drilled into him that 
 at the close of the war we would collect damages in money 
 from Great Britain, as in the long disputed but finally 
 settled Alabama case, and that to go to war or even to 
 threaten it w^hen we had an historical precedent for 
 settling by arbitration a much more serious cause of dis- 
 pute was absurd.* The South, to be sure, was not a little 
 angiy at England's cutting off her cotton trade with Ger- 
 many, and there was a certain uneasiness about our 
 shipping so much munition material to the Entente. 
 Aside from this, however, most Americans would have 
 been angry had they been told that we were distinctly 
 not neutral and that we were violating our oldest inter- 
 national tradition concerning the freedom of the seas. 
 This anger would have resulted, as I have said, partly 
 from an acquiescent ignorance, partly from a desire not 
 to be disturbel in our rapid making of money, and finally 
 from the fact that the people who most violently and 
 powerfully opposed our neutrality policy were just those 
 whom the ordinary man suspected of a desire to get us 
 into war — and as a nation we wanted peace. And if the 
 ordinary man had any lingering fears that perhaps the 
 American policy was not the just or desirable one, there 
 were always German propagandists with their inept com- 
 prehension of American psychology and opportune Ger- 
 man diplomatic blunders to reeonvince him. 
 
 Yet if the average American was consciously caught 
 unprepared for the war, a campaign of preparedness was 
 
 * It would be interesting to know if it has ever bc^en proposed that these 
 claims be paid. Are they to be referred to the Council of the League of 
 Nations?
 
 84 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 constantly being waged, all the more insidious and emo- 
 tionally disturbing because its methods were indirect and 
 adroitly disguised. Ostensibly, it was waged in the name 
 of patriotism and good citizenship, although in the end 
 it came to be officially known as the ''preparedness'' 
 campaign. Beginning with professional military men who 
 saw in the European war only a confirmation of their mili- 
 taristic philosophy, the movement then enlisted the sup- 
 port of large munition and war-material manufacturing 
 interests, which for obvious economic reasons were will- 
 ing that the country should commit itself to the policy of 
 a large standing army. If they at first had no direct wish 
 to embroil us in war (as they probably had not, the 
 Socialists to the contrary notwithstanding), it was but 
 natural that they hoped for a market for their wares 
 after the war was over. Then as our loans to the Allies 
 became greater and greater the bankers instinctively 
 encouraged the development of a weapon which might, in 
 the unhappy contingency of ourselves going in, be em- 
 ployed to guarantee the loans or — in the opposite con- 
 tingency — to make sure that Germany would not, by a 
 crushing military victory, destroy the Entente's ability 
 to pay. The whole upper social class, natural haters of 
 Wilson because of his vacillating pacificism and suspected 
 democracy, natural defenders of England because of 
 social connections and caste sympathy, speedily flung its 
 support to the campaign. The last to fall in line — and 
 here, I am glad to say, there were many honorable excep- 
 tions — were the intellectuals and the college professors. 
 They supported the campaign first for economic reasons, 
 since as a class they were either subsidized by or lived 
 parasitically upon the ruling financial and social class, 
 second for personal reasons, since they were on friendly 
 relations with the squirearchy of Long Island and the
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN 85 
 
 Back Bay, third for professional reasons, since tliey had 
 long been jealous of the accomplishments of German 
 scholarship and culture and they intuitively sensed the 
 war as a struggle for Anglo-Saxon prestige, intellectual 
 as well as military. Of course the snobbish American 
 Episcopal Church was in sympathy with the movement; 
 some of the most vulgar incitements to national hatred 
 came from the lips of their clergy. The Evangelical and 
 the Catholic Church itself, both nearer to the people, were 
 apathetic although not actively hostile unless in an un- 
 usual case. Certainly taking the Church as a whole it 
 supported, rather than brought the full force of its influ- 
 ence against, the campaign. On the popular side, the 
 campaign was a pleasant bit of excitement to the bored 
 and imaginative who liked nothing better than to conjure 
 up the possibility of a German invasion of the Atlantic 
 seaboard and who longed for the excitements and thrills 
 of a war unhappily denied them. 
 
 Now even this cursory description makes it clear that 
 the preparedness campaign was an upper class move- 
 ment. In the region west of the Alleghanies, in the whole 
 Mississippi Valley, in the flourishing grain country of the 
 North-West, on the Pacific Coast, war even as late as 
 1917 seemed an alien and impossible thing. President 
 Wilson had sensed the feeling of the country far better 
 than the followers of Roosevelt and Leonard Wood and 
 that astute Anglophile, Mr. James M. Beck. He had 
 preached peace and not war. Even when he had advo- 
 cated preparedness he had adroitly turned this advocacy 
 into preparedness for defence only, had preached it as 
 a condition necessary for the maintenance of that peace 
 which we cherished. The temper of the country was 
 pacific. There can be no doubt that whatever the local 
 and temporary conflicting causes the outstanding reason
 
 86 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 for the success of the President in his re-election was 
 because he was identified with the slogan, "He kept us 
 out of war." Even as late as January 13, 1917, The New 
 Republic could write — and was correct in its interpreta- 
 tion — * * the man who thinks conscription can be applied 
 today in America hasn't even an elementary grasp of the 
 political situation." Taken as a whole, the country was 
 mentally unprepared for the war. The actual declaration 
 came as something of a shock. As good a description as 
 I know of that mood is contained in a letter written by 
 Mr. Robert L. Duffus, the first week of the war, and 
 published in a New York journal : 
 
 **The news of war was received in California in a 
 perfectly conventional manner. That is to say, flags 
 broke out in almost every merchant's window, on the 
 front pages of the noisier newspapers, and over many 
 private houses; flag vendors, with button-hole replicas 
 of our own colors and those of our new allies, appeared 
 at the street corners; six of the wilful Senators were 
 lynched, happily in effigy, in a Marin county town; the 
 newspaper editorial writers hastened to express their 
 unwavering loyalty; and the most pacific assumed an air 
 or sad submission. But underneath these representative 
 symptoms California was dazed. A more complete men- 
 tal unpreparedness than hers for what had happened 
 could not be imagined. The man in the street had naively 
 assumed that his opinion about going to war would make 
 itself felt in Washington without his taking the trouble 
 to turn it into words, and the first sensation that he had 
 on reading the news on April 3rd was that this part of 
 the country, at least, had received something that it did 
 not order. For an ordinary Calif ornian going about his 
 daily work and not taking any great part in public affairs, 
 the declaration of war was as much a thing imposed from
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN 87 
 
 above by a group of men who did not ask his consent as 
 it could have been in pre-revolutionary Russia." 
 
 Nevertheless the preparedness campaign had done its 
 work. If its advocates constituted only a minority, the 
 minority was a powerful and aggressive one. It was 
 organized and articulate. It controlled the press and 
 the popular magazines. It could dominate the moving- 
 picture industry. It held the government practically at 
 its mercy. It had the support of substantially all of the 
 financial interests. It spoke from the pulpits. It cap- 
 tured the colleges and schools. Hardly a single recog- 
 nized leader in the economic or social or intellectual world 
 dared to risk his prestige by speaking against it. It 
 was a minority which began to function actively with the 
 day of the declaration of war. Who cannot recall the 
 parades and ''loyalty" pledges! the invitations to turn 
 amateur spy and report to the secret service any person 
 making a statement calculated to upset members of the 
 National Security League? the patriotic orations? the 
 sudden flood of ''atrocity" moving-pictures! the car- 
 toons? The American people may have been apathetic 
 and indifferent, but this minority had not been. When 
 the war actually came it was in a position to swing public 
 opinion in the belligerent direction it desired. Senators 
 might filibuster as did the famous twelve ; Congressmen 
 might feel reluctant to vote for war (and it is well known 
 that many of them, solely under the pressure of what 
 they thought was the mass of opinion, voted for war 
 against their personal convictions) ; the American Soci- 
 ety Opposed to Militarism and other pacific organizations 
 might protest; here and there might be found a skeptical 
 writer of some standing; the younger generation of rebels 
 might threaten to sabotage the whole war scheme; the 
 radicals might howl in rage, as they did in the St. Louis
 
 88 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 platform of the Socialist party. All was useless. The 
 way had been *' prepared" in a very real sense. 
 
 Paradoxically, the very indifference of the American 
 people to the whole campaign had been the minority's 
 strongest asset. The minority had had to fight this in- 
 difference, and in doing so it had learned fine lessons in 
 effective organization and in the tactics of mobilizing 
 mass opinion. When the war came the belligerent minor- 
 ity was in a strategically unbeatable position. It knew 
 what it wanted; it knew how to get it. Against its ag- 
 gressive and self-assured attack the weak and uncertain 
 and confused majority was helpless. 
 
 And furthermore, the advocates of a war policy had an 
 ally which they did not suspect, which, indeed, hardly 
 any of us suspected until the war itself revealed it. It 
 was a psychological ally, a force of which we were largely 
 unconscious, yet subtly persuasive and inciting. The 
 mood I refer to was made up of too many conflicting 
 strands to be compressed into a single word, but the 
 word which in my opinion comes nearest to expressing it 
 is — jealousy. We were jealous of Europe's great ex- 
 perience. A profound world tragedy was being enacted, 
 and we were hardly even supernumeraries in the ^\ings. 
 Most of the civilized nations we knew, and to which 
 either in blood or sympathy nearly all of us were at- 
 tached, were experiencing unprecedented spiritual de- 
 pressions and elations. The intoxicating tingle of life 
 in Europe contrasted favorably vnth the drab monotony 
 of our own. For years our magazines and newspapers 
 had been filled with descriptions of exciting things, war 
 babies, white feather drives, groat military pageants, 
 heroic campaigns, brutalities and tendernesses we had 
 hardly believed possible. We were thrilled and nervous 
 — and a little jealous. With so much tremendous new
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN - 89 
 
 experience being undergone (even though some of it was 
 experience of hell), were we not entitled to our share? 
 In a later chapter* I attempt to show in some detail 
 the attraction which war presents to a modern indus- 
 trialized nation of normally pacific inclinations, but even 
 a cursory examination of the American mood on entering 
 the war gives confirmation to the belief that one of the 
 strongest forces making for our sudden conversion from 
 peace to war was this unacknowledged jealousy of Eu- 
 rope. Of course we didn't admit this jealousy even to 
 ourselves; it really speaks volumes for the instinctive 
 good sense of the nation that we didn't openly asseverate 
 any of war's attractions until after we were actually in 
 it several weeks. I suspect that most of us were a little 
 disquieted at American ''hesitation" and that inwardly 
 we chafed at not playing a man's part in the world, but 
 our American instinct to keep out of quarrels to which 
 we were not a direct party always smothered this feeling. 
 Had we fought for our neutrality so to speak, had we 
 been quick to protest and act on each \dolation of it, 
 had it been, in a word, an active neutrahty instead of a 
 passive one permitted to us by the dubious method of 
 alternately accepting the insults of either side, we should 
 have found vent for our emotions. It is questionable if 
 in that case this jealousy of Europe would have arisen. 
 But it did exist as a fact. The enthusiasm we showed for 
 the war after the decision had been made for us is merely 
 proof that psychologically the war acted as a purgative 
 of our suppressed feelings. That suppression is neces- 
 sary for an understanding of our emotional break-down 
 before war-hysteria. For unfortunately we didn't know 
 we were suppressing anything. 
 
 Not only did we not know that we were suppressing 
 
 • See Political Symbolism and the Mob.
 
 90 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 anything but also, in a very human sense, we did not 
 know what we were fighting for. For intellectuals or 
 partisans of any of the Entente nations the question of 
 why we were at war was of course easily answered. The 
 former erected myths about international democracy or 
 a league of nations or defence of the Atlantic world, or 
 persuaded themselves that it was a moral issue between 
 ruthless force and civilization. No man of intelligence 
 and quick imagination, once the war was accepted as a 
 fact, needed long to be at a loss for ingenious justifica- 
 tion. The partisans naturally had only to identify the 
 American cause with the French or English or Italian — 
 I have been present at Long Island dinner parties even 
 before 1917 where the devastation of French provinces 
 was spoken of with more horror and understanding of 
 what it meant than would have been the case if it had 
 been Arizona or California which had been invaded. The 
 partisans and the intellectuals had an easy time of it, 
 and in my next chapter I shall discuss more particularly 
 their myth-creating faculties which made the war so 
 palatable. 
 
 But for the everyday American citizen going about his 
 business it really was a puzzle as to why we were at war. 
 Nothing in President Wilson's career is more ironical 
 than the surprise period following our declaration; I 
 mean the period when he was writing notes stating that 
 he was surprised anyone should ask the reasons we were 
 at war, yet in each new note himself giving a new reason.* 
 
 * For example, President Wilson 's letter to Representative Heflin, dated 
 May 22, 1917, begins: "It is incomprehensible to me how any frank or 
 honest person could doubt or question my position with regard to the 
 war and its objects. I have again and again stated the very serious 
 and long-continued wrongs which the Imperial German Government has 
 perpetrated against the rights, the commerce, and the citizens of the United 
 States. The list is long and overwhelming. No nation that respected itself 
 or the rights of humanity could have borne these wrongs any longer." 
 Compare this with other and later statements.
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN 91 
 
 Consider the everyday citizen's confusion. For over two 
 years he had been subjected to all sorts of diverse propa- 
 ganda. He had been lied to and deceived by practically 
 everybody. What was he to believe ? Were we fighting 
 to ''make the world safe for democracy"? Perhaps, but 
 the average man could not get it out of his head that all 
 our Allies, with the exception of France, were mon- 
 archies. (Russia, on our entrance, was a mystery, al- 
 though America's spontaneous feeling was one of satis- 
 faction at the Revolution.) Were we fighting to destroy 
 autocracy! Yes, but how about Japan? Were we fight- 
 ing to protect our rights on the seas? Assuredly, but 
 why then had we not gone to war at the time of the 
 Lusitaniaf Were we fighting to preserve the secret 
 treaties? We ought not to be, but up to date nobody had 
 repudiated them. Were we fighting to uphold inter- 
 national law? So we were told, but why then had we not 
 joined on the invasion of Belgium? The average man 
 did not have any clear answer to these questions or to 
 thousands like them. He was perplexed and bewildered. 
 Unlike the Frenchman and Serbian he was not fighting 
 for the tangible and visible defense of his native land. 
 Unlike the Italian, he was not fighting in the name of 
 sacred egoism for a greater nation; had we not specifi- 
 cally stated that we wanted nothing out of the war? 
 Unlike the Belgian, he was not fighting to regain lost 
 national independence. Unlike the Englishman, he was 
 not fighting someone who had been for years his bitterest 
 commercial and political rival. 
 
 What we are fighting for was something shadowy and 
 unreal. We were waging war in terms of an almost re- 
 ligious idealism which none of us precisely understood. 
 That is the solemn and unescapable truth of the mass 
 American attitude on the day war was declared. Presi-
 
 92 LIBERALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 dent Wilson in an unguarded moment on Ms Western 
 tour to urge ratification of the peace treaty made a state- 
 ment which was correct in itself although it gave his 
 opponents a fair opportunity to accuse him of incon- 
 sistency. He said, referring to the time of our entrance 
 into the war : *' America was not directly attacked. . . . 
 America was not immediately in danger."* And every- 
 body at the time knew it in his heart. It was precisely 
 what made the war seem unreal. 
 
 Now it was just this hysterical unawareness of why we 
 were at war which was fundamentally responsible for our 
 emotional breakdown. In France, for instance, where 
 there was no question of why or wherefore, the temper 
 of the people if strained and anxious was still serene. 
 There was the natural tolerance which springs from 
 everybody being agreed on the main point. Minor dif- 
 ferences of opinion were consequently accepted for what 
 they were — minor differences. We can see something of 
 the same thing even here in America. Why was it during 
 the war that the Eastern seaboard cities, speaking very 
 broadly, were much more tolerant than communities fur- 
 ther West, particularly the Middle West, California and 
 Washington? Heaven knows there was intolerance enough 
 in New York and Philadelphia and Boston, but yet as con- 
 trasted with small towns of the Mississippi Valley, with 
 St. Louis, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago, the 
 Eastern cities were relatively tolerant. It is doubtful if 
 the editors of the Masses, for example, could have been 
 tried in any of the last named communities and twice 
 have received a divided jury. And it is indubitable that 
 more sedition was talked openly in the streets of New 
 York — unless, possibly, in private houses in Washington 
 — than anywhere else in America. Well, the reason for 
 
 •Speech at Billings, Montana, September 11, 1919.
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN 93 
 
 it seems to me just this : the Eastern seaboard cities were 
 more familiar with the war than the rest of the country. 
 The preparedness campaign was invented and launched 
 and directed in the East. The submarine attacks were 
 near our shores. We saw the commander of the U-53 in 
 a box at the Metropolitan opera. We saw boats leave 
 from Hoboken and the East River as we crossed to work 
 in Manhattan and a few days later we read in our news- 
 papers that these same boats had been torpedoed and 
 sunk. Travelers were constantly coming to our ports 
 with stories of the war; commissions were received by 
 our chambers of commerce. In a word, we were emotion- 
 ally a little more habituated to the war than the rest of 
 the country. And when it came, we reflected that emo- 
 tional preparation in a slightly lessened degree of in- 
 tolerance. We were less excited simply because we were 
 more familiar. 
 
 Broadly, however, the country was not quite sure of 
 what our entrance into the war meant. We dared not 
 ask ourselves questions, for when we began to ask ques- 
 tions, we began to doubt. And we could not afford to 
 doubt ; the decision had been made and it was irrevocable. 
 Quite naturally under these extraordinary circumstances 
 we turned to outward activity. It was in the direction 
 of our traditional genius for accomplishing things effec- 
 tively on a grand scale. It kept us active and prevented 
 us from indulging in any morbid introspection. Super- 
 ficially, nothing might seem more grotesque than that 
 groups of citizens should put energy and time into form- 
 ing organizations, the chief function of which was to pass 
 around printed "loyalty" pledges that one had to sign 
 on pain of being called unpatriotic or pro-German. Yet 
 it was entirely understandable — it gave the organizing 
 committee some outlet for its desire ''to do something"
 
 94 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 and it gave the signers the delightful American thrill 
 known as "getting on the band-wagon." Since we liter- 
 ally dared not be critical about the aims of the war, since 
 we literally dared not examine realistically the glowing 
 idealistic vaporings of the President, we could be critical 
 only of the method of waging the war. Here, of course, 
 was an irresistible appeal to our native chauvinism. Only 
 one opinion was possible — we must finish the war on a 
 grand scale and achieve a smashing military success. 
 We must be the inventive nation to destroy the U-boats ; 
 we must loan money to our Allies without thought of the 
 future ; we must build the greatest fleet of aeroplanes in 
 the world; we must raise and equip the largest army 
 of anyone; we must feed the nations that were actually 
 bearing the brunt of the fight; we must manufacture 
 munitions as they had never been manufactured before. 
 And what is more, we must denounce the enemy as he 
 had never been denounced before. Our Allies had been 
 rather ''slow" in hate; we would show them what really 
 hating the enemy meant. All these appeals were to ac- 
 tion, one might almost say appeals to action in order to 
 hide unpleasant thoughts. They were successful appeals. 
 The energy we put into conscription, into raising money 
 for war loans, into production both of food and munitions, 
 into shipbuilding, into propaganda, was, as we look back 
 on it now, a magnificent display of national vitality. 
 
 One can see how decidedly unwelcome the dissenter 
 was to this temper. Above all things not to be tolerated 
 were questions or doubts. Our mood was of a tre- 
 mendous non-critical affirmation. Exactly as anyone who 
 interposed claims for the inner creative life during our 
 post Civil War period was swept away by the flood of 
 vast material accomplishment, so during the materialistic 
 energy of our war efforts anyone who interposed claims
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN 95 
 
 for thoughtful definition of our aims or for rectification 
 of the obvious imperialism of our Allies was similarly 
 swept aside. "Woe be to the man or group of men that 
 seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution,'* 
 said President Wilson, and our political prisoners still 
 in jail under long sentences attest that it was no idle 
 warning.* It was inevitable that the conscientious ob- 
 jector should be treated worse here than in England. 
 He was the ultimate refutation, the ultimate challenge. 
 He was the bad conscience of the drafted men, and the 
 vengeance they wreaked upon him in training camps was 
 merely the expression of their anger at his revealing 
 to them their own moral cowardice, for there is no getting 
 round the fact that most of the men in their hearts did 
 not want to go — that is, at first before propaganda and 
 social pressure had overwhelmed their native reluctance. 
 The officers, according to the majority of conscientious 
 objectors now released, usually gave more severe sen- 
 tences to those who objected on political grounds than 
 to those who objected on religious grounds. But this was 
 only part of the same phenomenon — the political ob- 
 jector challenged their intelligence and their real assump- 
 tions and necessarily irritated them more than the 
 religious objector who might be regarded as a kind of 
 moral crank, to be dealt with indulgently or severely 
 according to the whim of the local court-martial. And 
 in civilian life anyone who challenged or criticized the 
 policy of the war was put in the same category as the 
 conscientious objector in the camps. He was committing 
 the ultimate sin. He was asking questions. 
 
 Since the vague idealisms of the President, while they 
 might be translated into tangible terms of their own by 
 intelhgent men (and I think the most common, as it was 
 
 * Flag-day speech, June 14, 1917.
 
 96 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 the most pathetic translation, was that it was a "war to 
 end war"), were hardly strong enough meat for the 
 average sensual man, most of our war-time propaganda 
 was directed to the creation of an incarnate German devil 
 who must be destroyed like a scourge. The bewildered 
 small town lad hustled into a training camp whose per- 
 plexed soul longed for some assurance that he was an 
 instrument of righteousness against evil speedily dis- 
 covered that he was fighting for something far more 
 emotionally satisfying than the nebulous task of making 
 the world safe for democracy. He found he was fighting 
 to exterminate a devil in human form, a slayer of babes, 
 a raper of women, a murderer of old men, a foe of civili- 
 zation and art and all that a normal man holds dear. 
 The newspapers told him so ; the preachers told him so ; 
 his officers told him so. Atrocity stories and propaganda 
 appeared again with special virulence. Our compact and 
 highly organized newspapers all were filled with the same 
 stuff. He heard it on every side — the whole force and 
 drive of American mass opinion was behind it. In time 
 inevitably he came to believe the myth, although hardly 
 over, I think, without a certain inner skepticism which he 
 was afraid to express. It is significant that when our 
 first troops were captured by the Germans and were 
 asked what they were fighting for, their minds in- 
 stinctively dwelt upon some atrocity picture : they were 
 fighting to free Belgium women, to avenge deported 
 French girls, to pay off scores for indignities they had 
 been told had been inflicted on American soldiers, and 
 so on. I don't recall that a single one of them said that 
 we were fighting for any of the aims the New Republic 
 was then rather hysterically assuring us we were fighting 
 for. That this hatred, this conviction that he was fight- 
 ing a holy war against the forces of darkness, was mostly
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN 97 
 
 trumped up and factitious hardly needs to be stated. It 
 disintegrated with surprising rapidity when after the 
 armistice our men were quartered on German soil and 
 came into contact mth German women and children for 
 the first time and also for the first time met German 
 men as human beings rather than as official enemies. The 
 average American soldier, just as the average American 
 citizen, when put into personal contact with the Germans 
 could be trusted to recover some elementary human 
 decency and to exhibit some horse sense. He speedily 
 learned what Burke had tried in vain to teach an English 
 ruling class several decades before, the folly of attempt- 
 ing to draw up an indictment against a whole people. 
 
 Unfortunately, the stay-at-home civilian in America, 
 just as observers had discovered was the case in other 
 belligerent countries, not being able to give vent to his 
 feelings by actual fighting or by undergoing the rigors 
 of a training camp, had to concentrate his war feelings 
 into this factitious bitterness. It could find outlet only 
 in words and curses. Deprived of fighting the real 
 enemy, the ci\dlian found emotional rehef in hounding an 
 imaginary enemy at home, the so-called German sym- 
 pathizer who for the most part was merely the product 
 of his own over-heated imagination. Heresy hunts, spy 
 hunts, German ''plots," became the order of the day, and 
 everyone took part with a zeal which did credit to their 
 energy if not to their intelligence. The Liberty Loan 
 ''drives'* and other war "drives" furnished excellent 
 opportunities for the release of this suppressed energy 
 and emotion. The organization of patriotic parades and 
 the amiable task of prying into everyone's private 
 opinions also consumed considerable energy. Our writers 
 developed the war mind— "They were doubled up like 
 fists in the simplicity of a single purpose. And when we
 
 98 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 wrote or talked it was with an unnatural and monotonous 
 unanimity, as if there were a sort of treason in putting 
 our heads to any other use than battering" them against 
 the German empire. The variety of nature was excluded 
 from our Hves. Birds sang the Star Spangled Banner, 
 and if a cat caught a mouse, it reminded us of Germany 
 and Belgium." — for the demobilization of which Mr. F. 
 M. Colby so amusingly pleads.* 
 
 Here we have, I believe, sufficient background for 
 understanding the emotional breakdown into vicious in- 
 tolerance before war-hysteria which was especially true 
 of America. There was the unacknowledged and mis- 
 understood jealousy of Europe's experience, the subtle 
 grouping of powerful forces under the magnet of the pre- 
 paredness campaign, and finally the lack of knowledge 
 of what we were fighting for, which made us turn with 
 especial zeal to the outward activities of war and with 
 especial fury upon those who disturbed the unanimity 
 of action by asking questions. Into the vcacuum of real 
 opinion of our war aims, which the liberals struggled so 
 feebly to make in some realistic sense conform with the 
 pious announcements of the President and which many 
 other intelligent men delusively identified with their own 
 private idealisms, suddenly and with a tremendous drive 
 was injected the myth of the German devil, powerfully 
 supported by the civiHan stay-at-homes who had to create 
 an artificial hate in order to relieve emotions which other- 
 wise would have lacked expression. Added to these so- 
 to-speak local and temporary causes were our two bad 
 heritages from the American tradition — the race-hatred 
 psychology that was carried over to all ahens and dis- 
 senters, and the perverted moralism which makes us 
 
 * Vanity Fair (New York), for October, 1919. Article on page 45, 
 "War Mmds — Are We Setting Up Housekeeping in Our Literary 
 Trenches?"
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN 99 
 
 so ready to impose our standards of righteousness by 
 force and coercion. These forces taken together seem to 
 me fully to explain our sudden lapse into an intolerance 
 almost barbaric in its intensity. The whole process 
 psychologically and emotionally was a remarkable one, 
 and a few of the lessons which it provides for liberals 
 I subsequently attempt to point out in the chapters, 
 ''Pohtical Symbolism And The Mob," and ''The 
 Future." It was as extraordinary and instructive a 
 conversion as psychologists have ever had an opportunity 
 to study at first hand. 
 
 Any extensive cataloging of how this emotional break- 
 down expressed itself in specific actions is an unpleasant 
 task which I prefer to leave to some other observer. "With 
 the main facts concerning those actions most of us are 
 already only too humiliatingly familiar. We watched 
 the pulpit degenerate from a Christian instrument into 
 a mere time-server of the State. We watched ministers 
 of the gospel become mere vulgar ranters and abusers. 
 We watched the universities expell members of their 
 faculties who showed any originality or hardihood. We 
 watched our schools turn into propaganda centres, per- 
 verting history and corrupting the minds of our next 
 generation with all kinds of lies and false incitements. 
 We watched the Espionage Act used as an instrument 
 by cjTiical powerful interests for the disposal of social 
 agitators. Under the same act we watched innocent 
 men and women sent to jail for expressing mild opposi- 
 tion to the policies of the government. We watched our 
 judges and courts talk in the language of abusive fish- 
 wives. We watched the extension of the spy system into/ 
 a terrorism which did not balk at opening private letteryf 
 We watched the almost complete denial of the right of 
 free speech and assemblage. We watched our news- 
 
 (
 
 100 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 papers act as open inciters to riot. We watched mob 
 violence condoned by our leading citizens. We watched 
 young children on the street corners during Liberty Loan 
 campaigns retailing atrocity stories which they them- 
 selves only half understood. We watched our stage and 
 our moving pictures forget every artistic standard in 
 their eagerness to exploit patriotism. We watched the 
 denial of political asylum, one of our oldest traditions. 
 We watched the seizure of enemy property in direct 
 violation of one of our treaties. We watched the dis- 
 appearance of anything like sportsmanship or fair play 
 in our treatment of the actual enemy and of those of his 
 blood in this country. We watched the military machine 
 develope a reckless ruthlessness which would have been 
 a credit to Prussia itself. We watched all these things — 
 and some of us it made sick at heart. 
 
 Why was the opposition of American liberals to all 
 these things so feeble and spasmodic? Most of our 
 younger dissenters are to be forgiven — they were either 
 snapped up in the army, being young, or they fled the 
 country in which they had not an atom of a chance to 
 resist the great machine, or they found their way to 
 prisons, usually military ones. But what about the 
 leaders of thought and opinion who had an opportunity 
 to speak? the professors who had jeered at the German 
 professors early in the war when they signed their 
 famous manifesto? the ''forward looking" people who 
 had always pretended to shudder at mob violence and 
 intolerance? Why did we have only a bare half-dozen 
 writers who stood out against the degradation of our 
 national life? Why did we not have a single philosopher 
 to speak up with the courage of a man like Bertrand 
 Russell? Where was ovr Liebknecht, except the brave 
 and fearless Debs? Why did liberalism, in a word, be-
 
 EMOTIONAL BREAK-DOWN 101 
 
 come merely a well meaning but completely ineffectual 
 fringe ? Why was it powerless to control the current of 
 events even to a minor degree f Why did so many of our 
 supposedly liberal leaders in politics leave us wholly in 
 the lurch, when, indeed, they did not themselves turn 
 reactionary? Why did the press, all of it, fall in line 
 with so little protest? Why did the few upright minis- 
 ters, the few judges who could not stomach flagrant per- 
 version of the law, the few protestors in Congress, the 
 few organizations devoted to fair dealing such as the 
 Civil Liberties Bureau and the like, all seem so puny 
 beside the machine? Why did American liberalism fail 
 us in our emergency? 
 
 Some of these questions I hope to answer in my 'next 
 chapter.
 
 CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 TIMIDITY AND THE SEDUCTIONS OP OFFICE OR CAREER 
 
 "They were hound — even though it were raised upon their own 
 dead bodies — to elevate the tanner of insurrection so high that all 
 peoples might read therein its promises of victory; and they dragged 
 it through the mud of royalty, veiled it beneath protocols, or hung it 
 idly up — an ensign of prostitution — over the doors of foreign 
 Chancelleries. They put their trust in the promises of every minis- 
 ter, in the hopes held out by every ambassador, in everything save in 
 the omnipotence of the people. ' ' — Mazzini. 
 
 DURING the first months of the war and again during 
 the summer and fall preceding the armistice I had 
 occasion to go to Washington to see various department 
 executives and find out as much as I could for magazine 
 publication. Whenever possible, I rode in the Congres- 
 sional Limited because it was pleasant to sit in the Pull- 
 man or the luxurious smoker and day-dream as one 
 passed the mushroom munition towns and camps along 
 the Delaware Water Gap and Maryland. In company 
 with the smartly dressed officers in all kinds of foreign 
 uniform, the efficient looking business men probably on 
 their way to interview some official of the War Trade 
 Board or the Food or Fuel Administrations, the stylishly 
 gowned ladies whose prepossessing looks had not been 
 affected by any acquaintance with an erzatz diet, it was 
 easy to let the fancy loose and picture oneself as some 
 important executive en route to transact momentous 
 business of international importance or even — best of all 
 — as someone with information and a plan that would 
 bring peace to the world. It took very little imaginaton 
 
 102
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 103 
 
 to understand the charm of being important and "on 
 the inside." 
 
 Again in Washington as I walked through the rows 
 and rows of new department buildings, back of the War 
 Office, mth their thousands of busy clerks and hustling 
 executives, the rooms upon rooms crowded with efficient 
 noiseless typewriters, the long corridors with every door 
 bearing some imposing sounding title, I sensed some- 
 thing of the flood of energy which these rooms directed 
 all over the country. It was not fancy this time which 
 made me picture this cluster of buildings as a kind of 
 cerebellum of the nation, receiving impressions and 
 sensory images by wire and cable and wireless from 
 every part of the country and from our army in France 
 and then reacting and sending out through its efferent 
 paths streams of executive orders, propaganda exhorta- 
 tions, and bulletins of information. The war itself was 
 forgotten in the intensity of waging it. One could not 
 remember the larger purposes of the war or the implica- 
 tions of policy in the harassing task of detailed adminis- 
 tration, in the local jealousy of various departments, in 
 the struggle for prestige in accomplishment. Again I 
 could fancy myself one of these executives, putting every 
 ounce of energy into the creation of an efficient organiza- 
 tion, and I could see how disagreeable it would have been 
 for some outsider to come along with impertinent ques- 
 tions and ask for what ends all this activity was being 
 directed. I could see that once the question of ends hav- 
 ing been settled, I should have been absorbed in more or 
 less technical problems relating to my department and 
 that it would have been psychologically inevitable that 
 I should more and more have relegated the whole ques- 
 tion of ends and larger policy to the higher officials sup- 
 posedly elected by the people for the formulation of them.
 
 104 LIBEEALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 I should have had practically no spare margin of intel- 
 lectual or technical energy with which to analyze and 
 criticize these remote officials. Unwittingly, I should 
 have soon found myself in a situation similar to that of 
 an intelligent subordinate military officer who in a cam- 
 paign puts all his energies into the execution of orders 
 from his superiors, which, had he time for reflection, he 
 would have known to be indefensible. In a word, I 
 should have become ''mobilized." 
 
 Once more in New York after a six months' stay in 
 Chicago, as associate editor of a liberal journal, I found 
 myself invited to join various organizations composed of 
 well-known citizens, editors, publicists and college pro- 
 fessors. Most of these organizations had as their object 
 the discussion of our relation to the war, the formulation 
 of a liberal attitude towards that relation, and the at- 
 tempt to influence public opinion in the direction of that 
 liberal attitude by circulars, advertisements in the daily 
 press, and the coordination for unity of front among 
 the various journals of opinion holding more or less 
 sympathetic views. It was pleasant to go to these dis- 
 cussions and feel that one was part of a selected group ; 
 it was flattering to know that the organization's resolu- 
 tions were brought to the attention of the President and 
 other high executives ; it gave one a sense of importance 
 to realize that one was having some influence in shaping 
 public opinion; it tickled one's vanity to see one's name 
 signed to imposing advertisements in the daily press. 
 Time and again I disagreed sharply with specific con- 
 clusions of these organizations, and now and then I felt 
 out of sympathy with the whole drift of their influence 
 and purpose. Yet I found it difficult to resign, and in 
 the end I compromised between my natural human desire 
 to belong to something which was doing a tangible thing
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 105 
 
 and my inner feeling that I was not true to my own con- 
 victions by rather weakly staying away and just doing 
 nothing. 
 
 These personal experiences are trivial enough in 
 themselves and would have no importance, except that 
 they do illustrate some of the conditions of a first-rate 
 problem. In varying degrees this problem is present 
 wherever there is organization and a heirarchy of offi- 
 cials. It is simply the problem of how an individual 
 shall make known his conscientious dissent from higher 
 policy when the very act of making known the dissent 
 removes him not only from his opportunity to help cor- 
 rect that policy but is likely to bring upon him all kinds 
 of penalties. Consider what the psychological attrac- 
 tions are for any official to remain in a position of 
 importance or semi-importance. Often they are the 
 strongest psychological attractions known — the attrac- 
 tions of ambition, of vanity, of self-preservation. In the 
 majority of instances, resignation means loss of a job 
 and difficulty in finding another. Unless a man is inde- 
 pendently wealthy, he has to sacrifice too much. 
 Secondly, if he is not a man of great resource with the 
 ability quickly to achieve personal popularity, he wdll find 
 his chances for advancement in his career tremendously 
 diminished. Last of all, he is usually put in the humiliat- 
 ing position of trying to explain that his resignation was 
 due not to personal inefficiency and ignorance but to 
 honest disagreement in principle. Inasmuch as a man 
 quitting his job because of disagreement in principle is 
 not a common phenomenon, the popular presumption is 
 all against him and he finds himself in a position not at 
 all flattering to his self-esteem. 
 
 But last and most important of all, it seems to me, is 
 the human desire to keep in touch with the main current
 
 106 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 of events. Only the fanatic is temperamentally fond of 
 being an outsider, although the man of exceptional moral 
 integrity will not, on occasion, hesitate to become one. 
 Most of us like to feel that our efforts count and that we 
 are actively helping in the control of things. We like to 
 feel at home in the world of action — to go out in the 
 streets and know that the popular majority is on our 
 side. We may admire the heretic but we have little 
 desire to be one. And especially is this true in America 
 where respect for minorities can hardly be called a 
 national characteristic and where we have made the word 
 *' crank" synonymous with anybody who happens to 
 think differently from the conventional mass. With us 
 the popular pressure towards conformity is probably 
 greater than in any other civilized country. 
 
 Are not these the human reasons back of the basic 
 timidity of American liberals! I sometimes think my 
 radical friends are unfair to liberals when they accuse 
 them of cowardice — did not the liberals during the war, 
 they ask jeeringly, advise us all to keep quiet and not 
 "rock the boat" and to leave everything to the President 
 because disagreement with the Administration was 
 dangerous! and then when the treaty was finished did 
 they not — since something like an opposition public 
 opinion had developed and it was safe to speak — boldly 
 denounce the treaty's iniquities! Looked at from the 
 outside this is precisely what too many liberals did do, 
 yet less, I believe, because of the negative vice of 
 cowardice than because of a misdirection of a positive 
 virtue, the desire to be of practical usefulness. During 
 the war many an American liberal admitted to me pri- 
 vately his distrust of the President's different actions, 
 admitted that our policy was not clearly defined, admitted 
 that our commitments might lead us to exactly the re-
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 107 
 
 verse of what we were publicly proclaiming as our ideals 
 of a world settlement. When I asked why he did not 
 come out in the open with his fears and doubts the retort 
 invariably was, ''But what can I do? If I express my 
 opposition to this or that minor specific position of the 
 Administration, I at once am identified with the opposi- 
 tion as a whole, I am put in the same class as Lodge and 
 Root and Roosevelt and other reactionaries. I am prac- 
 tically placed in the position of supporting them and of 
 advocating just the policies I oppose. Is it not better 
 to keep quiet, to select from the Administration's ac- 
 tivities those which are in a liberal direction, emphasize 
 them, call public attention to them, and attempt to 
 strengthen the hand of the government wherever it is 
 liberal, possibly influencing it and giving it enough cour- 
 age to go even further! If I come out in the open even 
 what small influence I have is lost ; if I follow the com- 
 promise policy, I may be still of some service to liberal- 
 ism." Surely this is an understandable attitude, although 
 the experience of the war ought clearly to show that it 
 is a mistaken one. After all, any liberal with institutional 
 connections could hardly relish the splendid isolation 
 of Randolph Bourne. Neither had most of them the 
 fiery Irish temperament of Mr. Dudley Field Malone 
 who could resign his ofiQcial connection with the Adminis- 
 tration because of disagreement over the comparatively 
 minor issue of woman suffrage — in this case, by the 
 way, with his usual firm adherence to principle, the Presi- 
 dent completely reversed his original position. Nor, 
 again, had they the youthful impetuosity and independ- 
 ent means of Mr. W. C. Bullitt, who could resign his 
 position at the Peace Conference in disgust and safely 
 take his chances on his future. 
 The mention of Mr. Bullitt's name gives occasion for
 
 108 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 putting the problem in specific terms. On reading his 
 remarkable testimony before the Senate Foreign Rela- 
 tions Committee and learning of Mr. Lansing's open 
 opposition to the peace treaty and the covenant and of 
 General Bliss and Mr. White's implied opposition, was 
 it not difficult to avoid asking oneself, "If these three 
 men felt as strongly opposed as this to the entire methods 
 and policy of the President, why did they not resign and 
 publicly express that opposition?" I think that to the 
 average man it would seem that in the case of an issue 
 so momentous and so interwoven with the future peace 
 and happiness of millions they were clearly under an 
 ethical obligation to do just that. It would seem that they 
 had considerably more justification for such action than 
 had Mr. Arthur Henderson for resigning from Lloyd- 
 George's government. Yet without knowing more of the 
 extraordinary situation than what was revealed in Mr. 
 Bullitt's testimony, I believe one can draw certain rele- 
 vant — although necessarily hypothetical — conclusions. 
 It is easy to guess at General Bliss's natural repugnance 
 to such action. His resignation would have been a severe 
 criticism of his superior officer, in this instance, his Com- 
 mander-in-Chief, and no man of military training, aside 
 from the question of penalties such as we have seen un- 
 justly inflicted upon former Brigadier General Samuel 
 T. Ansell for his courageous attack on our shocking 
 system of army court-martials, instinctively likes any- 
 thing savoring of insubordination. Probably all three 
 gentlemen felt that to resign would seriously have em- 
 barrassed the President as representative of America 
 at the Peace Conference, and the patriotic motive must 
 have been exceeding strong. Furthermore, in Mr. 
 White's case and especially in Secretary Lansing's case, 
 resignation and criticism of the President might easily
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 109 
 
 have meant the ruin, if not of their careers, at all events 
 of their prestige. The Administration had powerful 
 weapons of publicity at its disposal with which to attempt 
 to discredit them. It could bring to bear all the pressure 
 of its enormous patronage. Mr. White and Mr. Lansing 
 would have had to struggle very hard to receive a fair 
 judgment from American public opinion.* 
 
 For there can be no doubt that to, I have called it, our 
 liberals' basic timidity, a result of their willingness to 
 compromise in order to be effective even in a minor de- 
 gree, the Administration during the war deliberately 
 added the background of what the French aptly term 
 the arriviste psychology. Many young men with radi- 
 cal inclinations who might otherwise have been irri- 
 tating ''outside" critics, many college professors who 
 were known to possess to an uncomfortable degree a 
 mind of their own, were seduced from their independence 
 by being invited into the service of the government and 
 by the hint that possible careers were in store for them. 
 Hundreds dreamed so ardently of being invited to the 
 peace conference that they ignored the unpleasant reali- 
 ties around them. All sorts of commissions were created 
 and the various administrations, coal, food, labor, infor- 
 mation, propaganda, and so on, held out many enticing 
 opportunities. Washington was as full of these young 
 men and ex-professors as an Adirondack wood is of 
 chipmunks. Even in New York I wondered if all my 
 acquaintances were in some branch of government ser- 
 vice ; indeed, there was one period when in self -protection 
 one had to pretend one was on some mysterious govern- 
 ment mission in order to avoid the suspicion of one's 
 friends that one was in the secret service. President 
 
 * Evidently Mr. Lansing has preferred to give up the fight entirely. He 
 ha3 never answered Mr. Bullitt's testimony, yet he has announced his en- 
 dorsement of the treaty in toto.
 
 110 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 Wilson not only silenced his critics by putting the out- 
 spoken ones in jail but by putting many others in the 
 government. Those who were conscripted into the army, 
 of course, had no choice, and one would have thought 
 that this would have satisfied any American President's 
 passion for suppression. But no, even the small remain- 
 ing margin for independence must be reduced. The bold 
 critics were committed to prison: the more amenable 
 ones were taken into the government and committed 
 to keeping their mouths shut. Indeed, surveying all the 
 facts, the wonder is not that during the war American 
 liberals were so timid, but that they were as bold as they 
 were. 
 
 For people of lesser importance than recognized inde- 
 pendent thinkers the Government held out other attrac- 
 tive prestige baits. In the diligence with which local 
 draft board officials worked, often without compensation 
 and with serious business loss, one is reminded of the 
 classic episode of Tom Sawyer and the fence that needed 
 white-washing. The officials had prestige in their com- 
 munity ; they gave ' ' the boys ' ' farewell dinners and made 
 patriotic speeches; they led them in the final parade; 
 they were commended by Crowder and other dignitaries. 
 If any final refutation of the ancient theory that men 
 labor only for money were needed, the spectacle of these 
 harassed and patient officials would supply it. Yet all 
 their labor was amply compensated for, if they made a 
 good record for their board in comparison with the 
 others. Certainly they were too busy to find spare time 
 for criticizing the foreign policy of the Government. In 
 the same way the Liberty Loan ' ' captains ' ' and district 
 managers, the women at the head of the local Red Cross 
 campaigns, the minor writers who formed societies like 
 the ** Vigilantes" and wrote letters to newspaper editors
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 111 
 
 solemnly warning the public that there were German 
 spies in every dark corner, the district Food Adminis- 
 tration assistants, all were prevented from making 
 effective criticism by the ingenious method of committing 
 them in advance. Moreover any one of us when we 
 bought a Liberty Bond was by just so much giving 
 hostages to non-criticism of the Government. Here, of 
 course, the seduction was directed at our financial com- 
 mon sense. For anybody with money Liberty Bonds 
 were as safe and conservative an investment as there 
 was on the market; for anybody without, they were a 
 salutaiy kind of enforced saving.* In fact, in a modern 
 industrialized country such as our own, a mere declara- 
 tion of war automatically sets in motion a network of 
 influences and pressures which only the erratic doctrin- 
 aire or the man of singular courage can withstand. This 
 point can hardly be repeated too often. 
 
 Aiding the Government in its technique of seducing 
 critics was, of course, the press. The said sight of a 
 supposedly liberal internationalist like Mr. William Eng- 
 lish Walling growing rabid in his partisanship is not 
 without its human side. Mr. Walling seems to have a 
 sort of congenital passion for clippings, but before the 
 war, he was not quoted extensively in the daily press. 
 After our declaration, with his wide reputation as a 
 Socialist combined with his bitter attacks upon Socialists 
 
 * Nothing could more graphically show the topsy-turviness of our ethical 
 standards than our attitude towards the conscription of life contrasted 
 with that towards the conscription of money. We took life without the 
 asking; we begged for money. If it were written into the Constitution 
 that on the declaration of war, inasmuch as the majority of male citizens 
 had to sacrifice or risk their lives on the field of battle, then it was fair 
 and was hereby made compulsory thrt anyone with a fortune over $500,000 
 Bhould immediately have the balance conscripted into the public treasury 
 to pay for the cost of the war — if that were written into the Constitution, 
 and it would be an eminently sensible thing to do, who can doubt that the 
 provocations to war and the chances of it would be diminished much more 
 strikingly than by any League of Nations ever devised?
 
 112 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 because of their pacifist attitude, he was instantly given 
 freedom of space in the conservative press. Here was a 
 man from the other side publicly coming over to their 
 position ! The newspapers naturally took special delight 
 in "rubbing in" Mr. Walling, as if to say to the radicals, 
 "You see. out of your own mouths you are condemned 
 as fools." There were months when it was difficult to 
 pick up a newspaper without reading some article by, 
 some letter from, or some reference to the ubiquitous 
 Mr. Walling. He must have had a gorgeous time pasting 
 all these clippings about himself into a voluminous scrap- 
 book. Something of the same human background, some- 
 thing of the same natural desire to be quoted and popu- 
 lar, can be safely hypothecated in the case of Mr. Charles 
 Edward Russell and Mr. John Spargo, both classed as 
 radicals and Socialists before their visit to Russia, from 
 which country they returned and wrote books, greatly 
 to the delight of the conservative world, attacking the 
 Bolsheviki from one or another point of view. "Bol- 
 shevism," by Mr. Spargo, has, I understand, gone 
 through several editions and has stirred up an enormous 
 amount of discussion, most of it favorable, although the 
 book on the face of it, it seems to me, is clearly dishonest 
 and unfair. But after all the satisfactions of laudatory 
 reviews, the satisfactions of being in the public eye, the 
 satisfactions of having your publisher congratulate you 
 on your success, are very great. Let the radical who is 
 without sin cast the first stone. 
 
 Yet the voice of conscience is a troublesomely per- 
 sistent thing. I have stated above that many liberals 
 were inwardly disquieted by the course of events, and 
 that the fundamental reason they acquiesced was due to 
 the desire partly to control events, to deflect them, if ever 
 so slightly, towards the liberal left. They were willing
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 113 
 
 to stoop to conquer. But they were hardly satisfied 
 merely to do so. They wanted some deeper justification 
 than just the pragmatically sensible one. So from the 
 moment of threat of war on they increasingly took refuge 
 from the contradictions of stubborn reality in an ideal 
 world of myths. They put considerable ingenuity and 
 critical intelligence into formulating the perfect terms 
 of peace and into explaining the obvious — but hidden — 
 moral and political necessities which made whatever was 
 happening the best of alternative courses. Things might 
 look bad on the surface, but there were deep moral reali- 
 ties beneath not vouchsafed to the vision of the ordinary 
 man. 
 
 For example, in the New Republic (which was very 
 busy discovering these realities during the war), for 
 February 17, 1917, on the eve of our entering, I find 
 an editorial called "The Defence of the Atlantic World," 
 After stating that the real reason we had been unneutral 
 in the war and had allowed England to starve Germany 
 but not Germany England was, because our judgment 
 of the issues of the war had been unfavorable to Germany 
 (in other words, that we had not had the courage to 
 participate, as we clearly should have done had our 
 judgment of the moral issues been "unfavorable," nor 
 on the other hand the courage to remain neutral), the 
 myth takes an unexpected turn: "On the two shores of 
 the Atlantic ocean there has grown up a profound web of 
 interest which joins together the western world. Britain, 
 France, Italy, even Spain, Belgium, Holland, the Scandi- 
 navian nations, and Pan-America are in the main one 
 community in their deepest needs and deepest purposes. 
 They have a common interest in the ocean which unites 
 them. They are today more inextricably bound together 
 than most even as yet realize. But if that community
 
 114 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 were destroyed we should know what we had lost. "We 
 should understand then the meaning of the unfortified 
 Canadian frontier, of the common protection given Latin- 
 America by the British and American fleets. . . . We 
 cannot betray the Atlantic community by submitting. 
 // not civilization, at least our civilization is at stake." 
 (Italics mine.) I only hope if China ever gets unity and 
 military strength and wages war against us, some liberal 
 in a Pekin journal of opinion mil have the irony to 
 write an article called ''The Defence of the Pacific 
 World."" Especially if he is also convinced that it is 
 a war for international democracy, the score will be 
 complete. This extract is a good example of what I 
 should call the myth of specious justification, and it 
 would be ungenerous to give further instances. 
 
 As an example of what I should call the myth of things 
 as they ought to be, I recommend ''The Structure of 
 Lasting Peace," by Dr. Horace M. Kallen,* because it 
 is an excellent representative of many other books of its 
 kind where a really first-class and alert intelligence occu- 
 pies itself too much with fancy and too httle with fact. 
 For instance, speaking of what indemnities Germany 
 ought to pay. Dr. Kallen creates this fairy-land : ""When 
 the Western powers exacted from the quite helpless 
 Chinese government and people indemnities for the dam- 
 age done by the Boxer rebelUon of which this government 
 and people was a victim even more than they, the United 
 States alone, of all the powers, directed the application 
 of its share to defraying the expenses of educating young 
 Chinese in America. Let the democratic powers follow 
 this precedent with regard to the government of Ger- 
 many. Let the terms of peace require that one young 
 German out of every thousand, both men and women, 
 
 * Marshall Jones Co., Boston; 1918.
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 115 
 
 shall from his or her twelfth year on be educated abroad 
 — in the United States, in England, in France, in Italy, 
 in Russia. An indemnity should be required to defray 
 the cost of so educating the new generation. The money 
 of this indemnity ought not, however, to be raised by 
 taxes from the German people. It ought to consist of a 
 trust fund, created by confiscating all the properties of 
 the royal families of Germany, and of the great German 
 landlord class, the junkers. This trust might be held 
 and administered by an international educational com- 
 mission for the good of mankind." To such an ex- 
 tent has Dr. Kallen's myth-making of non-existent 
 political entities gone that today, even after the League 
 Covenant has been pleasantly contrasted with the 
 facts of interfering in every other country by any 
 country which has the power and desire to do so, he 
 makes article ten of the Covenant the guarantee of 
 the rights of small nations and their sure shield of 
 justice against the foreign oppressor.* During the 
 war one might legitimately have been sympathetic to- 
 wards this preoccupation with myths. The creation of 
 them kept the mind at work; it afforded genuine emo- 
 tional relief from the too glaring brutalities of reality; 
 it was excellent for morale. Now that the war is over, 
 however, one resents a Httle the continuance of this pre- 
 occupation. It is too much like the emotional ''hang- 
 over" of a war-time mood which intellectuals are now 
 themselves inclined to feel a trifle ashamed of. One 
 prefers, when one hears such a conventional argument as 
 a half a league is better than none, the reply of Senator 
 Johnson which for aptness and terseness might well have 
 been the utterance of the great precursor who bore his 
 
 * See his remarkable communication in the Neva Republic for August 6, 
 1919.
 
 116 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 name. The President's argument, said the Senator, that 
 even a league with faults is better than no league at all, is 
 like saying an egg is better than no egg at all, even if 
 the egg is rotten. But in my next rthapter I try to show 
 that all the arguments of the President, whichever side 
 of the case he may happen at the moment to be arguing, 
 spring from the extension and perversion of this myth- 
 creating faculty, to which, in spite of the disillusion which 
 a normal man might be expected to experience on dis- 
 covering his increasing unpopularity, he still inveterately 
 clings. 
 
 Now what remedy has the liberal to suggest for this 
 state of affairs? How can the timidities, which kept him 
 so long and so disastrously silent, be exorcised from a 
 man like Raymond Bobbins? How can university pro- 
 fessors and writers be given the courage to speak their 
 real minds? How can a man like Colonel Thompson, 
 even in an American environment, be persuaded to tell 
 those facts about Russia which it was so important for 
 the country to hear when he did not speak? How can our 
 young men be buttressed against the seductions of office 
 ■or career and fortified to resist the insidious temptations 
 lof the arriviste psychology? How can American lib- 
 (Cralism lose its timidity? 
 
 Put in these bald terms, I think it will be seen that to 
 insist upon higher standards of personal integrity and 
 honesty of conviction will not of itself be adequate to 
 solve the problem. I admit that much can be done in 
 this direction. One contemplates with horror the harm 
 which has already been inflicted upon the next generation 
 by the regimentation of opinion which was forced upon 
 it in our schools and colleges during the war. And even 
 before the war the ideal of personal integrity had been 
 'gradually yielding to the more modern and appealing
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 117 
 
 ideal of efficiency. For a considerable time a subtle 
 spiritual poison had been working among our pedagogical 
 institutions, for the popular perversion of pragmatism 
 had made truth something not to be pursued in itself for 
 its own sake so much as something which became sjTiony- 
 mous, in our diction, with anything ''you can get away 
 with.'* These may be sophistications legitimate for the 
 adult of already fixed personal character — I treat this 
 whole subject in another chapter — but speaking for my- 
 self at any rate I know what harm they did me during 
 impressionable adolescence. The material standards of 
 the age were the theme of every pulpit and preacher, and 
 not entirely unjustly. Nevertheless the Church was 
 gradually losing its authority over the young as well as 
 the old — we feared neither God nor the devil, and I 
 think my elders will agree with me that the younger gen- 
 eration coming to twenty-one years of age between 1910 
 and 1914 was as upstart and impertinent a crew as tbey 
 ever had to endure. The problem of standards in educa- 
 tion is a very old one. I am inclined to believe, however, 
 that Plato put the case for insistence upon them more 
 strongly than anyone has done before or since. He was 
 speaking of the efficiency experts of his time in Greece 
 who objected to poetry and mythology of the Gods being 
 taught to the children ; tliey ought to be educated realisti- 
 .1^^, to be taught things as they are. Not so, retorted 
 Plato, you must teach children things as they ought to be, 
 not things as they are, for if you teach them things as 
 they are, when they grow up nothing will shock them 
 and they -^dll have no standards. There it is in a nut- 
 shell : nothing \n\\ shock them. Even in Victorian times 
 it was considered shocking when you called a man a liar. 
 Today nobody pays much attention to it. There is a 
 kind of gentlemen's agreement among us that all men
 
 118 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 are liars anyway, and the only unethical thing to do is 
 to commit the sin of being found out. The various gov- 
 ernmental propagandas during the war have also con- 
 tributed largely to the strengthening of this happy con- 
 clusion. 
 
 Still, if by some felicitous transformation of method 
 in our educational system personal integrity became a 
 standard that awakened the passionate attachment of 
 the majority of the students, it would be inhuman to 
 expect those standards to experience more than a flicker- 
 ing life in a social environment so hostile or indifferent 
 to them as our own. The fine enthusiasm of youth for 
 justice and truth does not, even when it exists, long resist 
 the withering blight of current emphasis upon sophisti- 
 cated efficiency, and it is rather silly to expect it. Again 
 we can see that mere emphasis upon certain personal 
 virtues is of itself fruitless. Although few would ques- 
 tion the desirability of our having a greater number of 
 young men with higher standards of personal integrity, 
 the liberal must see that the real incidence of the problem 
 is social. It is the problem of making opposition respect- 
 able in America — of creating a social atmosphere in 
 which it is possible for men to disagree on fundamental 
 things without being hable to immediate social ostracism. 
 As long as they are subject to that ostracism, they will 
 certainly, sooner or later, abandon any personal stand- 
 ards in order to go with the tide. We seem always to be 
 saying that man is a social animal and always to be for- 
 getting it. We can admire the man of exceptional 
 courage who dares to stand out, but we are not getting 
 a bit nearer to some feasible method of achieving a 
 flexible and creative civilization in which difference of 
 opinion is accepted as an indication of growth rather 
 than seized upon as a mark of depravity. We must make
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 119 
 
 it possible for a man in private or public life to tell the 
 truth, to live up to his honest convictions, to resign with 
 confidence that he will get something like a square deal 
 from the public, that there will be newspapers to present 
 his side of the case inteUigently and fairly, that he will 
 not be put in jail by some ignorant official who does not 
 understand even what he means, that he can still go to 
 his clubs, and that his wife will not reproach him over 
 the morning coffe for being a fool. 
 
 Fortunately, the struggle between the reservationists 
 and the anti-reservationists which has been waged in the 
 Senate and in the public press since the President 
 brought back the treaty from Paris (and as I write, is 
 not yet completed), has done a great deal to break up 
 the artificial unity of war-time before a common enemy. 
 Opposition to the Administration and its policies, if not 
 to accepted political shibboleths about democracy and the 
 rights of property, has already become respectable, and 
 happily the issues here involved are really fruitful and 
 important. It is not a sham battle, but a genuine strug- 
 gle between ideas. Up to the present the contest has not 
 developed great partisan bitterness and has been kept 
 — in comparison with other campaigns — on a fairly high 
 plane of rational discussion. The liberal here has a 
 fine opportunity to define the issues as well as he 
 can, to point out the strength and weakness of both 
 sides even while, in most cases I believe, although 
 of course not for the same reasons as specific Senators, 
 he will find it necessary to support the reserva- 
 tionists. Above all, ho can be good-humored about it; 
 all of us are inclined to be splenetic in our arguments 
 today as a rather natural result of the strain of the war 
 and of the unsettling changes in habits which it has 
 brought in its train; I have occasionally been guilty of
 
 120 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 that fault in this book. But until the artificial war- 
 hysteria of 1917 caught us unprepared and promptly 
 hypnotized us, Americans were known the world over 
 for their sense of humor. We seem to be recovering more 
 of it with each passing week — the testimony of Secre- 
 tary Baker, said Representative Fuller rather inelegantly 
 the other day (in reference to his testimony before the 
 House Committee on Military Affairs as to why we still 
 kept troops in Siberia), is ''all bunk," and the country 
 agreed, with a laugh. We need to do a lot more laughing ; 
 to laugh at the heads of chambers of commerce who dis- 
 cover a ''Bolshevik" in every policeman who wants to 
 join a union, whereas all they have discovered is a man 
 who is wondering how he is going to pay his winter's coal 
 bill and who is as firm a believer in the rights of private 
 property as they themselves. We need to laugh at col- 
 lege heads, like Nicholas Murray Butler and the comic- 
 opera Chancellor Day, who see the country going to ruin 
 with every new strike. We need to laugh at all the dodos 
 of self -constituted authority — and to do it without 
 malice. We need to laugh at the Anti-Saloon Leaguers 
 who seem to imagine that with the passing of public 
 liquor men will sin no more. And every now and then we 
 need to laugh at ourselves. Fanatics are not likely to 
 flourish in such an atmosphere. 
 
 Tactically, moreover, the liberal ought never to forget 
 the value of the flank attack. The political aims of the 
 British Labor Party were not the main, but the subsidi- 
 ary, consideration of the party's leaders at the beginning 
 of the war. The leaders concentrated upon the palpable 
 economic injustices before them and united the rank and 
 file on these more immediate aims. Political aims grew 
 naturally and slowly out of the original economic pro- 
 gramme ; the latter was not superimposed on the former
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 121 
 
 as too many Americans seem to fancy. Similarly at home 
 today Senator Johnson could probably not receive any 
 attention for consideration of the Russian problem if he 
 went out among the people and preached the ineffable 
 virtues of the Soviet government. But he gets immediate 
 attention and respect when he employs the rallying-cry, 
 ''Get the boys out of Siberia." A more rational consid- 
 eration of the whole Russian problem will tend to arise 
 in American public opinion, growing out of this origi- 
 nally pure emotional appeal. In this method there are 
 suggestions for other liberal leaders (I must admit that 
 the application of that term to Senator Johnson is rather 
 too generous ; he might be said to have occasional liberal 
 sproutings). By judicious emplojmient of the mass emo- 
 tional materials at hand, other problems too might be 
 lifted into the plane of rational accommodation — par- 
 ticularly the problems of industry and of the status of 
 the negro. 
 
 In this passing reference to tactics I particularly wish 
 not to be misunderstood. I use the word tactics only in 
 a descriptive sense. It is not a question of shuffling or 
 evading the facts. It is not even the recommendation of 
 an effective demagoguery for a high purpose; we have 
 had too much of that in the war, and the people are tired 
 of it. Although a more damning indictment of a cause 
 was never penned than the Minority Report of the Senate 
 Foreign Relations Committee — by the friends of the 
 President who wanted the Treaty ratified without change 
 — they showed a sound instinct in making the major ap- 
 peal of their report hinge on economic advantages, 
 with just enough pious gilding about the peace of the 
 world to make it palatable. After all, it is the economic 
 and political facts which really are the telling points. 
 And Senators Borah, Knox, and Johnson, even when they
 
 122 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 play the demagogiie and talk about their ''Americanism*' 
 and their love of our native independence, put the whole 
 force of their argument upon known facts — upon our 
 financial and military obligations, upon our inferior po- 
 sition in the Council, upon our moral duty to "police 
 Europe and the rest of the world in the sole interest of 
 England and other foreign powers," and so on. In other 
 words, by tactics I meant merely selecting out of a welter 
 of known facts those which are relevant to the people 
 and can excite their lively interest. The whole emphasis 
 is upon facts and not upon opinion. The method is in no 
 sense an excuse for gilding the truth or from shrinking 
 from it, even when unpopular (after all, the League of 
 Nations idea was popular in America, and its opponents, 
 until they had made known the flagrant injustices of this 
 particular League plan, were in an unpopular minority). 
 It is merely a question of emphasis. And at bottom it 
 continues to obey the rational injunction for facts, then 
 more facts, and still more facts — all of them. 
 
 Why do I emphasize so strongly the liberal duty of 
 getting all the facts ? Well, even the most bitter conflict- 
 ing opinions have a tendency to meet together in rational 
 understanding when the complete evidence is presented. 
 As Montaigne finely says, when all the facts are known, 
 sentiments are not divided. It is the liberal's first job to 
 extend the range of known facts as far as possible, and 
 his second, where decisions must be reached before all 
 the facts can be marshalled, to create an atmosphere of 
 rational accommodation. For since sentiments on some 
 things will always remain divided, inasmuch as all the 
 facts can never be known, the liberal strives to make sure 
 that every sentiment will have its day in court. It is 
 self-protection against the day when he himself may be 
 outnumbered; it is protection for the community which
 
 TIMIDITY AND SEDUCTIONS 123 
 
 can usually measure the degree of its civilization by the 
 degree of its tolerance. When these tasks have been ac^ 
 complished, then indeed American liberalism may lose 
 its timidity, and our young men have the courage to 
 speak out the truth that is in them.
 
 CHAPTER SIX 
 
 PEESIDENT WILSON : THE TECHNIQUE OF LIBERAL FAILURE 
 
 Senator Johnson asJced if the President's fourteen points were con- 
 sidered. 
 
 "I don't think they were discussed," said Mr. Lansing. 
 
 "Not discussed at all?" asJced Senator Johnson. 
 
 "No, we followed the terms of the arnvistice largely." 
 
 "Was there any discussion of insistence wpon the fourteen points?" 
 
 "I don't recall any." 
 
 — Quoted from the New York World, August 7, 1919. 
 
 T T is not here intended to give any formal analysis of 
 ■■- President Wilson's theories of government and public 
 polity in general, for such analysis gives no clue to the 
 workings of his mind. Moreover, his theories in them- 
 selves are of no particular value — as an original thinker 
 Woodrow Wilson is distinctly second-rate. ''It is neces- 
 sary to remember," writes Walter Lippmann, who is 
 well acquainted with his intellectual life, ' ' that the gram- 
 mar of Mr. Wilson's thought is a fusion of Jeffersonian 
 democracy with a kind of British Cobdenism. This 
 means in practical life a conviction that the world needs 
 not so much to be administered as to be released from 
 control. ... In the more temperate zones of its feeling 
 it leans towards free trade and a philosophical laissez- 
 faire. But its controlling characteristic is a lack of inter- 
 est in procedure^ organization, machinery, and technical 
 methods. The world is to be set right by the communion 
 of consciences."* And in a book published before the 
 war the same well-informed author says of him, "Wood- 
 
 * Yale Review, volume 8, number 4, pages 716 and 717. 
 
 124
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 125 
 
 row Wilson's 'New Freedom' is laid in the main upon 
 sympathy with 'those on the make/ with the man looking 
 for a career ; upon horror at the crimes of monopoly, and 
 little recognition of the crimes of competition. It is, 
 I believe, a vigorous restatement of the traditional 
 American Utopia in which justice is to be attained by 
 the balance of self-interest. There is a kind of hope 
 that an equality of push will neutralize all dangers, and 
 produce an automatic cooperation. So Wilson seems to 
 see the working man merely as a possible shop-keeper. 
 The assumptions are those of a generous commercial- 
 ism."* These pictures drawn (at their respective times) 
 by a sympathetic observer hardly need comment. They 
 represent a mind, hopelessly floundering and old-fash- 
 ioned, in a world of the twentieth century. And during 
 the war one watched with something almost akin to dis- 
 may the President's intellectual attitude hardening into 
 ideological, eighteenth century concepts about the State 
 with no awakening consciousness of the fertility of the 
 functional theory and the economic sanctions of plural 
 sovereignty. It was indeed ironical to be told that our 
 contribution to the war was to be an intellectual contribu- 
 tion under the leadership of a man to whom we looked in 
 vain for any sign of his appreciation of even the common- 
 places of Continental liberalism. 
 
 But a deeper reason remains for not emphasizing the 
 intrinsic qualities of Mr. Wilson's formally expressed 
 theories of government and polity. During the war econ- 
 omists, who, no matter how personally modest, must have 
 known that Mr. Wilson was beside them a child in eco- 
 nomics; professors of international law who must have 
 known that they were far better acquainted with their 
 subject than the President; political theorists, who must 
 
 •Drift and Mastery. By Walter Lippmann; Kenerley, 1914. Page 314.
 
 126 LIBERALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 have known that Mr. Wilson's dogmas were incredibly- 
 naive; sociologists, who must have smiled at the Presi- 
 dent's constant identification of morahty with adminis- 
 tration — all these were not uncomfortable in their active 
 support of a President obviously inferior to any one of 
 them in their respective specialties. The President was 
 to them a leader, and whatever his minor mistakes in 
 judgment or lamentable ignorance of certain details, he 
 did to them represent the hope of liberal aspiration. His 
 general direction was the right one ; taken by and large, 
 most of his utterances were a correct expression of lib- 
 eral sentiments. He was the only ideahst among states- 
 men who, for the most part, made little profession of 
 desiring other than material things. He was the rock 
 of moral integrity in a world which had forgotten how to 
 be decent. Consequently they trusted him; he alone 
 could lead us out of the morass of selfishness and greed 
 and nationalistic passion into which the cynical diplomats 
 and statesmen of the old world had plunged us. In a 
 word, Woodrow Wilson represents the problem of the 
 idealist in politics, and it is more valuable to study him 
 from this point of view than from the conventional one 
 of examining his theories in themselves. Furthermore, 
 the weaknesses of Mr. Wilson are important because they 
 have been to a surprising extent the weaknesses of Amer- 
 ican liberalism and American liberals. They are sym- 
 boHc. I believe that in trying to discover the essential 
 core of Woodrow Wilson's failure, then, we shall dis- 
 cover the essential core of the failure of American lib- 
 eralism during the war. Not only that : we shall discover 
 that the whole moral ideology of American liberalism has 
 been on a false basis and that most of our concepts of 
 what constitutes liberalism in action have been too sim- 
 ple and inelastic.
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 127 
 
 Perhaps the most fundamental thing which would 
 strike the objective psychologist in his examination of 
 Woodrow Wilson would be his extraordinary technique 
 of apologizing for his own weakness by preaching the 
 virtues of strength. It is a compensatory method which 
 goes very far and deep in this case. Let me cite a few 
 instances of what I mean. 
 
 By training and by temperament Woodrow Wilson is 
 an aristocrat. His upbringing in the South, his position 
 at Princeton, his spontaneous sympathy and feeling of 
 kinship with upper class Englishmen, especially with 
 those in whom the class feeling is very strong, all attest 
 this description. (It was Lord Lansdowne rather than 
 Arthur Henderson who made, at a time when the Presi- 
 dent did not like to be reminded of peace, discussion of 
 terms respectable.) Yet what do we find him most 
 famous for in his public life? Of course for his phrase, 
 **The world must be made safe for democracy." This 
 is not surprising when we look a trifle further. On his 
 first visit to Europe, both in his speech at Manchester, 
 England, and at Rome, Italy, the President made the 
 assertion, obviously ridiculous as a political proposition, 
 that what kept nations together was not self-interest or 
 mutual interest but spontaneous liking and friendship. 
 We must take this public praise of the inherent virtues 
 of friendship together with the indubitable fact that in 
 his private life the President is the loneliest of men and 
 that he has very few friends himself.* Or again, it is 
 hardly necessary today to point out that President Wil- 
 son is by temperament one of the most secretive of men ; 
 it is almost painful for him to make decisions except when 
 he makes them alone in the privacy of his study. Yet 
 
 * A report, not authentic but well vouched for, goes to the effect that Mr. 
 Wilson once said in a frank moment to Colonel House that he had never 
 made a man friend in his life.
 
 128 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 it is not necessary to mock him, as of course all the radi- 
 cals are merrily doing today, with the first of his fourteen 
 points, ''open covenants of peace openly arrived at." 
 One needs only to recall how again and again the Presi- 
 dent preaches the virtues of ''taking counsel," and ex- 
 pressly says that the only lasting and important deci- 
 sions of policy come as a result of frank communion of 
 many men's minds. In this respect, clearly, the Presi- 
 dent's practice is and always has been in flagrant contra- 
 diction to what he has publicly preached. Once more: 
 the President cannot endure criticism of any kind ; he is 
 uncomfortable in the presence of anyone his intellectual 
 superior who does not entirely agree with him, as the 
 make-up of his cabinet painfully reveals. It is not so 
 much that he is unfair to his opponent; he is almost 
 pathologically unwilling even to hear him. The political 
 prisoners now in jail as a consequence of the operations 
 of the Espionage Act bear inglorious witness to the truth 
 of this assertion. Yet from none other than Woodrow 
 Wilson's lips do we hear more eloquent professions of 
 the virtues of free speech. Mr. Amos Pinchot was not 
 so wide of the mark when he said of the President, "He 
 puts his enemies in office and his friends in jail."* 
 
 It is hardly necessary to pursue this inquiry any fur- 
 ther, for we can already see that to employ an adjective 
 
 * An anonymous "petition for the impeachment of Woodrow Wilson,** 
 circulated throughout New York City on July 4, 1919, and of course de- 
 scribed by the newspapers as the work of ' ' anarchists, ' ' charged against 
 him on its 21st count: "And finally we charge him with a still more 
 dangerous and immoral species of anarchy than the political anarchy above 
 charged against him. We charge him here with a kind of anarchy that is 
 subversive of all human relationships based upon understanding or agree- 
 ment, since the anarchy with which we now charge him threatens the de- 
 struction of society itself through the destruction of the integrity of human 
 speech — the spoken and written word — the medium by which men enter 
 into social relationships and into all moral relationships with each other. 
 An examination of the state papers and public speeches of Woodrow 
 Wilson, made in the light of events, shows such an utter perversion in the 
 use of language, and one so habitual, as to merit a new name. Its intrusion
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 129 
 
 like ** vacillating" to describe this attitude is somewliat 
 beside the mark. This quality of mind is something much 
 deeper than the mere defects of a conventional tempera- 
 ment. Simply, President Wilson's characteristic is this: 
 action is determined by the flow of events, by unconscious 
 predilections, by the unrecognized influence of friends 
 and advisers, by the unconscious desire for prestige, by 
 political pressure, by economic advantage, by the whole 
 complex of rational and semi-rational motives which de- 
 termine the plain everyday acts of most of us. It is not 
 determined by principles, for that might involve hard- 
 ship, or difficulty, or courage. It is merely the line of 
 least resistance among various lines of choice. Words, 
 under such circumstances, become merely a means of 
 justifying the action whatever it may be. This type of 
 mind approaches a situation which has better and worse 
 alternatives, as it conceives them morally. It then se- 
 lects the worse, under the pressure of events. But the 
 choice involves a certain inner discomfort. Is there no 
 way of avoiding this inner strain? Certainly. One needs 
 only to phrase the better course in idealistic terms and to 
 announce that whatever may be the external appear- 
 ances, the actual course chosen is really that course. One 
 does what one likes, but one has a great advantage, what 
 one likes to do becomes automatically the thing which 
 ought to be done. If there is any lingering question in 
 
 into the office once filled by George Washington would seem to merit its 
 being called by some particularly opprobrious name, though we think that 
 great man himself — the paragon of truthfulness as of Americanism — 
 would have called it simply lying and hj'pocrisy. Employed as it now is, 
 under the cover usually of a meretricious rhetoric, to confuse the thoughts 
 of men respecting their highest concerns, and by him who occupies the most 
 eminent of all earthly stations, we think that, until a new name can be 
 found for it, it deserves to be called anarchy — using the word in the sense 
 in which our ancestors used it, for in their mouths anarchy meant not 
 merely the subversion of the state, but of society itself." This is high- 
 flown and extreme, of course, yet who caa deny the kernel of truth in the 
 charge?
 
 130 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 one's mind about this, it can be immediately dissipated 
 by enunciation of the noblest principles and warm ad- 
 vocacy of them. The very nobleness of the principles 
 makes it clear that certain sacrifices must be made for 
 their furtherance — that is, precisely the sacrifices which 
 are already fails accomplis in the only half-understood 
 previous decisions. President Wilson, with his back- 
 ground of literary writing instead of scientific investiga- 
 tion, is an adept at phrasing principles. Yet this method 
 of using words to gild events and to free one's conscience 
 from uncomfortable doubts, something all men do to a 
 certain extent, is not, even in President Wilson's flagrant 
 case, anything like conscious hypocrisy. It is something 
 much worse, something pathological. It is a method 
 whereby a man of great intelligence and skilful technique 
 in employing words can avoid anytliing like the neces- 
 sity for self-criticism. Not merely does it enable one to 
 say one thing and to do the precise opposite; we all do 
 that to some extent, and Dr. Johnson's admonition to 
 Boswell that it was childish to expect men's practices to 
 accord with their principles remains as biting today. The 
 Wilsonian technique does much more ; it ultimately robs 
 its user of the self-knowledge that that is what he is 
 doing, Man may be weak : that is one thing, he can then 
 be forgiven his sins. But to make the worse appear the 
 better reason: that is another, nothing can be done for 
 him except to send him to a doctor.* 
 
 If this description of the President's mental processes 
 appears somewhat like a caricature, I believe it is only 
 because we live too close to him to acquire a sane histori- 
 cal perspective. Yet even today a little consideration of 
 
 * Since writing these words, the President has had a nervous collapse. 
 My own opinion is that this misfortune was due as much to psychological 
 as physiological causes — the strain of the inner conflict, the knowledge 
 that he had been defeated, was to6 much for him.
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 131 
 
 tlie actual policies and the methods of furthering them 
 by the President will make it tenable that such a descrip- 
 tion is not a caricature. We have not to contrast action 
 and speech to maintain this point of \^ew ; there are docu- 
 ments in existence which on the surface reveal it without 
 reference to any previous or subsequent action. Such 
 a document is the announcement of July, 1918, regarding 
 intervention in Russia. Let us keep firmly in mind what 
 this document announces: namely this, that we are to 
 send troops to Siberia and to cooperate with Japan in her 
 military activities. Yet incredible as it may seem the 
 document begins with the unequivocal statement that in- 
 tervention in Russia is more likely to increase the misery 
 of the unhappy people there than it is to allay it. We 
 announce that we intend to do precisely what w^e state is 
 the worst thing possible. The manner in which the docu- 
 ment in question avoids the appearance of enunciating 
 such an absurd policy is a masterpiece of sophistical 
 technique and will repay the closest study. It illustrates 
 perfectly the working of the type of idealism in pohtics 
 I have been describing. By frankly stating the virtue 
 of the opposing point of view, the document does much 
 more than disarm the opponent. It sets in motion a 
 subtly disguised chain of reasoning such as this: "Well, 
 if we are agreed that intervention is a folly and oppose 
 it as the document states, then it must be due to some 
 exceptional circumstance that we compromise on a few 
 details with the interventionists. Further, since we have 
 stated our opposition to intervention, it is obvious that 
 when we reluctantly have to intervene, we shall avoid all 
 the mistakes of those interventionists who intervene for 
 their selfish ends. Our aims are idealistic ; theirs are not. 
 We can intervene safely because having only the highest 
 ends in view we shall avoid just those errors which make
 
 132 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 intervention so despicable by those who pursue other 
 ends." For in politics the idealist, like the king, can do 
 no wrong. 
 
 An analysis of Mr. Wilson's foreign policy from 1914 
 on would show that this perverse moralism in politics, 
 although inherent in his whole philosophy of life, devel- 
 oped rather gradually and slowly before it reached its 
 high point of impotence to control or guide events in 
 July, 1918, and from that time on. When the war began 
 the President was quite sincere in his advocacy of a neu- 
 trality policy; his pacifism was shocked by the sudden 
 reversion of Europe to barbarism, and so far as any 
 half conscious desire for prestige went, it is probable 
 he saw himself in the role of mediator. To have brought 
 peace to the world was an aim wholly consistent with our 
 national temper at that time besides being one that would 
 go down very creditably in the history books. But as 
 the months passed the natural Anglo-Saxon sympathies 
 of the President asserted themselves and he gave at- 
 tentive hearing to the pro-Ally propaganda which from 
 the very first day of the war had begun to flood the 
 country. More and more, with what Walter Weyl caUs 
 his "invincible abstractness" of mind* and his habit of 
 putting complex acts into simple moral categories, the 
 President came to identify the Allied cause with what 
 was ''right" and the German cause with what was 
 "wrong," although of course as head of the nation at 
 least a verbal neutrality had to be maintained. This was 
 the real reason for his adoption of the "benevolent neu- 
 trality" policy which might be said to date actively from 
 
 * The New Republic, Volume XIX, number 240. Article on page 173, 
 "Prophet and Politician" by Walter Weyl. Although a trifle too gentle 
 in its treatment, this article remains today the most illuminating short 
 discussion extant of the President's weaknesses and the type of character 
 which made them inevitable.
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 133 
 
 as early as the Wilhemena case. This policy was not 
 adopted because the President saw clearly its implica- 
 tions for America as a nation, but because the Allied 
 cause was vaguely felt to be the just one. Had the Presi- 
 dent not been so sterile in his purely political concepts, 
 had he understood the economic background and struc- 
 ture not merely of the war itself but of all capitalistic 
 and highly industrialized States, he never would have 
 allowed his thinking to drift more and more towards a 
 futile Utopia of a league of nations. He would have seen, 
 had he understood the world about him realistically, 
 that any league of nations, under the present organiza- 
 tion of society, could at the best be only a league of 
 strong nations to exploit the weak, and at the worst — as 
 it has turned out to be — a mere repetition, in modern 
 terms, of the Holy Alliance. He would have seen that in 
 the world of 1914 and 1915 and 1916 the increasingly 
 pressing demand that American policy ought to make 
 should have been for peace. Our national interests in 
 every sense of the word demanded that we should make 
 every effort possible to bring Europe to its senses. Eu- 
 rope's slow destruction and its plunge toward economic 
 and financial bankruptcy were as inimical to our interests 
 as they were tragic to its own. He would have striven for 
 peace not (as of course he would have been accused by 
 the stupid reactionaries in our own country) out of a 
 sentimental pacifism and moral love of peace in itself 
 but because the practical exigencies of the situation made 
 such a policy imperative. In a word) had he been a 
 statesman instead of an idealist, he would have pocketed 
 his natural sympathies for the Entente and even at the 
 cost of wounding their susceptibilities would have at- 
 tempted to bring about any peace not too violently dis- 
 tant, in either direction, from the status quo ante. For
 
 134 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 this purpose lie had a two-edged weapon : By a threat to 
 England that the blockade, described by himself and for 
 once correctly, as ** illegal, ineffective and indefensible'* 
 would not be recognized by the United States he could 
 have purchased from Germany a certain amount of rea- 
 sonableness in their peace demands ; from the other point 
 of view, on England's protest at this threat, he could — 
 by showing himself unhesitating to employ an embargo 
 against her in retaliation — have purchased a certain 
 amount of reasonableness in their demands. We now 
 know that a status quo peace could have been easily 
 attained in January, 1915, and there were other occa- 
 sions on which the war could have been brought to a 
 fairly decent conclusion by effective American statesman- 
 ship. Of course the policy actually followed by the 
 President was merely the policy of drift — drift to a 
 great extent on a sea of moral emotionalism. To be 
 sure, the President did address some sharp notes to 
 the British Foreign Office in protest at their violation of 
 our plain rights as a neutral, but at no time did the tone 
 of the notes become menacing, and even today it is doubt- 
 ful if anywhere in the peace treaty, or in private under- 
 standings, have we exacted from England the money 
 reparation due us from her violations. The sensible 
 British in this respect very soon, as we phrase it, ''took 
 the President's number," and our notes only emphasized 
 the fact that the President had thrown away one of his 
 most valuable weapons for peace-making. Germany, on 
 the other hand, tried many times to get us to insist upon 
 breaking the British blockade — at least as far as non- 
 contraband went — and when after almost three years 
 of attempts the submarine counter-blockade was intro- 
 duced one could see that our entrance into the war came 
 inevitably as a result of diplomatic ineptitude. I am
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 135 
 
 not saying, as German sympathizers said with some de- 
 gree of plausibility, that the President was merely timid 
 before England. It would be equally true to say that he 
 was timid before Germany. It is not a question of 
 timidity. It is a question of following events rather than 
 attempting to control them. Mr. Wilson himself partly 
 realized this when, in his usual idealistic manner, he de- 
 nied being a *' leader" in a conventional sense and de- 
 scribed himself as an *' interpreter" and as a "spokes- 
 man." This habit of speech persisted even to the very 
 last. He continued to speak of himself in Europe as the 
 spokesman of the American people, as the interpreter of 
 their thoughts, in the face of a recent Congressional 
 election which had distinctly repudiated him. 
 
 During the war itself this tendency to follow the drift 
 of events and then to idealize the decision was illustrated 
 again and again. It was coupled, of course, with certain 
 other personal qualities of the President which must be 
 briefly mentioned — his vanity, his stubborness (for like 
 all weak men Mr. Wilson is stubborn), his way of sud- 
 denly yielding to a proposition after he had repeatedly 
 stated he would not entertain it, his perverse loyalty to 
 those whom he had appointed to office (an outcropping 
 of his stubborness and his intellectual inferiority com- 
 plex), but chiefly his inveterate ignorance of relevant fact 
 and his hatred of administrative detail. Perhaps the 
 most evil consequence of the amiable habit of enunciating 
 noble platitudes is that it soon gets one into the habit of 
 ignoring details. In the President's case it went even 
 further; by the summer of 1917 it is hardly unfair to say 
 that among the liberal and intelligent i)eople either here 
 or abroad the President was the most ill-informed on 
 the immediate events and issues of the war. This ig- 
 norance of the President about what was actually taking
 
 136 LIBEEALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 place would astonish the average American citizen, if 
 he were made aware of it. It is a myth, which all States 
 sedulously cultivate, that ''the Government" has special 
 and secret sources of information and must therefore 
 be in the possession of more facts and be better able to 
 judge than the citizen "outsider." As a matter of fact, 
 most foreign offices and State Departments are organiza- 
 tions for suppressing truth and for concealing disagree- 
 able facts from high administrative officials. The activi- 
 ties of the President were not directed towards obtain- 
 ing impartial evidence, but towards the creation of or- 
 ganizations which would select from the mass of evidence 
 only what he wanted to know, organizations which would 
 shield him from unpleasant realities. Mr. Lincoln Col- 
 cord, one of America's ablest political journalists and 
 a liberal, has pointed out admirably in an article in the 
 New York Nation* the technique of these organizations. 
 ''What would happen, for instance, if they (the Amer- 
 ican people) could credit, know, and understand that the 
 Government probably was more ignorant of politics and 
 affairs abroad than many a private individual or organ- 
 ization; that the State Department was organized vir- 
 tually to withhold true information, in the sense that it 
 was committed to a presentation only of the acceptable 
 bureaucratic point of view; that the claim of 'secret and 
 confidential information' in which every official, from the 
 President down, took refuge when hard pressed, was 
 frequently nothing but specious humbug; that while 
 baskets-full of secret and confidential information un- 
 questionably poured in upon the State Department, prac- 
 tically none of it bore on the more vital forces and issues 
 that were moving in the world; that a great deal of 
 authentic information from abroad was not permitted to 
 
 *T'h€ Nation (New York), Volume CVIII, number 2811, page 782.
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 137 
 
 enter the doors of the State Department at all; that the 
 small residue of true report which found lodgment there 
 was, in the nature of the bureaucratic atmosphere, self- 
 discredited and rarely considered; and that the whole 
 effort of the Administration to maintain an authority 
 over opinion and to keep the public in ignorance of true 
 facts was largely inspired, either deliberately or uncon- 
 sciously, by the desire of the bureaucracy to cover up its 
 inadequacy and inefficiency, and to have its own way 
 without the bother of a formidable opposition." 
 
 Robert Dell, for years the correspondent of the Man- 
 chester Guardian in Paris, wrote me from Paris in a let- 
 ter dated April 18, 1918: "If the German offensive is 
 checked, we look to Wilson to make the Allied Govern- 
 ments listen to reason, but I fear that he is not very well- 
 informed about the situation in Europe. Lloyd George 
 and Clemenceau have done everything that they could in 
 an underhand way to prevent the deputation of Allied 
 Socialists from going to America, for fear that it should 
 enlighten A¥ilson; they could not refuse passports, so 
 they have put obstacles in the way and in particular the 
 Enghsh Government has encouraged Havelock Wilson 
 to tell the sailors to refuse to carry Huysmans." 
 
 Lest the reader receive the false impression that Presi- 
 dent Wilson was himself not so much deliberately ig- 
 norant as imposed upon and given erroneous informa- 
 tion, I wish to give in Mr. Colcord's words from the 
 article mentioned above the sequel : 
 
 ''On February 20-23, 1918, the Inter- Allied Labor Con- 
 ference was held in London. American labor delegates 
 did not attend. The Conference delegated Camille 
 Huysmans and others to go to America and attempt to 
 bring our labor movement into a more liberal frame of 
 mind. The whole issue of President Wilson's liberalism
 
 138 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 was involved. The delegates at London were tlie true 
 friends of his fourteen principles, the true enemies of 
 the secret treaties. Two weeks after that event, the Ad- 
 ministration had no knowledge of the Inter-Allied Labor 
 Conference. It did not know that events were wholly out 
 of the State Department's sphere. The press news of 
 the Conference, of course, was almost entirely cut off by 
 the British censor; but the information finally reached 
 the Administration through unofficial channels. To 
 judge by the results, it must have thrown the Administra- 
 tion into quite a panic. Huysmans and the Inter- Allied 
 Labor Conference stood for a conference with German 
 delegates. The British Government was asked to stop 
 these men from coming. A hand-picked group of Lloyd 
 George adherents in British labor circles was immedi- 
 ately dispatched to America from England — in an effort 
 to split the British Labor Party. It w^as not until a 
 month after the close of the Inter-Allied Labor Confer- 
 ence of February that the first labor report of the war 
 was received by the State Department from the American 
 embassy in London. Thus closely was President Wilson 
 cognizant of and w^orking with his real friends; and 
 thus deliberately did he sustain the hands of his real 
 enemies.'* 
 
 It would requi]:'e an extremely long book to point out 
 the diplomatic blunders of the President based on wilful 
 ignorance; his refusal to see RajTnond Robbins on his 
 return from Russia, the man who knew more about the 
 Russian situation than any other person, simply on ac- 
 count of personal pique (an old political grudge, in this 
 case) ; his entire innocence of the implications of the 
 Austrian peace proposal in 1917, simply because he was 
 then interested in war and not peace ; his misunderstand- 
 ing of the Stockholm conference, simply because to un-
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 139 
 
 derstand it would force liiin to realize that there was a 
 nascent liberal spirit among some Germans ; his supreme 
 indifference to the whole Eastern question, simply be- 
 cause the factors involved in making other than an 
 a priori judgment on it were difficult and complex. The 
 score could easily be lengthened.* Yet is it more instruc- 
 tive to select an example where the President did learn — 
 although, of course, too late to make effective use of his 
 knowledge — under the sheer pressure of events. 
 
 In the early summer of 1917 the Central Powers were 
 in a mood for peace, and naturally liberal sentiment in 
 Germany plucked up its courage to fight its constant, if 
 temporarily suspended, battle with the militarists. The 
 facts are well known now. The ruthless submarine cam- 
 paign showed signs of being a failure ; the Russian revo- 
 lution was a disappointment; Austria was tired of the 
 
 * (a) Walter Weyl, in the article above referred to writes: "Mr. Wilson 
 sat down at the Peace Table knowing nothing of the things he should have 
 knowTi. He knew nothing of Shantung, Fiume, Dalmatia, Silesia, Mace- 
 donia, and cared little about them so long as his principle of self-determina- 
 tion prevailed. He knew nothing of the complex economic interrelations, 
 friendly and hostile, between various European nations, for he trusted to his 
 not very clearly defined princijile concerning 'economic barriers.' JEe did 
 not even want to Moto these 'details.' " (Italics mine.) (b) The testimony 
 of Secretary Lansing before the Senate Committee (August, 1919), in which 
 he showed he knew nothing of the secret treaty between Japan and Great 
 Britain, France, and Italy before he went to Paris was only another proof 
 of the lamentable ignorance of the whole situation. (It is worth pointing 
 out, too, that Lloyd George was in some respects almost as ignorant; he 
 once asked an American visitor if it was "Upper or Lower Silesia" which 
 the Peace Conference was discussing.) (c) Walter Lippmann, in the article 
 above referred to, writes : * ' Just as he avoided the diplomatic service, so he 
 abstained during the war from the intricacies of European diplomacy. A 
 less unconventional mind would have argued that if he was to participate 
 in the details of the treaty, it would be necessary to participate in the 
 working out of the preparatory negotiations which were leading towards 
 it. Mr. Wilson knew what a network of commitments, arrangements, notes, 
 and treaties would confront him when the time for making peace finally 
 arrived. He had resolved to take part in the making of that peace, and to 
 pledge America to guarantee the results. Yet he refrained from interfering 
 in the decisive stages of the preliminaries." (d) I do not refer to the 
 President's statement before the White House Senatorial Conference that 
 he knew of none of the "secret treaties," because, frankly, it is not 
 humanly possible to believe this.
 
 140 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 war and had even threatened to sue for a separate peace ; 
 the economic power of America had already made itself 
 felt and the growing military power of our armies was 
 obvious. On July 9th the famous Reichstag resolution 
 for a no-annexation peace was carried by a large major- 
 ity, although as early as the first of June it was plain 
 that before many weeks passed Germany would make at 
 least the gesture of an official offer of a liberal peace. 
 Of course in this hour of Germany's discouragement the 
 hopes of the Allied statesmen were correspondingly 
 high. They were intoxicated with wine of prospective 
 victory; they did not want to believe there was any lib- 
 eral sentiment in Germany because they did not want to 
 discuss peace seriously. Neither did President Wilson 
 want to believe what was plain to almost all other men. 
 On June 14, some three weeks before the passing of the 
 resolution, he said in his most belligerent speech; "Do 
 you not now understand the new intrigue, the intrigue for 
 peace, and why the masters of Germany do not hesitate 
 to use any agency that promises to effect their purpose, 
 the deceit of the nations? Their present particular aim 
 is to deceive all those who throughout the w^orld stand 
 for the rights of peoples and the self-government of na- 
 tions ; for they see what immense strength the forces of 
 justice and of liberalism are gathering out of this war. 
 They are employing liberals in their enterprise. They 
 are using men, in Germany and without, as their spokes- 
 men whom they have hitherto despised and oppressed, 
 using them for their own destruction, — sociahsts, the 
 leaders of labor, the thinkers they have hitherto sought 
 to silence."* Stripped of its verbiage, this was merely 
 
 * Flag Day Address at Washington, June 14, 1917. Even the President's 
 warmest supporters found it difficult to approve of this chauvinistic and 
 intemperate speech. The New Republic, for instance, called it an 
 *< aberration, " although not on the immediate occasion of its delivery.
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 141 
 
 the ** German trap" philosophy of the newspapers; it 
 assumed that every decent democratic or liberal expres- 
 sion which came from Germany came with the connivance 
 and encouragement of the imperialists and reactionaries. 
 Consequently it was not surprising that when the Resolu- 
 tion was passed it was absolutely ignored by the Presi- 
 dent. As late as August 27, in his reply to the Pope's 
 propositions of peace, the President again spoke as if 
 Germany were in the grip of only one party and as if the 
 entire nation were a unity in its beliefs : ''It (this power) 
 is not the German people. It is the ruthless master of 
 the German people. It is no business of ours how that 
 great people came under its control or submitted with 
 temporary zest to the domination of its purpose ; but it is 
 our business to see to it that the history of the rest of 
 the world is no longer left to its handling."* This was 
 the tune when things looked shaky for Germany. 
 
 By the first of January, 1918, the external appearance 
 of the fortunes of war had somewhat changed. The Rus- 
 sian Revolution had taken an unexpected turn and the 
 treaty of Brest-Litovsk was being openly negotiated. 
 Russia was forcing the hands of the Allies in the matter 
 of stating terms of peace ; Lloyd George, under pressure 
 from impatient British Labor, had already disclaimed 
 any imperialistic aims. Lord Lansdowne had appealed, 
 as his friends thought, to the conscience of the leaders of 
 the Entente, and, as his enemies thought, to their self- 
 interest. The military situation was a dead-lock. With 
 the expected withdrawal of Russia from the war, Ger- 
 many could begin a gigantic offensive on the Western 
 front, an expectation, we now see, fully warranted. The 
 
 Phrases like, "Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in 
 our Avay in this day of high resolution, ' ' with its thinly disguised threat 
 of coercion of all opposition opinion, were distinctly disquieting. 
 * Eeply to the Pope through Secretary Lansing, August 27, 1917.
 
 142 LIBERALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 Allied statesmen could hardly go on without a justifica- 
 tion much more convincing than blind fear of defeat. 
 Brest-Litovsk was forcing them again to don liberal 
 clothes. The President did so very gracefully in his 
 speech of January 8, outlining the fourteen conditions of 
 a liberal peace, the famous ''fourteen points" of now 
 lamented memory. In this speech the President said: 
 "To whom have we been listening, then? To those who 
 speak the spirit and intention of the Eesolutions of the 
 German Reichstag of the ninth of July last, the spirit and 
 intention of the liberal leaders and parties of Germany, 
 or to those who resist and defy that spirit and intention 
 and insist upon conquest and subjugation? Or are we 
 listening, in fact, to both, unreconciled and in open and 
 hopeless contradiction? These are very serious and 
 pregnant questions. Upon the answer to them depends 
 the peace of the world. . . . it is necessary ... as a pre- 
 liminary to any intelligent dealings with her (Germany) 
 on our part, that we should know whom her spokesmen 
 speak for when they speak to us, whether for the Reichs- 
 tag majority or for the military party and the men whose 
 creed is imperial domination." (Italics mine.)* To put 
 it in a nutshell. President Wilson practically said: "We 
 will talk peace with you, if only you will revert to the 
 liberal spirit of the Reichstag resolution." That the 
 Germans did not do so shows only their own diplomatic 
 stupidity and their blind confidence that the Allied 
 nations were ready for a decisive exhibition of what the 
 French called defeatism. It does not alter the fact that 
 within seven months the President, under the pressure of 
 the challenge of the Russian formula, had learned some- 
 thing of the inner significance of the Reichstag resolution 
 of which he had previously been so contemptuous. He 
 
 * Address to Congress, January 8, 1918.
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 143 
 
 learned it, of course, too late. And he learned it, too, 
 only to employ it as an instrument wherewith to attempt 
 to articulate an irrelevant idealism that would draw away 
 the attention of the masses of the Entente countries from 
 the more direct and concise clarity of the Russian ex- 
 tremists. He had to create the fourteen points in order 
 to rescue his waning liberal prestige. Whether he meant 
 anything more by them than just that, whether they were 
 organically the expressions of principles he, as he made 
 sure others must pretend to at any rate, would fight for 
 with his life — these are questions I leave to my readers 
 to answ^er as charitably as they can. 
 
 Now I have given this much space to the President 
 because he illustrates so perfectly the problem with which 
 this chapter is concerned, the problem of the idealist 
 in politics. Woodrow Wilson shows to what extremes 
 of cruelty and intolerance and injustice the idealist in 
 politics can go. This is not a Chestertonian paradox. 
 Idealism in politics is like love in life — to pursue either 
 is to fail of both. The object of life is not love, but an 
 active and effective life usually brings love in its train. 
 So too in politics ideals are not the object of statesmen, 
 but a courageous and honest administrator content to 
 deal with immediate facts and issues as they arise from 
 day to day in the light of a very few simple principles 
 like integrity and open-mindedness and common sense 
 will usually be surprised to find that when men survey 
 his career as a Avhole they will call it idealistic. For 
 ideals, to use perhaps a simpler psychological parallel, 
 are not objects so much consciously to be pursued as to 
 be achieved by the performance of the humbler daily 
 tasks of administration or truthful statesmanship. Only 
 a fool pursues pleasure for itself; everyone knows that 
 such pursuit results in the exact opposite, in nausea.
 
 144 LIBERALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 Similarly, the really idealistic statesman does not talk 
 much about ideals, he knows how blighting upon action 
 is the comfortable glow of eloquent enunciation. In a 
 word, ideals are not objects to be thought about so much 
 as attained — and the wise man usually knows that per- 
 haps the best way to attain them is not to think of them. 
 Once permit oneself the luxury of talking idealistically 
 and it becomes increasingly difficult to be even ordinarily 
 decent in everyday relationships. For the danger is 
 precisely this : the attention is thrown out of its proper 
 focus, and the mind which is devoting its time to the 
 formulation of abstract justice misses opportunity after 
 opportunity to rectify the petty immediate injustices be- 
 fore its eyes. Just because the ideal embraces so much, 
 anything can be sacrificed for it, and usually it turns out 
 that the worse the sacrifice is, either of principle or orig- 
 inal intention, the greater is the name of the ideal under 
 which it is supposedly subsumed in a higher unity of the 
 good. Ideals thus become the instruments of tyranny in 
 practical action: such, in fact, has too often been their 
 historical role in the field of politics. For statesmanship 
 requires less the intellectual ability to formulate the 
 terms of a world remoulded nearer to the heart's ideal 
 desire than the character to take the world, shattered as 
 it is, and piece together effectively the little one can. 
 This is the only kind of idealism in politics that counts, 
 the only kind that accomplishes anything for which men 
 afterwards remember your name and bless you. It is 
 unfortunately not the kind we have had from President 
 Wilson. He has given us the verbal kind. It is the 
 cheapest on the market, this century just as the previous 
 centuries of organized mankind. And as dangerous. 
 Untempered idealism is almost as devastating in action 
 as untempered malice. We have seen it in two years,
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 145 
 
 when thoughtlessly backed up by our enormous power 
 as a nation, reduce all of Europe to economic misery and 
 spiritual despair. At least a generation will be needed 
 before its ravages will have been repaired. 
 
 Now the central weakness of the President was, as I 
 have said, the central weakness of American liberals 
 in general. It would be absurd to say that many of the 
 injustices at home and the imperiahstic proposals for 
 abroad did not receive vigorous condemnation at their 
 hands. Some of the shrewdest criticism of events, from 
 a liberal point of view, are to be found in our American 
 journals of opinion, and even during the war itself many 
 of our newspapers could be read with profit. But the 
 central weakness remained: whenever a skeptic pointed 
 out certain unpleasant realities, not in consonance with 
 our professions, he was in the last analysis always met 
 with the same retort, that the ideal was so great that 
 sacrifices must temporarily be made for it. Always, too, 
 he was asked to abdicate his intelligence in favor of the 
 Administration, and to '* trust" the President even long 
 after he had shown himself unworthy of trust. There 
 are more basic reasons for this American liberal attitude 
 than the natural impulse in time of war to follow a leader 
 unquestionably and to abandon one's own personal effort 
 to contribute to the direction of events. We are inveter- 
 ate idealists, and Waldo Frank is perfectly right in *'Our 
 America" when he states: **No American can hope to 
 run a journal, win public ofiice, successfully advertise 
 a soap or write a popular novel who does not insist upon 
 the idealistic basis of his country. A peculiar sort of 
 ethical rapture has earned the term American."* Fur- 
 thermore, Americans are naturally hero-worshippers; 
 
 * Our America. By Waldo Frank; Boni and Liveright, 1919. First part, 
 ''The Laud of the Pioneer."
 
 146 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 the sterility of our political conflicts and our habit of 
 framing such conflicts in simple terms of good and bad* 
 have resulted in our moralizing men unrealistically. On 
 its intellectual side, as I have already pointed out,t this 
 national idealistic habit of thought is pernicious in its 
 effect. It throws the balance of intelligent minds in the 
 wrong direction — in the direction of working out Utopias 
 instead of concentrating upon the perplexities and diffi- 
 culties of immediate administrative detail. Nothing was 
 more pathetically amusing during the war than to watch 
 the very severe pragmatic minds, who had condemned 
 just this false emphasis, themselves turn to the less oner- 
 ous task of articulating the framework of things as they 
 ought to be. The mind of American liberals, harassed 
 by the glaring inconsistencies of events and by the 
 stridency of popular clamor, gladly took refuge in the 
 task of formulating ideal terms of peace. Nearly every 
 liberal group had drawn up its own charter of a league 
 of nations before the war was of three months duration. 
 If one took a numerical count, for instance, of the in- 
 crease of the ''oughts" and *'shoulds" in the New Re- 
 public as compared with these hortatory verbs before 
 the declaration of hostilities one would be astonished at 
 an advance almost in geometrical proportions. It would 
 be ungracious to emphasize this point, for American 
 liberals today do not hesitate freely to say that they lost, 
 and there is much contemporary donning of sackcloth and 
 ashes in their ranks. However, the lesson of their de- 
 feat ought not to be lost and perhaps from that lesson 
 they can gather strength for the future. 
 
 The lesson seems to me a simple one, yet one curiously 
 difficult to learn. It is this : liberalism cannot afford to 
 
 * See Chapter 6. 
 t See Chapter 7.
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON 147 
 
 compromise with moral categories and idealistic inten- 
 tions in the field of practical action. It must continue 
 further its pragmatic analysis of events rather than just 
 stopping short when the analysis becomes embarrassing; 
 it must increase rather than decrease its insistence upon 
 scientific rigor; in politics it must continue to judge by 
 results rather than intentions; in leadership it will pay 
 more attention to character than to sentiment. So stated, 
 the lesson is not particularly dramatic; it has an oldish 
 ring. Perhaps. But was it not Charles Lamb who once 
 said, "Every time a new book comes out, I read an old 
 one"?
 
 CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM AND THE MOB 
 
 'T^O call tlie collapse of most intellectuals before war 
 ■*- hysteria an emotional breakdown is accurate enough 
 as a description of fact. But the term of disparagement 
 does not help us to understand those psychological forces 
 which, in political action, are almost equally at work upon 
 everyone — indeed, the only reason we can legitimately 
 call especial attention to the so-called leaders of thought 
 is because with them the reasons advanced for their 
 political actions are more ingenious and more articulate 
 than the reasons advanced by the average impulsive 
 man. Of course in time of war even a casual observer can 
 detect many of the consciously directed propagandas 
 designed to smother his individual judgment. After our 
 declaration of war it did not require any great intel- 
 lectual alertness to watch how an apathetic, where not an 
 indiiferent or hostile, population was deliberately con- 
 verted to passionate partisanship. Yet even in time of 
 peace there are forces constantly at work to guide and 
 sway mass opinion, forces often all the more powerful 
 because they are unrecognized and unacknowledged. It 
 is first necessary to comprehend what one might call the 
 normal forces making for political unreason before the 
 more elaborate and artificial mechanisms for controlling 
 public opinion in war time can be appreciated. 
 
 Students of politics are forever indebted to Graham 
 Wallas for his bringing psychology into the open and 
 
 148
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 149 
 
 putting it to work upon the practical affairs of men. No 
 one has shown more clearly than he* how the ostensible 
 reasons often given by a man for voting a particular 
 ticket in a Parliamentary or a Congressional contest are 
 seldom the real ones. In practically every modern 
 democracy — but in America, as I shall try to show, most 
 of all — it is largely the unconscious and impulsive 
 motives which lead a man to mark his ballot in a particu- 
 lar way. The whole development of the party system 
 is a practical acknowledgment of the inadequacy of the 
 private, individual judgment. Most men are uncomfort- 
 able in the role of bolters. They want to belong to a 
 "regular" party, to feel secure in the knowledge that 
 they are part of a recognized organization with a history 
 and a tradition and a symbol. Seldom after an election 
 in America Tvdll you hear a man defend himself if he 
 voted the ticket ''straight" (although he may feel called 
 upon to give reasons why he voted one ticket in prefer- 
 ence to another), whereas if he "split" his vote, he gen- 
 erally feels that some explanation is due his friends. 
 Of course the party system has its good as well as its 
 bad side : obviously, it is impossible for the average citi- 
 zen to know the personal qualifications or views of one- 
 tenth of the number of candidates upon whose fitness 
 for office he is called upon to pass judgment at the polls ; 
 and the party system enables him to make a choice with 
 some slight assurance that he is not jumping in the dark. 
 It is, however, the psychological significance of the party 
 system to which I wish here*to draw attention. No one 
 who has assisted, as I have, at the attempted formation 
 of a new "third" party in America — for, curiously 
 enough, the hopeful creators of new parties seldom if 
 
 * Human Nature in Politics. Bv Graham Wallas. Houghton, Mifflin, 
 1916. See especially, Chapter 2, ' ' Political Entities. ' '
 
 150 LIBERALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 ever reckon seriously with the existing Socialist Party — 
 can escape the uncomfortable feeling that he is working 
 in a kind of political vacuum. The question of a name 
 (shall it be called the Liberal, the National, the Labor, 
 the New Progressive Party?) with the subtle unconscious 
 emotional associations attaching to certain adjectives, 
 the earnestness of one's desire to connect the new move- 
 ment with some permanent body of tradition or of his- 
 torical development, the lack of a good marching tune, 
 the type of symbol to be printed on the ballots (it must 
 be easily recognizable and at the same time appeal to 
 the affections of the voters) — all these difficulties give 
 one a sharp sense of what it means in practical life to 
 create a new political entity where none existed before, 
 deliberately to make a symbol to which the loyalty and 
 sense of personal possession of large groups of people 
 can be attached. It is well-nigh impossible to escape the 
 conclusion that the successful parties will always be 
 those which have grown up naturally and spontaneously 
 from the needs of people rather than from any pre- 
 arranged design. And such an attempt provokes an even 
 sharper conviction that politically, at all events, men 
 tend naturally to act through organizations rather than 
 through the free play of individual judgment. 
 
 Moreover, the reasons which lead men to choose one 
 form of organization rather than another through which 
 to act politically are seldom purely rational reasons, 
 however strongly one may pretend they are. I do not 
 need to dwell here upon the classic instance in America 
 of the *' Solid South," except that it might be worth 
 while to point out that the party of traditional ** States* 
 Rights" certainly received from its Southern members 
 no violent protest against the Prohibition Amendment, 
 which as members of such a party they should, if they
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 151 
 
 were consistent, have fought. Even before the war we 
 saw the spectacle of the Eepublican Party putting the 
 tariff down and the Democratic Party putting the tariff 
 up, and of course during the war we witnessed the growth 
 of an all-pervasive Federalism which must have made 
 Jefferson uneasy in his grave. In a word, for a great 
 bulk of voters in America it is not the rational principles 
 which the Democratic and Republican parties are sup- 
 posed to represent (today, in fact, they are almost in- 
 distinguishable) that make them mark their ticket a 
 certain way, it is the cluster of emotional associations 
 and memories and childhood prejudices which give the 
 real meaning to the two w^ords. To the Southerner the 
 words, the Democratic Party, arouse vague feelings of 
 local pride and personal and social prestige ; the slogan 
 has an emotional appeal which is entirely unrelated to 
 the functioning political entity at Washington. To the 
 Northerner, especially if he is of New England or Aboli- 
 tionist training, the words, the Republican Party, simi- 
 larly arouse vague feelings of local pride ; the symbol is 
 connected in some indirect way with the world fame of 
 Lincoln (which it is an honor even to share by reflected 
 glory), it means emancipation, freeing of the slaves, op- 
 position to the foreigners and generally implies a higher 
 social standing than possessed by the Democratic voters 
 in cities, like New York and Boston, where the powerful 
 local machine is usually Democratic and Irish. Political 
 sjTiibols — such as party names or slogans — conse- 
 quently seldom mean what on the surface they profess ; 
 they mean exactly what has been read into them by par- 
 ticular groups of men at particular times and under 
 particular circumstances. Thus the meanings are to a 
 certain extent fluid; they are the temporary resultant 
 of conflicting drifts of mass opinion and emotion, always
 
 152 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 with a certain fringe or aura of historical association 
 learned in childhood and passed on from one generation 
 to the next. Practically no voter (not even the more self- 
 conscious Socialist voter) ever sits down to a quiet and 
 rationalistic examination of the real meaning of a party 
 or of its doctrines. He acquires his opinions both of the 
 party and what it stands for by the more direct and 
 human method of his own experience, his own hopes and 
 his early teachings. 
 
 Nor is this all. Every individual goes through a psy- 
 chological development of his own, and at different times 
 in his life the same political entity implies entirely dif- 
 ferent things. We are all familiar with that stage of 
 adolescence in the normal boy when his father is the 
 hero, when his family is the ideal family, when the opin- 
 ions of his own fireside have a final importance. At this 
 stage of father idolatry most boys, had they the vote, 
 would invariably cast it exactly as their father cast it. 
 Later on, the swing of the psychological pendulum is nor- 
 mally the other way — the restraints of family life are 
 felt as irksome, the great world calls to adventure, the 
 boy is proud of his radicalism and wants to differentiate 
 himself in his opinions as sharply as possible from his 
 elders. At this stage — and it is usually the stage 
 when a man first votes — the young man is likely to vote 
 the Socialist ticket, especially if his father is a Republi- 
 can. But such voting does not represent reasoned con- 
 viction in nine cases out of ten ; it is merely one expres- 
 sion of his general youthful adventurousness. For still 
 later on, when he has acquired a family and an income 
 and a position of some importance in the community, the 
 seductions towards conservatism are almost irresistible. 
 He has to think of his career, his family, liis future, his 
 clubs. He accepts his political faith very much as he
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 153 
 
 accepts the more special conventions of the social mileu 
 in which he finds himself. We may safely conclude, then, 
 that not merely are there social external forces shaping 
 one's opinions and giving special meaning to various 
 political entities, but everyone has within himself, so to 
 speak, a series of psychological transformations which, 
 for the most part unconsciously, endow him mth an in- 
 dividuahstic bias. In politics, as in most other social 
 activities which have not the corrective discipline of the 
 exact sciences, a man has to fight for clearness of opinion 
 against double obstacles: against the general conven- 
 tions and beliefs current in his time and his community, 
 and against the neurotic tricks of his own temperament 
 which occasionally will ocur even in the psychologically 
 most normal and healthy of men. Who of us, for ex- 
 ample, cannot remember when we have marked a ballot 
 contrary to our general beliefs and convictions just out 
 of personal peevishness and the desire to give vent to 
 our anger at some special office-holder who has irritated 
 us ? I once knew a life-long Democrat (and a fairly heavy 
 drinker) who voted the straight Prohibition ticket be- 
 cause of no more tangible emotion than sheer disgust at 
 Bryan's advocacy of grape juice. 
 
 Now this preliminary discussion of what one might 
 call the core of irrationality in political mass action in 
 times of peace mil make clearer the largely impulsive 
 character of all political action in time of war. Words 
 and phrases like national honor, bravery, patriotism, love 
 of country, defense of home and hearth, etc., may not — 
 and in fact, do not — bear Socratic analj^sis, but that does 
 not prevent them from becoming symbols for which men 
 will willingly die. Even if we did not know it before the 
 past five years have taught us that when a nation goes 
 to war springs of loyalty are touched in the common man
 
 154 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 deeper almost than any religious conviction. Walter 
 Lippmann has given us an excellent description of the 
 components of that disposition which we call patriotism.* 
 Men die in battle, when they die gladly and with a sense 
 of high duty performed, not with any consciously con- 
 ceived notion of their country or nation but with the 
 picture of a face, the remembrance of a childhood wood 
 and lake, the broken fragment of a melody. Any political 
 symbol — a flag, a tune, a phrase — will serve its purpose 
 of arousing loyalty. For I repeat, it is not the intrinsic 
 meaning of the symbol which counts but the cluster of 
 emotions and affections which have been identified with 
 the symbol by human men and women. Now that various 
 State legislatures and municipalities are busily passing 
 laws against the display of the red flag, the psychologist 
 can safely say that the forces of reaction are doing them- 
 selves a very bad turn. They are giving an emotional 
 association to the red flag which it did not hitherto pos- 
 sess; they are increasing its value as a symbol. Con- 
 sequently in later conflicts the party which is represented 
 by the red flag will have just that emotional advantage 
 over its opponent — it will have a flag which carries more 
 emotional significance precisely because it is human na- 
 ture to cherish those things which are persecuted. All 
 of us can appreciate how the involuntary thrill which we 
 experienced at first hearing ''The Star Spangled Ban- 
 ner" after the declaration of war became weaker and 
 weaker with its countless repetition in moving-picture 
 houses and theatres, and how, no matter how sturdily 
 patriotic, we came to dread the next Liberty Loan cam- 
 paign. For it is clear that the manipulators of our po- 
 litical symbols during the war were, on the whole, bad 
 
 * The Stakes of Diplomacy. By Walter Lippmann, Henry Holt, 1915. 
 See especially, Chapter 5, ' ' Patriotism in the Eough. ' '
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 155 
 
 psychologists ; they over-worked symbols to the point of 
 emotional exhaustion, and the net result of their manipu- 
 lations, now that the war is over, will be an increase of 
 healthy skepticism towards any patriotic shibboleth, 
 especially on the part of those who really bore the bur- 
 den of the war itself. Of course this increase of skep- 
 ticism is much truer of those European nations which 
 almost reached the point of physical exhaustion, and in 
 the case of Russia did actually reach it. (It is interesting 
 to note how, certainly for the first year of the Bolshevist 
 revolution, an entirely new set of political symbols was 
 created to take the place of the old ones destroyed.) For 
 America as a whole, the war did not bring any dire 
 physical suffering and loss. Our symbols of national 
 pride have not been so tarnished with blood. 
 
 Yet whether a war turns out well or ill for a nation, 
 whether it involves little or great loss and suffering, it 
 remains profoundly true that the pohtical symbols of 
 patriotism and nationality arouse a loyalty so deep that 
 compared with it the loyalty to political parties or to 
 secular or even religious organizations in times of peace 
 seems almost different in kind. Defeat in battle does 
 not permanently alter the case. A nation may change 
 its symbols, and usually after a single generation it has 
 forgotten its previous national misfortunes or loss of 
 prestige, but the disposition to be loyal even to the death 
 persists in the mob. The only question really is to what 
 this loyalty shall be attached. And the reason why, in 
 time of war, it naturally attaches itself to some patriotic 
 or nationalistic s>Tnbol is worth some consideration. 
 
 Modern nationalistic wars between highly industrial- 
 ized countries have an irresistible psychological attrac- 
 tion, which paradoxically enough is not diminished but 
 increased by the knowledge of the terrible consequences
 
 156 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 which must result from war's declaration. It is rather 
 naive of pacifists to dwell too realistically upon war's 
 horrors — it is these very horrors which constitute one 
 of war's major attractions. Sigmund Freud has pointed 
 out* how in our attitude towards death we live, in normal 
 peace times, psychologically beyond our means. In the 
 hum-drum days of ordinary business or professional 
 rivalry we can get only the thin gratifications of our ever- 
 dying, ever-resurrected heroes of literature and the 
 stage. All our challenges of fate, all our risks, are 
 vicarious. *'Life becomes impoverished and loses its 
 interest when life itself, the highest stake in the game of 
 living, must not be risked," writes Freud. In that vol- 
 ume of acute criticism, "Winds of Doctrine," written 
 before the war, George Santayana speaks with a twinge 
 of disgust at the (then) pragmatic concern for survival, 
 at our romantic longing in the midst of a highly sophisti- 
 cated civilization for the primitive — the "Simple Life'* 
 of a Roosevelt who never was so unfortunate as to have 
 to lead it. Santayana writes: "To be so preoccupied 
 with vitahty is a symptom of anaemia. When life was 
 really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, 
 no one seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of 
 existence either by the incubus of matter or by the petri- 
 fying blight of intelligence. Life was like the light of 
 day, something to use, or to waste, or to enjoy. It was 
 not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of 
 living consisted in dealing death about vigorously."! 
 Even in so unphilosophical and essentially journalistic 
 and contemporary a writer as H. G. Wells there often 
 recurred this same bitterness at the lack of color and 
 
 * Reflections on War and Death. By Sigmund Freud. Translated by 
 Dr. A. A. BriU and Alfred B. Kuttner. Moffatt, Yard and Co., 1918. 
 
 t Winds of Doctrine : Studies in Contemporary Opinion. By George 
 Santayana. Scribner's, 1913. Page 19 and following to end of chapter.
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 157 
 
 movement in modern life, where, as lie once expressed it, 
 a man could live through his entire three score years and 
 ten fudging and evading and never being really hungry, 
 never being really thirsty or angry or in danger, or 
 facing a really great emotion, until the agony of the 
 deathbed. Long before the war Wilham James, in his 
 now prophetic essay, '' A Moral Equivalent of War,"*" 
 expressed the criticism of the alert and discerning mind 
 at the thinness and barrenness of a universe constructed 
 from merely well-intentioned ideals. James's whole 
 essay was a straightforward attempt to assess the high 
 value of danger and risk in any endurable society. 
 Civilization had not merely refused to calculate on death, 
 but had come almost to the point of refusing to believe in 
 it. Alert critics of varying intellectual temperaments 
 had reached an almost identical diagnosis of the anemia 
 of modern industrial civilization.! 
 
 Then came the war, and with it that most disconcerting 
 phenomenon which L. P. Jacks| has described as ''the 
 peacefulness of being at war" — the sense, at last, that 
 there was really danger and high adventure and the pos- 
 sibility of dealing and receiving death once more. Of 
 course the conventional reformist type of mind was 
 shocked and horrified at this emergence of death as a 
 reality. Up to what might be called the saturation point 
 of sensitiveness these minds dwelt with almost unctuous 
 detail upon blood, pus, agony, and human hopes shattered 
 to bits by unfeeling fire and shrapnel. These were the 
 people who during the first year of the war never tired 
 
 * Memories and Studies. By William James. Longmans, Green and Co., 
 1917. See Chapter 11. 
 
 t The end of this paragraph and the entire next paragraph is taken in 
 substance from a review of Freud's Eeflections on War and Death, written 
 for The Dial (New York), Volume LXIV, page 482, by the author. 
 
 { The Peacefulness of Being at War. By L. P. .Tacks. Article in the 
 Hilbert Journal, 1914.
 
 158 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 of telling us that civilization had tumbled into ruins. 
 Unlike the average soldier, dragged from an industrial 
 life of doubtful happiness, thwarted in his aspirations 
 for creative activity, crushed in his few timid strivings 
 for genuine emotions, bound by routine, they did not 
 accept the war as a kind of release from the diligent 
 muffling against the realities of life and death which we 
 call modern civilization. In all men in whose veins blood 
 has not wholly turned to water there is left a strong dis- 
 position for what the French call nostalgie de la houe, 
 and while they do not pretend to like lice and mud and 
 sudden pain and hunger and cold and an iron discipline 
 that reduces their own individuality to zero, it would be 
 idle to deny that they find in all these things a kind of 
 deep gratification that life is not the smooth, round, taste- 
 less monotony which the industrial revolution had almost 
 succeeded in making it. For what is undeniable is that 
 war, in so far as it is war and not a corporation-like 
 mechanism, does satisfy a fundamental and thwarted hu- 
 man need. In one sense at least modern wars are the 
 atonements we make for our lack of appreciating the 
 human evils of a pallid, ''safe" industrialism. War 
 compels us to live dangerously — to recognize the reality 
 of death, just as the death of the beloved of primitive 
 man (who, like our own unconscious today, did not be- 
 lieve in death) forced him to recognize its reality. For 
 war restores what civilization can hide: heroism which 
 springs from our deep inability to believe in our own 
 death, pleasure in the killing of the hated one in the 
 enemy (the hatred which is the component of all love) 
 and power to rise above ''the shock of the death of our 
 friends. " It is here perhaps that we can best understand 
 what Freud means when he says that in time of peace we 
 live in our attitude towards death, psychologically be-
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 159 
 
 yond our means. For it is clear that ordinary peace time 
 has been lacking in danger and color and movement. 
 And it is also clear that whatever civilization ultimately 
 emerges from the recent clash of arms it can have no 
 stability and no creative joy unless our former timidities 
 are exorcised.* 
 
 But it is not merely that war reveals to us our con- 
 ventionally hypocritical attitude towards death, thus fur- 
 nishing a deep gratification of release from pretense ; it 
 also removes less fundamental, although perhaps more 
 persistent, inhibitions imposed by the morality of normal 
 times and allows hitherto unexercised (and often un- 
 recognized) dispositions to have free play. I am speak- 
 ing, of course, of those dispositions, with all their rami- 
 fications, which in times of peace we label with the severe 
 nouns of lust and cruelty. The desire to inflict pain on 
 others is perhaps the subtlest and most difiicult of these 
 released dispositions to discuss. I have no wish to enter 
 into a detailed consideration of what is termed the am- 
 bivalence of emotions,! for such consideration would 
 carry us too far afield, although it is notable that in 
 *'The Great Society" Graham Wallas in his discussion 
 of different dispositions of human nature groups to- 
 gether in one chapter ''Love and Hatred." And cer- 
 tainly no one can read that chapter without a sharp 
 sense that the disposition to hate has relatively lost its 
 biological importance in the modern world as compared 
 with the disposition to love, and further that what margin 
 of hate remains in the average man today, what margin 
 of his nature needs to be stimulated to activity by 
 
 * See especially for this point of view the first chapters of Freedom, by 
 Gilbert Cannan. Stokes. Mr. Cannan has written a passionate indictment 
 of the evils of untempered industrialism. 
 
 t Totem and Taboo. By Sigmund Freud, Translated by A. A. Brill. 
 MofEatt, Yard and Co., 1918. Chapter 2.
 
 160 LIBERALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 anger if he is to be purged in the Aristotelian sense, is 
 relatively small. Not only small, but even if large, it 
 would appear that the best way to gratify it would be 
 by seeking to gratify it directly rather than through the 
 costly and clumsy mechanism of psychological satisfac- 
 tion which modern war provides. The case of those few 
 men who took a positive delight in running through a 
 man with their bayonet, a kind of unreal and pleasurable 
 intoxication, is, I believe, a case for individual psychiatry 
 rather than for social psychology. Philip Gibbs, the 
 brilliant war correspondent, in one of his dispatches re- 
 lates how a party of Germans went out for attack, mis- 
 taking a first line British trench for a series of empty 
 shell holes. They were compelled to retreat, but un- 
 luckily for them when they reached their own lines they 
 found that they had forgotten (or a shell had destroyed) 
 their secret road of safety through the barbed wire 
 guarding their trench. The range from the British line 
 was short, the visibility perfect. The Germans ran up 
 and down in front of their w^ire — easy marks for the 
 British riflemen — screaming and sobbing as, completely 
 helpless, they were one by one shot down. But the dis- 
 patch adds that the Britishers did not exactly relish the 
 task; some turned pale; some actually fainted; there is 
 a hint that some of them vomited as their rifles became 
 hot under continuous use. Now if anger at the enemy 
 had been the dominant motive with them — as militaris- 
 tic writers never fail to emphasize — they would have 
 been delighted instead of horrified at this first-class op- 
 portunity to vent it. Instead they were sick. As human 
 beings they could not stand the indecency of it. At the 
 battles of the Mazurian Lakes, for another instance, when 
 the Russians suffered their first great reverse at the be- 
 ginning of the war, several German officers, who as a
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 161 
 
 class are not exactly thought of for their gentleness, went 
 mad at the sight of the slaughter. Mere anger could not 
 sustain them. Today in fact, so-called ** German atroci- 
 ties" are seldom cited as a reason for making moral 
 judgment respecting the two sides in the war not so 
 much because they are stale as because they are felt to 
 be irrelevant. We are beginning to perceive that we are 
 dealing here not with a general social phenomenon so 
 much as with special individual cases. What I mean is 
 that the disposition of anger or hatred (with its attend- 
 ant cruelty) is normally in times of peace sufficiently 
 aroused for the average man anyway — by some galling 
 routine, by some personal affront of a snob, by a sense 
 of unjustified insult, by the keenness of a professional 
 rivalry. In a word, it is no longer impossible to envisage 
 a world in which the disposition to be angry, whether 
 strong or weak, would be adequately gratified without the 
 beneficent intrusion of modern war. 
 
 In fact the weakness of the disposition towards hatred 
 (although valid as far as it exists) is very prettily illus- 
 trated by the American scene, especially the Middle 
 West which before our entrance into the war was nor- 
 mally pacifistic and war-hating. Foreigners not really 
 acquainted with us often remarked to me that they were 
 astonished that a community like the Middle West, which 
 surely appeared on the surface to be placid and opti- 
 mistic, could so easily be persuaded into the passionate 
 partisanship of war. As a matter of fact that community 
 was not easily persuaded — in order to be persuaded, 
 every political symbol of nationalistic pride and every 
 agency for distributing those symbols had to be utilized 
 with ruthless ingenuity and efficiency. The press was 
 mobilized ; there was no such thing as a general anti-war 
 press. The moving-picture industry, which plays so
 
 162 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 large a share in our political as well as our cultural life, 
 naturally capitalized the patriotic motive, and found to 
 its delight that scenes of rape and murder, hitherto pro- 
 hibited by a strict censorship, could easily be presented 
 if given under the patriotic pretense of portraying actual 
 German atrocities. Scenes of marching soldiers in the 
 **News of the "Week" films, coupled with jingo captions 
 to the ** flash," were certain of popular applause, if for 
 no other reason that no one would have the temerity not 
 to applaud. In the Red Cross, Liberty Loan, and other 
 war ** drives" for financial aid of one kind or another 
 each town and each city and State was apportioned its 
 relative quota, and the entire population was made to 
 feel that it was a great honor for its section to *'go over 
 the top" before any other section. Conscription, once 
 the principle had been made acceptable to public opinion, 
 became a competitive race between different States as to 
 which would fill its alloted number of recruits. That 
 process of * degrading the enemy" to the status of thing 
 instead of a merely wicked human being was carried on 
 to a tremendous degree, even President Wilson permit- 
 ting himself the phrase **this intolerable Thing,"* and 
 the newspapers, of course, constantly hypostasizing 
 entities like ''Hun" and ''Baby-Killers" and even 
 "Gorilla." Especially in the different war posters pic- 
 turing the Germans one could watch this steady with- 
 drawal of all human attributes from the enemy until he 
 became a mere generalized scourge to be exterminated 
 like the plague or any loathsome disease. President 
 Wilson's early distinction between the German govern- 
 
 * President Wilson's speech asking for a declaration war on Austria- 
 Hungary, December 4, 1917. "First, that this intolerable thing of which 
 the masters of Germany have shown us the ugly face, this menace of com- 
 bined intrigue and force which we now see so cVarly as the German power, 
 a Thing without conscience or honor or capacity for covenanted peace, must 
 be crushed, ' ' etc.
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 163 
 
 ment and the German people never really caught popu- 
 lar fancy, and even if it had, our various self-appointed 
 patriotic societies (usually financed by our armament 
 makers and bankers who had a stake in foreign war 
 loans) would speedily have destroyed it. As we have 
 seen,* the universities and the Church did the conven- 
 tional patriotic thing, and their social pressure was enor- 
 mous. Yet in spite of it all, who cannot remember the 
 pitiful story of the young men of pre-war American 
 training who notwithstanding the utmost efforts of this 
 kind of propaganda fainted during bayonet-practice at 
 the officers' training school at Plattsburg? And although 
 President Wilson really had everything his own way, he 
 yet could write that the passage of the Espionage Law 
 was ** necessary" to him in the successful prosecution of 
 the war. For who of us did not, even during the height 
 of all this patriotic fervor, have some dim sense that 
 nine-tenths of the so-called ''hatred" of the enemy was 
 trumped-up for the occasion and that this attitude must 
 be maintained merely to ensure the stability of national 
 morale? 
 
 Why, then, if the disposition was itself weak and if it 
 was so difficult to arouse, was it — when finally aroused 
 — manifested with such a concentration of fury and in- 
 tolerance, resulting in mob violence (painting "slack- 
 ers' " houses yellow and forcing Socialists to kiss the 
 flag) and ultimately in such an abominable and disgrace- 
 ful incident as the lynching of the innocent Prager? I 
 think the explanation lies partly in the very weakness of 
 the disposition. Subconsciously, perhaps, we felt that 
 the emotion was for the most part unreal ; therefore we 
 consciously exhibited it with extreme intensity — a kind 
 of patriotic whistling to keep our hatred-courage up. 
 
 * See Chapters 4 and 5.
 
 164 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 That was the artificial side of it. But I do not wish to 
 under-rate the intrinsically spontaneous side of it; un- 
 doubtedly that side did exist. However, the intensity of 
 expression came more from joy of release at the disposi- 
 tion itself than from the original strength of the re- 
 pressed tendency. We can see this vividly in the case of 
 the other individualistic and anarchical repressed dispo- 
 sition, where the prohibitions upon its manifestation ex- 
 isted to a moderate degree even in war-time. I mean the 
 sex desire. Here obviously the repressions of normal 
 civilization were very severe, and the consequent joy of 
 release very great. There is little need of dwelling upon 
 the fact of the '* war-babies " of the European countries 
 nor upon the regrettable incidents around our own train- 
 ing camps — here again, when the manifestation went to 
 the extreme of violence, I believe we are deaUng with 
 something for individual psychiatiy rather than for the 
 social psychologist. It is more instructive to take more 
 prosaic and less obvious manifestations of this repressed 
 desire in war time, in order to illustrate some of the mis- 
 understood charms of belligerency. 
 
 For it is no paradox that the Middle "West went into 
 the war with so much fervor precisely because its normal 
 life was so dull : I remember the evening in Paris when 
 war was declared and with what almost tragic sobriety 
 the declaration was taken ; one felt that it was not merely 
 that France knew what war meant as other nations did 
 not (I happened, fortunately, to be in London a few days 
 later when England entered the war, and I can remember 
 that everybody felt the evening a proper occasion for a 
 Roman holiday), but also that France led too rich and 
 varied a life to cast it lightly upon the balance scales of 
 a European war. The average Frenchman, however 
 much economically hampered, had spiritually more to
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 165 
 
 lose by war than the average citizen of Akron, Ohio. As 
 Americans use the term, the Middle West likes to think 
 of itself as a ''good" community ; it judges its candidates 
 in political contests largely on mere moral grounds; it 
 is publicly committed to prohibition because it believes 
 the saloon is a "bad" thing and must therefore be abol- 
 ished. Spiritually, the Middle West is the descendant 
 of the rigid and intolerant Puritanism of New England, 
 whose emigrants were its early settlers and the children 
 of whom today set the social standards and occupy the 
 strategic positions in the educational and economic and 
 cultural life of the whole Mississippi Valley. It has not 
 absorbed its foreign immigrants into the general social 
 life of the community; it would indeed be a travesty to 
 say that it gained in richness or breadth of point of view 
 by contact with them. It preferred to isolate them, 
 where it could not devour, and to keep them in a position 
 of relative inferiority, socially and economically. Thus 
 it is more rigid in its morality than the more tolerant 
 sea-board cities; it is highly self-satisfied (for its ideal- 
 ism is matched by a shrewd commercial pragmatism 
 which has transformed the early bare pioneer days into 
 a modern general and high prosperity) and it is generous 
 in its donations to foreign "missions" who are sent forth 
 to convert the world and make it over in the Middle 
 West*s image.^ Virtue has a highly technical meaning, 
 and woe betide any young woman who defies this local 
 god. In a word, the Middle West is self-complacent, 
 priggish, intolerant, and successful. Yet it is infernally 
 dull. Vachel Lindsay has described, with vivid artistic 
 
 * The Beview (New York), Volume T, number 2, page 34; article on 
 The Middle West, by Philo M. Buck, Jr. ' ' But the Middle West is 
 pragmatic as well in its philosophy. The eternal conflict of right and 
 wrong does not keep it from seeing clearly its own interests, and it will 
 contrive that the right which has been chosen shall justify itself by its 
 fruits. ' '
 
 166 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 feeling, its peculiar smugness whicli corrodes the soul. 
 And when the war came the Middle West bent so much 
 of its energies upon it, was so completely absorbed in 
 it, precisely because the war furnished an adventure, a 
 raison d'etre, a lifting of many individual prohibitions 
 which no other social phenomenon could possibly have 
 done so effectively and speedily. The Middle West's 
 almost ecstatic enjoyment of certain aspects of the war 
 was the exact counterfoil to its previous strained and 
 Chautauqua professions of horror at the very mention of 
 the word. A whole community does not turn with such 
 suspicious speed and enthusiasm from one type of social 
 activity to another radically different one, if it was really 
 as happy as it thought in its first. Consider such an 
 aspect of the war as the financial ''drives" aimed at the 
 stay-at-home citizens. In every woman, especially in 
 every "good" woman as the Middle West would describe 
 her, there is a latent prostitution complex — using the 
 word in the limited sense of meaning the desire to draw 
 attention to herself by the exhibition of good looks, 
 clothes, and other sexual attractions. In peace times the 
 respectable woman can gratify this unacknowledged de- 
 sire to win out in the competition of interesting men by 
 selection of dress, by judicious beautifying, and by per- 
 haps a mild flirtation. Certainly no such woman in times 
 of peace would dream of going to a public restaurant 
 and of speaking to everyone in it. But it was not only 
 considered legitimate, it was considered highly patriotic, 
 for various attractive young women to put on their jol- 
 liest clothes, employ the most seductive lip rouge, and 
 go to public restaurants to solicit money for war pur- 
 poses. No one who has been in the lobby of a fashionable 
 hotel during one of these *' drives" could maintain that 
 the motive dominating the handsome girls who were com-
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 167 
 
 peting for the honor of raising the most money was 
 wholly patriotic. I have myself been present at a dinner 
 party where the malicious intensity of a hitherto mild- 
 mannered spinster's hatred of the Germans and her con- 
 tempt for all young men who did not languish for the 
 privilege of running a knife through a Bavarian peas- 
 ant's bowels shocked everyone present. As a matter of 
 fact, of course, this spinster was not getting half so much 
 fun out of this imaginary slaughter of the enemy as she 
 was out of the thought of young men going out to die 
 for (as she said) their country but (as she secretly 
 thought) for her. She had been unsuccessful in her love- 
 making ; this was the atonement which youth was making 
 to her for its previous neglect. She derived a kind of 
 vicarious sexual excitement from the thought of so much 
 blood and agony. She was having her revenge. In fact, 
 anyone with a little reflection can discover innumerable 
 other examples of war's release, either directly or 
 through symbols, of dispositions which in ordinary times 
 are decently kept hidden. 
 
 But there is another factor in their release which adds 
 powerfully to the psychological attraction of war. Nor- 
 mally, as we are learning more clearly every day, indi- 
 vidual prohibitions are broken in dreams, in neurotic 
 states, in the merciful amnesia of drunkenness. Spoon 
 River is merely the other side to the medal of smooth, 
 smiling optimism which is presented to the world. War, 
 however, changes the whole social scene ; passions which 
 hitherto could not possibly receive social sanction can 
 now be expressed with general pubhc approval. The 
 war ** drive" woman worker, described above, has the 
 applause of the community. The minister who curses 
 the Germans from the pulpit is allowed a margin of 
 vulgarity and bad taste, previously prohibited. Men can
 
 168 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 make sacrifices with an eagerness which in any other 
 temper than that of war time would seem publicly ab- 
 surd; energies are set in motion; there is greater co- 
 hesiveness within the national group; the "follow the 
 lead" instinct is stimulated to a high degree, and the 
 mob takes summary vengeance upon anyone who mocks 
 at the symbols of national unity. For war produces a 
 quickening of the sense of the herd* which is so great 
 that many writers are of the opinion that it is only the 
 fact, the possibihty, or the remembrance, of war which 
 ever gives the average citizen a warm and personal sense 
 of the State. In brief, war produces a situation which 
 fuses the individualistic and social impulses, thus endow- 
 ing the energies of men with an unwonted drive and 
 certainty. He can be, so to speak, anarchical and gre- 
 garious at the same time, and the combination is irresist- 
 ible.t At no other time are so many of his impulsive dis- 
 positions stimulated; at no other time is he less in the 
 irritable state of ** baulked disposition." 
 
 For it is not necessary to assume any special **herd 
 instinct" to account for the tendency of men to align 
 themselves with the national group. As we have a gen- 
 eral disposition to love and hate, to think, to be self- 
 seeking, to lead a normal sexual life, so we may be said 
 to have a general disposition to conform. The word 
 instinct is today fairly well discredited, and the specific 
 instincts, for example, of imitation or so-called sugges- 
 tion or *' sympathy" are no longer employed in the termi- 
 nology of careful psychologists. The word disposition is 
 
 * Instincts Of The Herd In Peace And War. By W, Trotter. Macmillan ; 
 1915. 
 
 t The Psychology of War. By J. T. MacCurdy. John W. Luce and 
 Company, 1917, page 61, etc. "I might mention that the elation and 
 energy of the maniac state seem to be regularly accomplished by ideas that 
 represent a fusion of individualistic and social tendencies."
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 169 
 
 distinctly better because it represents a larger and more 
 complex body of impulsive fact, and also implies a social 
 environment which provides appropriate stimuli. Con- 
 sequently I should like to use the phrase, disposition to 
 conform, without raising the question of a specific gre- 
 garious instinct. For the relevant facts are in any case 
 clear for my purpose. In times of peace the disposition 
 to conform means that the average sensual man experi- 
 ences a certain conflict between his own private desires 
 and the public standards of right and fitness; that al- 
 though his private desires are strong, his desire to do the 
 conventional thing which will meet with the approval of 
 his fellows is even stronger. Usually, in other words, 
 the general social standards win: we can see the biologi- 
 cal value of most of these standards and the penalties 
 which follow disregard of them are in most cases sharp 
 and immediate. Now in a very general sense — and here 
 is where I disagree with those who define this gregarious 
 impulse in irrational terms and oppose to it the individ- 
 ual ''reason" — these social requirements are in the right 
 direction. In times of peace, clearly, there is little in 
 the social environment to discourage the use of the mind ; 
 however irrational institutions may be in their origins, 
 it is never considered dishonorable to try to justify them 
 intellectually: in fact, outside of the exact sciences, is 
 not most of philosophy, political liberalism, economic 
 speculation, the vast literature of opinion, precisely this 
 attempt at justification! I am not, of course, raising the 
 question as to whether or not, or how far, institutions in 
 themselves can be justified. I am merely pointing out 
 that in peace times the standards of conformity are, on 
 the whole, on the side of the rational and the intellectual- 
 istic. It is not considered discreditable to be tolerant, to 
 attempt to ''understand" other countries, to be broad-
 
 170 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 minded. Quite the contrary. Civilization is largely the 
 erection of just this type of social sanction where the 
 summons of the community is, again speaking broadly, a 
 summons to the life of reason. Indeed, one of the most 
 serious difficulties of this civilized standard has been 
 that in the modem world the social scale had been so 
 broadened that men found it difficult and irksome to ad- 
 just themselves to it in civilized terms. That is why, 
 before the war, Bergson was so popular a philosopher; 
 men had grown tired of the everlasting intellectualism 
 of modern civilization and turned with relief to a doc- 
 trine which sang the delights of the primitive organic 
 buzz where thought and problems were mercifully absent. 
 It was recognized that man was quarrelsome, selfish and 
 lustful, just as he was altruistic and ''socially" minded, 
 but the whole emphasis of civilization was upon the re- 
 pression of all the first mentioned instincts as it was 
 upon the tempering of the altruistic impulse with expedi- 
 ency. In a word, a man could not make a fool of himself, 
 he could not do anything too chivalrous, too dangerous, 
 too adventurous, too cruel (how quaint the casualty lists 
 appeared in our newspapers alongside reports of anti- 
 vivisection meetings) ; the social ideal was, in a narrow 
 and repressive sense, to "be reasonable." 
 
 War completely reversed the social sanctions. It was 
 practically an invitation to the abdication of reason in 
 favor of feeling. Men found that the disposition to con- 
 form, instead of being in conflict with their private de- 
 sires, was in many cases in complete accord with them. 
 All parts of human nature worked in harmony, except 
 for a brief, lingering regret at that temporary disappear- 
 ance and unstimulation of the disposition to thought. 
 Most of the massive and impulsive sides of our nature 
 received deep satisfaction in a friendly social environ-
 
 POLITICAL SYMBOLISM 171 
 
 ment. And until liberal thought frankly faces this in- 
 dubitable psychological fact of war, it will be powerless 
 to suggest a way out. 
 
 Before the war, the doctrine of the moral equivalent 
 had been recognized. The healthy side of the Hobbesian* 
 analysis of man as having within him "the instincts of 
 the ravening beast" had been understood and many sug- 
 gestions had been made for finding socially useful chan- 
 nels in which these instincts could be expressed. This 
 search for substitutes — international sports, dangerous 
 occupations instead of military service — I believe is 
 perfectly valid as far as it goes. Certainly our discussion 
 of political symbolism, for example, showed how barren 
 was any new political symbolism created out of the 
 thin rationalistic air of conventional ci^^lized life, and 
 the need of correlating in a new symbol political fact 
 with emotional appeal. To discover types of social and 
 political activity which can be justified on rational 
 grounds — which can be justified on the grounds of im- 
 proving the quality of general community life — and 
 types which at the same time can stimulate and gratify 
 large parts of our otherwise suppressed impulsive na- 
 ture — such discovery is still a primary task for liberal 
 investigation. 
 
 What the war has shown us, however, is that such dis- 
 covery is only one-half the task. We can see now that 
 the problem of finding new channels of expression is not 
 completed when we discover channels that are on the 
 whole socially useful and personally gratifying. They 
 must be channels wliich also meet with the same universal 
 social applause that accompanies the activities of war. 
 A true ''sublimation" is not merely a release to new 
 activities but a release which is made in a friendly social 
 
 • Hobbes : The Leviathan.
 
 172 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 environment. Intellectuals have a much more difficult 
 task before them than the easy paid-attorneyism of war 
 time. The creation of these types of new activity will 
 require every bit of constructive genius they possess ; it 
 will require constant psychological investigation and ex- 
 periment of the scientific and patient sort. We must 
 devise other things to do than to make money or to write 
 poems about the evils of the world when we do not 
 succeed. 
 
 And it will not be easy. The newspaper editors who 
 had no compunctions about encouraging millions of 
 young men to depart for slaughter in time of war yet 
 felt a certain ethical uneasiness in their praise of Harry 
 Hawker's dangerous and almost foolhardy first attempt 
 to cross the Atlantic in a single-motored aeroplane. They 
 were not entirely certain as to whether it was quite 
 * ' right ' ' for him to take such desperate chances. They, and 
 the majority of the mob as well, are even more hesitant 
 about encouraging an entirely revolutionary social move- 
 ment of a kind which can keep men's thoughts and emo- 
 tions occupied with almost the fervor and ecstasy of 
 war time. They cling pathetically to the old symbols 
 which the know. They are afraid, we are all afraid, to 
 experiment. Yet we must experiment or perish. West- 
 ern civilization cannot long endure an oscillation between 
 war, which releases one large part of our nature, and 
 peace which suppresses it. We must find some harmony 
 without that desperate expedient, if we are not finally 
 to destroy ourselves like a grim jest for the untutored 
 Orient.
 
 CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
 THE DEBIcLE of PRAGMATISM 
 
 w 
 
 "The old faith in the dignity and potency of reason which is the 
 corner stone of humanistic liheralism." — Morris E. Cohen. 
 
 HEN was Anatole France's Le Jar din d' Epicure 
 first published? I cannot recall, but the actual 
 date seems unimportant, for when we look back now to 
 the days before the war, did not the graceful sensuous 
 satire, the slightly tired irony, the impeccable style, the 
 amiable distrust of the mind when its modern triumphs 
 were compared with the long unchanging course of our 
 animal history, did not these qualities lodged in Anatole 
 France's infinitely subtle epigrams seem best to typify 
 the sophisticated anti-intellectualism of that era? Better 
 even than Bergson's reduction of logical terms to a 
 flowing experience of protoplasmic throbs, better than 
 the fin de siecle poets who bade us savor the immediate 
 fullness of every moment as they went flitting by in 
 meaningless succession, better than the contempt for 
 mere logic on the part of the younger intellectuals, Le 
 Jar din d'Epicure seemed the epitome as it was in many 
 ways the consummation of an era. In Mr. Stephen Mc- 
 Kenna's interesting novel, ''Sonia,"* there is an illumi- 
 nating description of the pre-war milieu in England, al- 
 though the mood of the first decade of the 20th century 
 was much the same throughout the Continent — a mood 
 of skepticism, of accent upon desire and pleasure, of 
 
 *Soiiia: Between Two Worlds. By Stephen McKenna. Doran. 
 
 173
 
 174 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 dillettantism in letters, of the will to power in labor and 
 in governments, of anti-intellectualism in philosophy, of 
 sexual self-consciousness, of general lowering of the 
 older standards of personal integrity. And just before 
 the war the dominant mood was reinforced by the popu- 
 larization of the theories of Freud (without, of course, 
 the corrective discipline of their scientific exponent), 
 which were translated into — at least in the large, uncrit- 
 ical sense — a central belief in the supremacy of instinct 
 over intelligence.* In the hands of the rebellious and 
 sophisticated, of course, this central belief in the su- 
 premacy of instinct was twisted into a belief in the valid- 
 ity of instinct, and the patient work of metaphysicians 
 was lightly disposed of as merely the personal expression 
 of temperamental idiosyncracies. The whole plane of 
 discourse was tilted one might say from the conscious to 
 the unconscious level ; propositions were not so much ex- 
 amined on their merits as explained away in terms of 
 suppressed inner conflicts, ** auras," or unconscious bias. 
 The very adjective *' rationalistic" became an adjective 
 of reproach, for the value of opinions lay not in their 
 intrinsic merits but in their pointing towards a personal 
 drama or an interesting psychological background. 
 
 Now I would be the last to deny the enormous quicken- 
 ing to speculation and inquiry which came with this em- 
 phasis upon the fluidity of thought and this discovery of 
 the importance of naturalistic, instinctive origins. The 
 ^ rigidity of the older economic and political and sociologi- 
 
 * Syndicalism was a definite anti-intellectualistie movement. * ' Hatred 
 causes people to study their opponents, and to study their own opinions. 
 It does away with the silly * We all agree at bottom ' idea. The righteous 
 anger of the oppressed against their oppressors is no petty, self-centered, 
 calculating feeling. Dreary intellectuality flees before passionate hate. 
 The saint is a fighter while the well-meaning person is peaceable. The 
 topic of the times needs pricking — prudence and sense are the devil." 
 Syndicalism And The General Strike. By Arthur D. Lewis. Small, May- 
 nard, 1912.
 
 DEBACLE OF PRAGMATISM 175 
 
 cal theories was notorious; Nietzsche's demand that 
 everything be judged afresh by one had its indubitably 
 healthy side. There was really need for a transvaluation 
 of values. But that the reaction went too far seems to- 
 day equally plain. After all, when the dominant anti- 
 intellectuahsm of the sophisticated filtered down to the 
 masses it became in popular terms merely an invitation 
 to forget the pettifogging workings of the mind and to 
 trust to the animal impulses — an invitation oftenest 
 readily accepted, even if the native good sense of the 
 masses prevented the new radical theories from being 
 accepted too Hterally in practice. The whole mood of 
 the period, however, was, as we look back upon it now, 
 tinged with something akin to degeneration ; without ac- 
 cepting the philosophy of the militarists, it was a fact 
 that the more stalwart virtues both of character and 
 mind had become soft and flabby, and the transformation 
 of D'Annunzio from a world-sick poet flirting with the 
 idea of suicide to the recent flaming rebel against his 
 own government is a symbol of a genuine even if an 
 unfortunate regeneration. Even the bravest — for who 
 would deny the courage of Anatole France? — were 
 afflicted with the malady of the age. For when an age 
 becomes skeptical of its intelligence it usually ends by 
 becoming skeptical of everything, because in the long 
 run the beliefs and culture men value are the product 
 of intelligence. The game of discrediting the reason in 
 order that one may run away and play like a happy ani- 
 mal is well enough when formalism is stiff and unjield- 
 ing; carried too far, it usually results in an acute case 
 of spiritual ennui. That was to a great extent the case 
 with the intellectuals the world over on the eve of the 
 war. They accepted the shibboleths of the war with an 
 alacrity which otherwise would have been surprising,
 
 176 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 because they intensely wanted something to believe in, 
 something worth fighting, and if need be, dying for. 
 And, I believe, we here have the reason why the masses, 
 after the first emotional wave of excitement and change, 
 usually sickened of the war much more quickly than 
 the intellectuals who were conducting it from the top. 
 They at least were not wholly corrupted by the spiritual 
 malaise of the era ; unlike their intellectual betters, they 
 still believed in something. 
 
 This drift of pre-war thought was not unnoticed by the 
 keener and more alert thinkers. A few saw the threaten- 
 ing dangers. Graham Wallas, for example, who is gen- 
 erally a decade ahead of his period, saw with prophetic 
 vision : 
 
 "The old delight in the * manifest finger of destiny* 
 and 'the tide of progress,' even the newer belief in the 
 effortless 'evolution' of social institutions are gone. We 
 are afraid of the bhnd forces to which we used so willing- 
 ly to surrender ourselves. We feel that we must recon- 
 sider the basis of our organized life because, without re- 
 consideration, we have no chance of controlling it. And 
 so behind the momentary ingenuities and party phrases 
 of our statesmen we can detect the straining effort to 
 comprehend while there is yet time. Our philosophers 
 are toiling to refashion for the purpose of social life the 
 systems which used so confidently to offer guidance for 
 individual conduct. Our poets and playwrights and nov- 
 elists are revolutionizing their art in the attempt to 
 bring the essential facts of the Great Society within its 
 range. . . . We stand, as the Greek thinkers stood, in a 
 new world. And because the world is new, we feel that 
 neither the sectional observations of the special student, 
 nor the ever-accumulating records of the past, nor the 
 narrow experience of the practical man can suffice us.
 
 DEBACLE OF PRAGMATISM 177 
 
 We must let our minds play freely over all the conditions 
 of life till we can either justify our civilization or 
 change it."* 
 
 Here we have a reaction against the temper of the 
 day which had barely time to become articulate before 
 it was overwhelmed by the war. Wells had come out 
 for clear thinking against muddleheadedness, even when 
 he was himself the chief exponent of the latter quality. 
 Bertrand Russell was beginning to write those acute 
 criticisms of pragmatism, wherein he showed that the 
 pragmatic criterion of truth applied only to religious 
 myths and the terminology of science where, in the first 
 instance, the validity lay in furnishing subjective satis- 
 faction, and in the second, in supplying an instrument 
 of practical utihty, an admitted but still a useful fiction : 
 that, briefly, the pragmatic method did not apply to ob- 
 jective reality at all but merely to those ideas which gave 
 us the greatest subjective efficiency in getting along with 
 certain aspects of that reality. Over the entire intellect- 
 ual world, I think, had crept the shadow of this fear 
 Mr. Wallas expressed, ''the straining eifort to compre- 
 hend while there is yet time." The turn was towards 
 the objects rather than the methods of apprehension, 
 towards the finding out of certain relevant facts about 
 the social world at large before we were carried away on 
 the drifting streams of unrelated specialisms. 
 
 As I said, it had been a recent reaction and it had 
 not gone far. In Mr. Wallas 's own case, for instance, 
 we can find an excellent example of the subtle shift in 
 the winds of doctrine. His ''Human Nature in Politics" 
 was published in 1908, an extremely powerful argument 
 against the older intellectualism. His "The Great So- 
 ciety," an equally powerful argument against certain 
 
 * The Great Society ; Macmaian, 1914. Pages 14 and 15.
 
 178 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 aspects of 20tli century anti-intellectualism, as he Mm- 
 self says,* was, I believe, published, with its prophetic 
 anticipation of war, only a few days before the war 
 actually began. The summons was again to reason, to 
 objective truth, to a humble yet severe use of the mind — 
 in a word, to intellectualism. 
 
 It is a pity the reaction had not gone further before 
 the war came. Would we not have seen fewer intellectual 
 breakdowns, had the previous period been one of greater 
 logical discipline and less psychological speculation about 
 the origins of beliefs'? For it is curious but a fact that 
 although the younger disciples of pragmatism were con- 
 stantly speaking about the value of beliefs — always of 
 course in reference to their utility — they really con- 
 centrated more attention upon the origins of beliefs, 
 upon the paradoxical anti-rationalistic background. It 
 was a much more dazzling and brilliant performance 
 from the layman's point of view, and it had certain ap- 
 peals to our common vanity. It was an emphasis upon 
 the human drama rather than upon the cosmic scene, and 
 naturally, from the popular point of view then somewhat 
 skeptical in a well-fed age of immediate sensations of 
 all cosmic scenes, more attractive and interesting. It 
 constantly spoke of utility when it was merely describing 
 processes. Yet as a method of achieving results, for all 
 its boasting about utility, it failed miserably during the 
 war. Instead of controlling events, it found itself sub- 
 servient to them. It had found its proud role of inter- 
 preter insensibly transformed into the less thrilhng one 
 of sycophant. The reasons for this are worth giving. 
 In this phenomenon we have an excellent example of 
 what perversion of doctrine can do when carried over 
 literally into the field of practical political action. 
 
 * See preface of The Great Society.
 
 DEbICLE of pragmatism 179 
 
 There were, it seems to me, two main reasons for this 
 failure. I should summarize them somewhat in this 
 fashion: in the first place, the concept of utility is not 
 the idea of an end or of a value, it is a description of the 
 economical method of achieving ends. Fastening their 
 attention upon utility, the pragmatists lost sight of 
 genuine ends and began creating ends of their own. In 
 the second place, when they considered methods of achiev- 
 ing these more or less mythical ends of their own creation, 
 they liit upon the concept of compromise as a useful tool. 
 But under the circumstances, this method of achieve- 
 ment was the weakest technique possible, even if it was 
 the method which made the strongest human appeal in 
 a harsh environment that discouraged recourse to more 
 heroic concepts. I realize this sounds confused, but I 
 shall try now to make my meaning clearer. 
 
 Take my first contention. Can there be much doubt 
 that during the war the pragmatists gave almost as much 
 of a sacrosanct glamour to the word utility as the mili- 
 tarists in their turn did to the word preparedness f When 
 you said that a certain method of action, a certain way 
 of doing things in the political field, a certain technique 
 of controlling public opinion, had a higher utility value 
 than any other corresponding method, way, or technique, 
 had you not said the most valuable thing about it? Had 
 not you given it the highest praise ? Certainly ; an almost 
 religious aura enwrapped the word. That is what I 
 meant when I said the pragmatists were always talking 
 about utility when they really were talking about pro- 
 cesses. For as you could usually floor the militarists by 
 asking them plainly what the preparedness was ''for," 
 similarly the pragmatists were dreadfully embarrassed 
 when you suggested that the utility of a method had ab- 
 solutely no meaning until a previous question had been
 
 180 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 answered, ''utility for what?" It might be quite true 
 that a certain method was the most effective for achiev- 
 ing an end, popularly assumed to be justifiable ; did that 
 make the method the most valuable? Why of course it 
 signified nothing about the method, except as a descrip- 
 tion of fact in a certain set of circumstances, until you 
 had previously examined the popular assumption that 
 the end was justifiable and proved the assumption correct. 
 For instance, it might be quite true that suppression 
 of freedom of speech, jailing of recalcitrant conscientious 
 objectors, arousing of hatred in the mass, were, under 
 the peculiar American circumstances, the most effective 
 methods of winning the war against Germany. Well, 
 supposing that a rationalistic examination of ends 
 showed that the spiritual benefits of preserving a tolerant 
 public opinion in America had more value as an end 
 than the enforcement of certain political purposes upon 
 Germany, what then? The whole method became mean- 
 ingless. The plain truth is that method and technique 
 are subsidiary to ends and value in any rational philoso- 
 phy either of pofitics or life, and that the pragmatists 
 were so busy studying method that they had small time 
 left for studying the purposes to which that method was 
 to be applied. Quite literally, their impulse was to put 
 the cart before the horse. They had a firm grasp on the 
 unessentials of how to do things rather than upon the 
 essentials of what things were worth doing. 
 
 Which to a great extent explains the intellectual 
 phenomenon of how the pragmatists, usually the most 
 acute critics of those who employ the reason merely to 
 gild a decision already unconsciously made, themselves 
 during the war fell victims to the same tendency. After 
 all, the ends for which all the technique of the war was 
 being employed were told to us in no uncertain tones
 
 DfiBlCLE OF PRAGMATISM 181 
 
 by the reactionary press and publicists. They had not 
 doubt what things were worth doing. They had not 
 doubt that the destruction of German cities, the devasta- 
 tion of Europe, the embittering of the world, were the 
 happy objects for which they so cheerfully sent out 
 young men to die. Naturally the pragmatists, oftenest 
 liberal and intelligent, were embarrassed. They felt that 
 an answer must be made to them ; further, they became 
 convinced, partly out of their own heart and partly be- 
 cause of the ''will to believe" the vagueness of the Presi- 
 dent, that the real ends of the war were the liberal ends. 
 By asserting so long and loudly, by ignoring realities 
 and creating elaborate international Utopias of their own, 
 they ended by assuming such to be the case. They had to 
 assume it in self-defence. Thus they soon came to be as 
 uncritical and assumptive of ends as the more ignorant 
 popular mass. What is perhaps worse, due to the attacks 
 of the reactionaries whose vision moved in so limited 
 a sphere, the pragmatists occupied most of their time 
 in the erection of intellectual trenches against them, and 
 inevitably they became preoccupied with merely political 
 ends. They concentrated upon a yqyj narrow range of 
 values. They concluded, I think without fully realizing 
 it, by assuming that all other values could wait for ap- 
 praisement until the question of the political values of 
 the present war were settled. The ends of tolerance, 
 international good ^\ill, liberty of the individual, were 
 of course desirable, but they spoke of them with a little 
 impatience. Could not one hold these values in abeyance 
 until the infinitely more important ends of overthrowing 
 the Hohenzollerns and gi\nng Germany a democratic 
 constitution and creating a League of Nations had been 
 accomplished? This was understandable, and in a way 
 creditable to their gregarious impulses. But it certainly
 
 182 LIBEEALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 was not rational. Indeed it resulted in the liberal prag- 
 matists* inevitable fiasco — that the conclusion of the war 
 found them much more disillusioned and astonished than 
 it did the ordinary man, whose instinct told him that wars 
 were unpleasant but more or less in the order of things, 
 and that, in spite of fine words, nothing particularly 
 wonderful was to be expected from this one. 
 
 Had the pragmatists first asked themselves the pri- 
 mary question of all rational philosophy, the question of 
 value and of ethically desirable ends (using ethics in its 
 most generous sense), they would not have been thrown 
 so out of focus. They preferred to concentrate upon 
 method and utility, which, when one comes down to it, 
 is an extremely barren concept. Then when the whole 
 question of ends was raised by the reactionaries, they 
 spontaneously put the discussion on a purely political 
 plane because their controversy was possible — and not 
 extremely dangerous. They could hardly raise the ques- 
 tion of ultimate ends without getting themselves in jail. 
 It is noticeable that a philosopher like Bertrand Russell, 
 who before the war was one of pragmatism's acutest 
 dialectical critics, himself when the war came, raised 
 precisely that question. And it is also noticeable that 
 men who were pragmatism's spiritual descendants in 
 America, men like Dewey and Kallen and Lippmann,, 
 practically never raised it. 
 
 Yet this was only half of the story. Assuming for a 
 moment (an assumption, of course, I do not personally 
 agree with), that the political ends for which the prag- 
 matists were temporarily willing to sacrifice all others 
 were the paramount ends really. (And from this point 
 of view, we of course would have to say that the failure 
 to achieve most of them was merely due to the stubborn- 
 ness of fate and that what shell of them we actually re-
 
 DEBACLE OF PRAGMATISM 183 
 
 ceived was the result of the pragmatists ' labors.) Then 
 it becomes quite rational to examine method and tech- 
 nique. It becomes indeed the only proper function of 
 the intelligence. Yet how did our pragmatists go about 
 the task of finding the proper technique? Frankly, it 
 seems to me, as uncritically and impulsively as they as- 
 sumed that all values were temporarily subsumed in the 
 accomplishment of certain political ends. Although no 
 one would deny that, the war once in full swing, it would 
 have been highly desirable if certain political ends could 
 have been accomplished, I for one cannot but believe that 
 the method actually chosen was the most inexpedient 
 among a choice of alternative methods. 
 
 AATiat was this method ? Succinctly, it was the method 
 of compromise ; and it might be maliciously described as 
 the method whereby one hopes to control events by 
 abandoning oneself to them, or, as I said before, by 
 stooping to conquer. Events crowd in upon one faster 
 than it is possible even to make decisions about their de- 
 sirability, much less deflect them from their main course. 
 In war-time, especially, the flood of actual occurrences is 
 sweeping and irresistible. Therefore one's only chance 
 of turning the great flood towards a happy haven is not 
 to scream impotently at it and be overwhelmed in its 
 rushing waters but to get on a boat with the great mass, 
 especially a boat that contains a leader upon whom one 
 may exercise some influence, however slight. Thus, and 
 thus only, can one pragmatically accomplish anything in 
 such a catastrophe. Mere objection, even stopping too 
 long to ask where the flood is going means impotence 
 where not destruction. If to be honest and downright 
 and forthwith is to in\dte ineffectiveness, then by all 
 means, pragmatically speaking, be subtle and shrewd 
 and unscrupulous. Anything to be effective.
 
 184 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 Put figuratively, this argument (the one most com- 
 monly employed during the war) has a certain validity, 
 and I should not venture to deny that on occasions the 
 method it defends might really achieve certain things. 
 But one recoils from it precisely because it seems such 
 a mean estimate both of human nature and of the kind of 
 moral world in which we live. Pushed to extremes, in- 
 deed, it becomes a justification for almost anything; it 
 may speedily degenerate into a philosophy of that false 
 •optimism whereby the fruits of ''coordination," ''inter- 
 national concert of powers," God knows what, may all 
 with equal cheerfulness be plucked as the fruit of bloody 
 trenches and broken lives. It is so gregarious that its 
 first invitation is to find out where the stream of things 
 is headed and then subtly to tempt or guide the stream to 
 good ends; it dislikes the even temporary isolation of 
 standing out boldly against the whole stream and telling 
 the unpleasant truth that it is headed to perdition and 
 that it must completely reverse its direction. It is a 
 philosophy so enamoured of mingling with the warm 
 living stream of everyday that it turns with ferocity upon 
 any claims for ethical resistance to the main current of 
 events. It is typically American in the sense that it is a 
 philosophy which is afraid to be alone. 
 
 I have called this a philosophy, whereas it is only the 
 necessary outcome, in terms of human affections, of the 
 selection of the method of compromise for achieving ends. 
 As a matter of fact, the method of non-compromise is 
 equally open to choice ; certainly as a method it appeals 
 more strongly to the sense of moral integrity in men, and 
 in its achievement of ends who can say it has not as high 
 a utility or pragmatic value? The concept of compro- 
 mise, after all, is only one concept among many for ac- 
 complishing purposes. There are the concepts of justice.
 
 DEBACLE OF PRAGMATISM 185 
 
 of liberty, of regard for truth itself. In the past these 
 concepts have been employed with singular success — 
 most of us are inchned to beheve with considerably more 
 success than the concept of compromise. A rational 
 examination of the methods utilitarianly of most value 
 for the accomplishment even of the narrow political ends 
 which we have assumed as all-important would have in- 
 volved a much more searching inquiry into the effective- 
 ness of these other concepts than the pragmatists vouch- 
 safed. When we look back on the war just ended, is 
 there not some reason for saying that it is precisely 
 these older concepts which have accompHshed most for 
 just those ends the pragmatists yearned! Who has done 
 more for liberalism in England, the compromising Mr. 
 Zimmern or the uncompromising Mr. Smillie? If effec- 
 tiveness in changing the current of events is the test, 
 who changed them more, the compromising cabinet heads 
 of the German Empire or the indefatigable doctrinaire, 
 Mr. Trotsky! If salvaging some of the old spirit of toler- 
 ance is the criterion, who has salvaged more in the long 
 run, the editors of hberal journals or the conscientious 
 objectors in prison? If a decenter treaty is the de- 
 sideratum, who has made it more decent, the compromis- 
 ing liberals of the American peace delegation, or the 
 uncompromising Mr. Bullitt who resigned 1 If ennobling 
 the spiritual side of man is the only valid end, who has 
 ennobled it more, the compromising ministers who were 
 timidly patriotic, or the uncompromising Mr. Bertrand 
 Russell who was neither a minister nor patriotic? Even 
 on their utiHty side these older concepts do not appear 
 to have come off so badly. Justice, and truth, and love 
 of liberty, and honesty, seemed, if the pragmatists will 
 pardon me, to have worked. 
 
 It is quite beside the point to maintain that concepts
 
 186 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 like the above are indefinable. Of course they are inde- 
 finable. So is everything else when you come to be 
 philosophically critical, for as Mr. Arthur J. Balfour, 
 who however reactionary a politician is certainly an able 
 philosopher, says in one of his most dazzling passages 
 of ratiocination : ' ' The physical causes of perception are 
 inferred, but not perceived. The real material world 
 has been driven by the growth of knowledge further and 
 further into the realm of the unseen, and now lies com- 
 pletely hidden from direct experience behind the im- 
 penetrable screen of its own effects."* If you defy me 
 to tell you what justice or truth is, it is easy for me to 
 retort with dialectical scorn that it is equally impossible 
 for you to tell me what a chair or a lamp or a dog is, that 
 you can only describe its attributes (even these not per- 
 ceived directly) and not its essence in which they are 
 assumed to inhere. I can as easily point out attributes of 
 justice and truth without ever coming any nearer to their 
 essence. All language, exactly as algebra and scientific 
 terminology, is fictional and symbolical; it is merely a 
 means of our finding our way about in a jungle of reali- 
 ties, which whether we believe in their essence or not, 
 are seldom if ever susceptible to exact definition in a 
 language so flexible as living human speech. Conse- 
 quently the value of concepts, precisely as the value of 
 ideas about more material things, lies in their way of 
 adjusting us to life successfully, and to that extent the 
 pragmatic analysis is indubitably correct. What I am 
 here reproaching the pragmatists with is their failure 
 to carry the pragmatic analysis far enough. To be sure, 
 certain desirable ends would have to be agreed upon by 
 rational inquiry, but pragmatism is not necessarily con- 
 
 * Theism and Humanism. By Et. Hon. Arthur James Balfour. Doran ; 
 1916.
 
 DfiBlCLE OF PRAGMATISM 187 
 
 cerned with those ends; once discovered (or as too often 
 the case, assumed), pragmatism merely points out those 
 concepts and ideas most likely to bring us success in 
 reaching them. On material ideas, for instance, we are 
 more or less agreed ; we find it convenient to call a chair 
 a chair and expect all chairs to have certain attributes 
 in common, even although we cannot precisely define a 
 chair. There is a large series of such ideas which most of 
 us are willing to take for granted. We find that it 
 ** works" to do so. Yet the same test really applies to 
 concepts more remote. 
 
 '*If theological ideas prove to have a value for con- 
 crete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense 
 of being good for so much. For how much more they 
 are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the 
 other truths that also have to be acknowledged,"* writes 
 William James. 
 
 That is, when we employ concepts like justice and 
 truth and honesty to summon us to action, we are thrown 
 back immediately to the empirical world, and we have to 
 ask how a belief in them has succeeded, or is rationally 
 likely to succeed in action. We have to contrast their 
 success or lack of it Avith that of other concepts like com- 
 promise, which is equally indefinable in itself. It really 
 does no good to call these concepts sentimental shibbo- 
 leths and to say that we shall be guided in our action by 
 the more sensible concept of utility. That concept is 
 equally a shibboleth, and it is just an accident of language 
 that around it has not sprung up the suspicious aroma 
 of romanticism attaching to the more heroic words. 
 Looked at from the pragmatic point of view, it is no less 
 a symbol than any other concept and its value is sub- 
 jected to the precisely same test of empirical success. 
 
 •Pragmatism. Bj William James. Longmans, Green; 1907. Page 73.
 
 188 LIBERALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 Indeed it is as easy to become mystical over the shibbo- 
 leth of utihty as it is over the shibboleth of justice, per- 
 haps more so. When one becomes ecstatic over utihty, 
 he is seldom challenged by the ordinary man because the 
 ordinary man feels it irrelevant. With justice or truth, 
 however, for which men have fought and died sincerely 
 even when they could not define them, there is a constant 
 challenge, because vnth respect to specific circumstances 
 these words in the long run are given a common signifi- 
 cance by the bulk of everyday men and women and one 
 cannot permanently define them in terms opposed to that 
 common significance. One is under a real, even if remote, 
 democratic control. President Wilson may today define 
 the treaty as *'just" and be believed by many good peo- 
 ple — in the long run, the world will not believe him. 
 If he calls it expedient, no one will ever dispute him 
 because no one will ever care whether it is or not. Men's 
 mass emotions and feelings do not attach themselves to 
 such barren concepts. 
 
 Pragmatism, I mean to say, in no sense sanctioned dur- 
 ing the war a technique of compromise as against re- 
 sistance, it in no sense behttled the older political con- 
 cepts of liberalism, it in no sense offered encouragement 
 for the beclouding of the ugly factual realities in the 
 morale-valuable myths of an emerging international 
 Hberalism. On the contrary, it sanctioned precisely the 
 reverse, in so far as it was a summons to practical action. 
 It turned or should have turned, one's face towards the 
 empirical world, and invited, or should have invited, a 
 rationalistic examination of its objects and ideas and 
 purposes. I know James himself constantly used the 
 word ''rationalistic" in a derogatory sense, where many 
 of us have always felt that the word scholastic would 
 have been better. But certainly he did not employ the
 
 DEBACLE OF PRAGMATISM 189 
 
 word rationalistic in the sense I iiave used it here ; cer- 
 tainly he did not mean to be derogatory towards the 
 thesis that the use of the mind and reason are good 
 things. James was reacting from the pallid absolutism 
 of transcendental New England; he wanted to set his 
 face towards facts, to put the savor of life into philoso- 
 phy; he was by temperament something of an anarchist 
 hungry for all experience. Yet he never meant we were 
 to swallow that experience unthinkingly and without as- 
 sessment — was it not precisely upon assessment he 
 placed his emphasis? and how can assessment be made 
 except by rationalistic examination of all the conflicting 
 facts? except by rationally finding one's way through 
 that jungle of experience, of the richness of which James 
 himself was so humanly and refreshingly aware?
 
 190 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 A few days after having written this chapter I had the pleasure of 
 reading in manuscript Mr. Kobert Dell's book, soon to be published I hope,, 
 My Second Country — Prance, of course, for Mr. Dell is known in both. 
 England and France for his affection for the latter country even when hei 
 is sometimes a severe critic of its faults, a habit of intellectual honesty 
 he learned from his foster-country. In that book in a chapter called * * Back, 
 to Voltaire ' ' he confirms, from a slightly different point of view, practically 
 all I have said in this chapter. I am more than pleased that so competent. 
 an observer assures us that the reaction back to intellectualism and the dis- 
 cipline of facts has become strong among the younger Frenchmen who- 
 went through the hell of the war. These bits are worth quoting: 
 
 * ' One cannot help having a certain suspicion of a philosopher whose^ 
 lectures are attended, as were those of M. Bergson before the war, chiefly 
 by fashionable ladies. The attraction was, I imagine, M. Bergson 's theory 
 of intuition. Women usually claim to have more intuition than men — 
 the claim may be justified for all I know — and the theory flattered them. 
 Besides nothing can be more comforting than the notion that by intuition 
 we can get further than all the great psychologists and other men of 
 science, for everybody has intuition to some degree and the great advantage 
 of the theory is that it dispenses people from the necessity of any kind 
 of work or study. Theories that save trouble are always popular and a 
 smart woman is naturally gratified at the idea that she can know more 
 about psychology, for instance, than Dr. Pierre Janet. That, I fancy, 
 is one reason at any rate why M. Bergson 's lecture-room at the College 
 de France became the best place in Paris for observing the latest fashion 
 in hats. As I have said I am no metaphysician and approach the subject 
 merely from the point of view of the plain man. From that point of view 
 any philosophy that tends to the disparagement of reason is pernicious 
 and, whatever M. Bergson may desire, his philosophy has that tendency. 
 . . . He has been one of the strongest reactionary forces in France dur- 
 ing the present century. I frankly admit that that fact is enough for me, 
 and Pragmatists at any rate, must admit the validity of the test." 
 
 "There are signs already of an intellectualist and rationalist revival 
 in France. It was always inevitable, the French character being what 
 it is. Bergsonism is essentially un-Freuch, although 'propaganda' during 
 the war has been circulating at the public expense pamphlets written to 
 prove that M. Bergson is the only true and lineal philosophical descendant 
 of Descartes and that his philosophy is the complete synthesis and final 
 expression of all French philosophical traditions. . . . Perhaps M. 
 Bergson 's diplomatic activities have not improved his credit, but the 
 reaction that I have mentioned is due to other causes. The war has 
 produced at any rate in those that have taken part in it a sense of 
 realities, which is impatient of metaphysical discussions and philosophical 
 systems. Above all it has shown the disastrous results of impulse and 
 religious feeling — for patriotism is a true religion — and the importance 
 of reason. Reason has been completely dethroned during the war and the 
 consequences have not been good for the world. So far as my experience 
 goes, the young French intellectuals have come back from the Front con- 
 vinced rationalists. M. Barbusse's latest book 'Clarte,' is symptomatic; 
 the future probably lies much more with this point of view than with that 
 of M. Bergson. A philosophy that commended itself to rich idle women is 
 hardly likely to appeal to men who h;ive had so terrible an experience of 
 realities. Probably M. Bergson 's influence in France has always been in
 
 DEBACLE OF PRAGMATISM 191 
 
 great measure due to his great literary gifts; he writes a beautiful style 
 and has remarkable lucidity of expression. Perhaps it is chiefly as a man 
 of letters that he will live. But men that have been through this war 
 need something more than literature. They know that ignorance, illusions, 
 romantic beliefs made the war and will make other wars unless they are 
 subdued by reason and positive knowledge. Like Simon Paulin in M. 
 Barbusse's book they want clarity — positive facts not metaphysical specu- 
 lations. And their nearness to death for five years has emphasized the 
 supreme importance of life. It is not they who will 'bring us back to God,' 
 as Mr. Brittling fondly imagined; rather do they say with Simon Paulin, 
 ' Je ne vols pas Dieu. Je vois partout, partout, 1 'absence de Dieu ! ' " 
 
 My Second Country is a remarkable book, and certainly one who himself 
 lacks the opportunity for observation cannot know what modern France of 
 today is like without reading it.
 
 CHAPTER NINE 
 
 LEADEESHIP 
 
 THIS war has made me doubtful about the advan- 
 tages of education, for all through it the * unedu- 
 cated classes' have shown that they possess much more 
 good sense than their 'betters' and have kept their heads 
 much more successfully. The palm for unreason must 
 certainly be given to the 'intellectuals,' who have talked 
 more nonsense than any other class. One rarely hears 
 among the people, for instance, the hysterical cant that so 
 many newspapers have pubhshed about the air raids and 
 the bombardment. Some journalists, whom one would 
 never have suspected of religious fervor, have denounced 
 the 'sacrilege' involved in bombarding a church, thereby 
 attributing to the Germans the amazing feat of taking an 
 exact aim from a distance of seventy miles. The Parisian 
 public, on the contrary, is not disposed to make too much 
 of incidents which, deplorable as they are, are trifles in 
 comparison with what is going on at the front. The 
 Parisians do not like being bombed and bombarded, but 
 they take their risks coolly as inevitable consequences of 
 war and feel that there is something indecent in shrieking 
 at the death of a few score civilians in plain clothes at a 
 moment when thousands of civilians in uniform are fall- 
 ing at the front. I sympathize with their attitude, for I 
 have never been able to understand why the life of a man 
 becomes of no value the moment he is dressed in blue or 
 khaki."* 
 
 • The Dial, Volume LXIV, number 766, for May 9, 1918, page 438. 
 
 192
 
 LEADERSHIP 193 
 
 I quote this long section from a letter from Mr, Robert 
 Dell to the Dial, dated Paris, April 9, 1918, because it 
 expresses vividly a reaction which many have dimly felt 
 but few made articulate, and secondly, because this letter 
 illustrates, by a pecuUar circumstance, the stupidity and 
 ignorance of American officialdom during the war. The 
 particular issue of the Dial in which this letter appeared 
 — to be sure, some eleven weeks, as I remember it, after 
 the issue had been printed and distributed — was de- 
 clared non-mailable under the Espionage Law. When in 
 astonishment I inquired what had made it so, I was 
 gravely shown a marked copy of the issue in which this 
 particular paragraph was singled out, with the specific 
 sentence beginning, *'The Parisians do not like," and so 
 on, especially underscored and this remarkable observa- 
 tion appended, ''This is the philosophy of German baby- 
 killers!" That a government should employ men and 
 money to ferret out so trivial and altogether innocent 
 sentence such as the one quoted, and then should sup- 
 press the magazine containing it on the ground that such 
 sentiments gave aid and comfort to the enemy — it really 
 surpassed belief. And when one realized that it was 
 done with the sanction, if not direct at least tacit, of the 
 leaders of a so-called democracy whose proudest heritage 
 was its traditions of liberty and free speech, what was 
 one to think of those leaders f The answer was, of course, 
 less than nothing. Leadership of that stupidly undis- 
 criminating character could command the respect of 
 hardly a single intelligent man. 
 
 In one instance, this war has been a remarkable one. 
 It produced practically no leaders among the men of 
 affairs, except possibly, Lenin. Although almost the en- 
 tire world was at war for over four years no one of 
 outstanding genius for leadership, such as Cavour, or
 
 194 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 Bismarck, or Lincoln, or Disraeli, emerged from it. Cer- 
 tainly France did not bring forth leaders who were the 
 complete inheritors of her glorious traditions. Could 
 Joffre or Foch or Poincare or the pettifogging deputies 
 of the Chamber fill the bill? Hardly. Even Clemenceau 
 has been, for all his stubbornness and refreshing reac- 
 tionary directness, more of a dictator than a leader. No 
 one would claim that he speaks the soul of France today. 
 Nor did England do much more than reveal the enduring 
 virtues of her liberal and laborite leaders, such as As- 
 quith and Henderson and Smillie, when contrasted with 
 the stark reactionism of the Tories. Her present leader, 
 the chameleon creature of the ''stunt" press, Mr. Lloyd 
 George, cannot stir us. Many of his own countrymen 
 regard him as the apotheosis of middle-class mediocrity, 
 energy disguising itself as insight, an early chauvinism 
 and braggadocio only tempered by the unrelenting pres- 
 sure of labor discontent. Germany then? Surely not 
 the Kaiser with his childish vanity and love of a bright 
 uniform, a football of his own General Staff, too cowardly 
 to face the consequences of defeat and revolution, a man 
 who, in the words of Vorwaerts used to describe Beth- 
 mann-Hollwegg ' ' meant well — feebly. ' ' Nor the mighty 
 "iron" men of the German army and navy, Tirpitz, 
 Ludendorff, Hindenburg, now so busily revealing in our 
 daily newspapers that their iron was very weak human 
 clay. The Httle kinglets and petty tyrants of the Bal- 
 kans, or even young Charles, who loudly protested his 
 innocence and good intentions with an uneasy glance 
 backwards towards Berlin? Where are they today? 
 And in America can we any longer call Wilson a leader? 
 I doubt it, for we are delightedly discovering that when 
 he claimed to be the spokesman of this country, he was
 
 LEADERSHIP 195 
 
 in fact speaking mostly for himself and no one else. His 
 leadership stands repudiated. 
 
 This surprising lack of leadership during the war has a 
 certain implication. Men like Lloyd George and Wilson 
 and Clemenceau, even if they were not leaders in the old- 
 fashioned sense, did — and still do as I write — possess 
 tremendous power. In a world of machines, newspapers 
 of a million circulation daily, technical experts, and in- 
 dustrial complexity, leadership in the grandiose Carly- 
 lean hero sense tends to disappear. What remains? 
 Well, during the war at any rate the powerful man ap- 
 peared not so much as the fountainhead of moral forces 
 as the skilful juggler of parliamentary majorities, the 
 propaganda expert, the compromiser and astute trimmer 
 among the winds of unreason, greed, and flickering no- 
 bility, the adjuster and adapter of circumstances. He 
 was the director of forces which had grown up imper- 
 ceptibly and which he himself barely understood. 
 
 I said ' '■ during the w^ar, ' ' for there are indications now 
 that leadership with something of the older moral au- 
 thority and quality has not become obsolete even in an 
 industrial machine age. The conditions of the war made 
 the directing power of people like Wilson and Lloyd 
 George not perhaps so much palatable as just merely 
 possible. Under circumstances of peace it is extremely 
 questionable if they could have attained the position of 
 prestige more or less thrust upon them by the accident 
 of war. No one, I believe, could come into anything like 
 intimate contact with these so-called leaders and not be, 
 granted his honesty, thoroughly disgusted at their igno- 
 rance, their hypocrisy, and their utter lack of principle 
 or vision. Speaking only for my own limited contacts, 
 I can remember the despair with which I used to come 
 ^way from anyone near or himself "higher up" in the
 
 196 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 directing class, whether the government, the press, the 
 church, or the university; I found, as Mr. Dell found 
 in Paris, that if I wanted anything like commonsense 
 about the war I had a better chance to hear it in a bar- 
 room from a street-car conductor or a truck driver when 
 a few drinks had removed the inhibitions of war-time 
 censorship and war-time artificial press opinion. It was 
 a common reaction with those who had much to do with 
 so-called ** statesmen."* 
 
 The average man, however, came in contact with those 
 who were directing the larger aspects of national policy 
 only very remotely — for all practical purposes of judg- 
 ment only through his daily newspaper. Certain propa- 
 ganda, skilfully devised to make him react a certain 
 way, was set before him. Then the leaders, knowing in 
 advance almost exactly what this reaction would be, 
 spoke words which flattered it. He imagined on many 
 occasions, consequently, that the leaders were expressing 
 his own thoughts and opinions, a little bit better, to be 
 sure, than he might be able to express them himself, but 
 still his thoughts. He was being emotionally exploited 
 without being aware of it. And that exploitation, with 
 the elaborate modern artifices for controlling mass 
 opinion, could be continued as long as the passion and 
 censorship-obscurities of war-time continued. 
 
 Yet that exploitation, in spite of the desperate efforts 
 made by many of these same leaders to continue it on into 
 more normal times (consider how the propaganda ma- 
 chine for Wilson's League of Nations has worked over- 
 time since his return from Paris), has shown healthy in- 
 dications of going to pieces in the saner atmosphere of 
 peace. In many instances, as we can see increasingly in 
 America, the skepticism and disillusion have become in- 
 
 * For example, Mr. Lincoln Colcord,
 
 LEADERSHIP 197 
 
 tense almost in proportion to the earnestness with which 
 hollow hopes were held during the war. Speaking for 
 all countries, the war has been a profound dis- 
 appointment, no less for the \dctorious than the 
 defeated. No single nation got out of the war all 
 it hoped for and expected, and we, who said we ex- 
 pected nothing, got precisely that — except high prices, 
 taxes, debt, an inflated currency, the dislike of the 
 world, and industrial unrest thrown in as a side bar- 
 gain. Outside of the new little imperialistic pets of the 
 Entente, like Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and Rumania, 
 who see no reason why they should not loot as long as it 
 is an open season, most of the nations couldn't be coaxed 
 back to war under any provocation. (Let us hope a few 
 more months of this may knock much of their morbid 
 and newly awakened chauvinism out of them. As I write, 
 the common people of Poland seem to have become skep- 
 tical of the advantages of self-determination.) It is safe 
 to say that the organized, compact, belligerent Europe 
 of June, 1914, would have found scores of occasions for a 
 large-scale war in the present-day petty disputes which 
 the Supreme Council at Paris is a languid and rather 
 pathetically futile way is trying to compose — Fiume, 
 Armenia, Silesia, Budapest, Limburg, and all those spots 
 in the Balkans where the authority of the Council is 
 mocked and the inhabitants seem determined to prove 
 that if war is purgatory, peace is hell. The statesmen 
 directing the affairs of the bigger nations simply dare 
 not declare war on a large scale again. They may organ- 
 ize punitive expeditions of mercenaries, put on rigorous 
 economic blockades, exhort, send military commissions, 
 coax mth food;* but a formal declaration of war, never. 
 
 **'If some one conceived an idea of installing a Zulu as receiver of 
 Austria at the Vienna Hofburg, I do not believe that there would be_ a 
 person interested enough to view the ceremonies. Unless food was dis-
 
 198 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 Now if such is the temper of the nations as a whole, 
 how much worse is the temper of the citizens who com- 
 pose them. Except for the profiteers, the statesmen and 
 officers who had the intoxication of playing with the 
 world as if it were a rubher ball, the safe civilians who 
 indulged in an orgy of thrills, the vividest recollections 
 of war to millions are of death, disease, starvation, op- 
 pression, or discomfort. And at the end what has been 
 the reward for all these sacrifices? They have returned 
 to their homes — when any has been left them to return 
 to — only to find it difficult to get a job, to find food dear, 
 to find the whole normal course of the old life they knew 
 upset, to find their old liberties curtailed, to find no com- 
 mensurate reward either in happiness or security for 
 what they have undergone. It is but natural that their 
 temper is suspicious and angry ; it is only just that they 
 should discredit the intellectual leaders who promised 
 them all things if they would only '* carry on" till peace. 
 The best description I know of the mood of the average 
 man today — and I mean of all countries — is to be found, 
 strikingly enough in a prophetic paragraph by Mr. J. A. 
 Hobson, written a full year before the armistice itself. 
 He says : 
 
 *'The temper of the peoples, released from the tension 
 of war, will be irritable and suspicious, and this irri- 
 tability and suspicion, copiously fed by stories of 
 governmental incompetence and capitalistic greed in the 
 conduct of the war, and sharpened by personal sacrifices 
 and privations, wdll be dangerous for governments. The 
 contrast between the liberties for which they were fight- 
 ing and the new restraints to which they are subjected 
 will be disconcerting and instructive. Every trade and 
 
 tributed, no one would take any interest in the matter. Sucli is the feeling 
 of the people." From a letter from Vienna, published in the New York 
 Globe, September 24, 1919.
 
 LEADERSHIP 11)9 
 
 every locality will have its special difficulties and 
 grievances. Economic and financial troubles will every- 
 where break up the artificial national unity of war-time, 
 and the grave political cleavages that must display 
 themselves when the issues of taxation, permanent con- 
 scription. State ownership of industries, imperial federa- 
 tion and international relations open out, will, by break- 
 ing the old moulds of party, set free large volumes of 
 political energy for new experiments in political and 
 economic reconstruction. Many of the old taboos of class 
 prestige, sex distinction, sanctity of property, and settled 
 modes of living and of thinking, will be broken for large 
 sections of the population. The returning armies will 
 carry back into their homes and industries powerful re- 
 actions against militarism and w^ill not be disposed to 
 take lying down the attempt of the reactionists to incor- 
 porate it as a fixed institution in the State. In every 
 oountry of Europe" — and it is true of us, is it not? — 
 ''popular discontent will be seething and suspicions 
 against rulers gathering. In other words, all the factors 
 of violent or pacific revolution will exist in conscious 
 activity. ' '* 
 
 In my first chapter I said that hardly ever in history 
 had the spirit of militarism been so rampant, and it 
 might seem inconsistent to stress so strongly the reaction 
 of the average man against all the shibboleths of war 
 and against his former miUtary leaders. The incon- 
 sistency seems to me verbal rather than genuine. It is 
 quite true that for milUons the glamour of militarism 
 is broken. It is quite true that most of the larger nations 
 are infinitely war weary — Japan and America, of course, 
 less so than the others. It is quite true that many war- 
 
 * Democracy After The War. By J, A, Hobson, Macmillan, 1917. Page? 
 210 and 211.
 
 200 LIBERALISM IN AMEEICA 
 
 time military idols are discredited for good. It is quite 
 true that in many countries, especially those that suffered 
 defeat, purely nationalistic adventures have lost their 
 appeal. It is quite true that conscription, even if no 
 nation has formally repudiated it, is loathed as never be- 
 fore. It is quite true that the conviction that war on a 
 large scale does not pay has become rather popular. Yet 
 surveyed critically, these reactions are more or less 
 against the externals of war and are specifically directed 
 against the special phenomenon of wars between great 
 nations. What has happened is that the spirit of mili- 
 tarism, the philosophy of violence, has shifted its field 
 of apphcation from conflicts between nations to more 
 relevant and immediate industrial and economic conflicts. 
 No man in the world can tell what smouldering fires of 
 nationalistic passion are left in the hearts of hundreds 
 of thousands of peoples by this iniquitous treaty,* and 
 we do know that professional militarists the world over, 
 while gracefully retiring until the present reaction has 
 run its course, are still calculating upon these passions 
 to revive once more and restore them or their kind to 
 their previous position and power. They may be cal- 
 culating correctly or incorrectly ; prophecy here is futile. 
 But what we seem to be witnessing in the actual world 
 of today is the spreading out of the temper of militarism 
 to cover large sections of hitherto pacific people, and the 
 exhibition of that temper in the violent and intolerant 
 
 * * ' You hear little complaint of the treaty. It is accepted with a curious 
 combination of fatalism and conviction that it cannot endure. You find no 
 intention to resist it, simply a calm assumption that it cannot possibly be 
 executed. Nationalist papers deplore the 'absence of national self-con- 
 eciousness' which takes territorial amputations with such a shrug. The 
 only provision much discussed is that concerning coal." From a Berlin 
 letter by Lewis S. Gannett in The Nation (New York), for September 27, 
 1919. My ovni guess is considerable nationalistic feeling will revive with 
 the solution of the more pressing food and fuel shortafres. Many of ^ the 
 Baltic states, for instance, are suffering tremendously, yet the nationalistic 
 feeling is strong.
 
 LEADERSHIP 201 
 
 Bolution of problems previously believed susceptible of 
 peaceful solution. The four years of war have hardened 
 people to the method of achieving ends by force and 
 threats of force. The violence hitherto associated with 
 international imperialism has been incorporated in more 
 immediate domestic problems. When the union officials 
 conducting the steel strike say ''We will tie up the entire 
 country before we lose this strike," and the corporation 
 officials retort ''We will shut down every mill and stop 
 the entire industry before we yield," it may not be mili- 
 tarism is shining armor but it is militarism none the 
 less. 
 
 What this shift in popular temper has meant for lead- 
 ership is a change so profound that it is not surprising 
 that the surviving leaders in power, who were also 
 leaders during the war, do not comprehend their present 
 almost complete failure to achieve popular confidence. 
 On his recent trip, judging from the rasping tone of his 
 later speeches, it is obvious that President Wilson would 
 not allow himself to reahze what had happened to him — 
 namely, that the masses no longer took what he said 
 seriously. And it has not happened to him alone. In 
 England the vast majority of working men and women 
 no longer even pay attention to the promises of Lloyd 
 George ; in France, the peasants and laborers regard the 
 antics in the Chamber with something akin to disgust;* 
 in Italy, the prima donna among nations, cabinet mem- 
 bers no longer lead the people but are amusingly and 
 determinedly led around by them. The intellectuals, after 
 the disastrous mess of predictions made by them during 
 the war, everywhere receive scant courtesy. The press, 
 
 ***I find every-where this contempt for politicians. France shrugs its 
 shoulders at them all and says: 'It is a game, it has no reality.' " Corre- 
 spondence of Philip Gibbs. Quoted from the New York Times, September
 
 202 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 for all its tremendous power, has lost the primary asset 
 it possessed during the war of being able to exploit the 
 patriotic motive. It can still, and still does, color facts 
 and thereby wield an influence over people of which they 
 are not aware. But its editorial opinions have lost all 
 guiding power — we had a pretty illustration of that in 
 New York City during the recent mayoralty campaign — 
 and even its news items are being subjected to an ever- 
 increasing skepticism. The Church, as I shall try to 
 show in my next chapter, has come out somewhat better 
 than almost any other popular institution, but very few 
 and far between are the individual ministers who have 
 the complete public confidence of their community. Even 
 labor union officials, who of all people might have con- 
 sidered themselves exempt, are discovering that their 
 own rank and file are more and more tending to repudiate 
 them and their leadership, until some of them must be^n 
 to wonder if the pessimistic Professor Nicolai of Berlin 
 was right when he said, *' Leaders don't count any more. 
 It is only the mass.'' 
 
 Where then has popular confidence gone? What new 
 type of leadership has emerged to take the place of the 
 old? It is a difficult question to answer, for when we 
 look at the actual conditions around us most of the move- 
 ments of popular strength seem almost literally to be 
 leaderless ; strikes seem to take place not so much because 
 of leaders] Ip as in spite of it, and they all have the 
 character of spontaneous mass movements; opinions 
 form and dominate the tone of social assumptions for 
 a few weeks or months, gradually give way to new 
 opinions, without any of them being easily traceable to 
 specific leaders. But as we look closer I believe we can 
 see that this seeming disappearance of leadership is the 
 result of trying to think in too wide social units. Leader-
 
 LEADERSHIP 203 
 
 ship has not so much disappeared as it has split up ; in- 
 stead of the few great leaders of a decade ago who could 
 sweep the majority of the country by personal appeal, 
 we now have thousands of leaders of smaller units. The 
 prolonged habit of thinking in terms of the nation, 
 which was to a certain extent forced upon all of us dur- 
 ing the war (indeed, to think in terms of the world), has 
 necessarily been a strain upon the average mind, whose 
 interests and habits of thought customarily move in a 
 narrower sphere. Men instinctively have huddled back 
 to their smaller, local groups where their own personal 
 interests had legitimate claims — to their local union, to 
 their club, to their special ward in the city, to their own 
 class or sect paper. And it is the leader in that union, 
 the acquaintance in that club, the home politician in that 
 ward, the almost personal friend who writes the editorials 
 in that class or sect paper, who can most effectively rep- 
 resent their immediate needs and interests — there you 
 find the leaders of today. Of course the older type of 
 leader who had a wide popular range of appeal still 
 exists, but the leadership that initiates those movements, 
 which in the beginning are so small and unrelated and in 
 the aggregate so massive and far-reaching, the leader- 
 ship that represents the vital centre of gravity in the 
 progress of actual events, such effective leadership, it 
 seems to me, is to be found increasingly in the small 
 group. 
 
 In all likelihood, however, this apparent submergence 
 of a few large-scale leaders by many small-scale leaders 
 is only temporary. As immediate pressing grievances 
 are satisfied the margin of the average man's interest 
 for participation in national, and ultimately interna- 
 tional, affairs will increase. As Mr. Hol)son has said, 
 ''Every trade and every locality will have its special
 
 204 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 difficulties and grievances.'* Until the reaction against 
 the artificial national unity of war-time has run its course, 
 the social scene will exhibit numerous small groups and 
 economic cliques with a striking resemblance to a collec- 
 tion of infinitely repellant particles. There will be a 
 period of countless petty disagreements and squabbles, 
 most of them indulged in with little or no thought of the 
 common advantage. It will be a period of ''special in- 
 terests" with a vengeance. (Police strikes are an excel- 
 lent example of what I mean.) Yet as the local grievances 
 are settled directly, or as the incidence of their solution 
 is seen to be national rather than local, the old type of 
 leadership will tend to come back into its own, the old 
 type, I mean, in the sense of its range, for the quafity of 
 all leadership, small or large, has been permanently 
 altered by the experiences of the war. 
 
 What is the quality of this new leadership, so intense 
 and direct, so scornful of the time-honored demagogic 
 tricks? Instinctively we think of Lenin, I suppose, and 
 although he is himself reported to be a man of great 
 personal charm and wit, from this distance the quality 
 of his leadership has about it something dry, and hard, 
 and uncompromising, and without humor. It is never 
 rhetorical or gracious. His speeches have none of the 
 rhetorical spleen of Trotsky's or none even of the pas- 
 sionate vibrancy of those of Ramsay MacDonald or Lieb- 
 knecht. They are compact and logical. They appeal to 
 the facts. They are astonishingly impersonal — and 
 here, perhaps, we have a clue to their tremendous driving 
 power, for nothing in a speech pleases the average man 
 today so much as the conviction that what is being told 
 him is absolutely divorced from any question of personal 
 advantage for the speech-maker. The leader who can 
 today get up before a popular audience and make it feel
 
 LEADERSHIP 205 
 
 that in what he is saying there is no arriere pensee look- 
 ing towards personal ambition, can be sure of his audi- 
 ence's respect and attention. ** Spellbinding" of the old 
 Texan orator type has little place in a world where men 
 have been taught through the suffering and disillusions 
 of four years to ask what every proposition means in 
 terms of material comfort and human happiness. Any 
 public speaker mil tell you that popular audiences are 
 more critical and alert than before the war; his hearers 
 are not afraid to heckle and at times mil not hesitate to 
 disagree. All over the world men were led to entertain 
 high hopes for freedom and justice by the magic of Presi- 
 dent "Wilson's rhetoric. Probably nothing in history has 
 contributed more to making them skeptical of mere fine 
 words than the studied fashion in which what Wilson so 
 generously promised proved, on the test of events, to be 
 oftenest the exact opposite. 
 
 Indeed this reaction, healthy enough in itself, has al- 
 ready gone too far. For one Lenin, with his ability and 
 economic and historical training, there are hundreds of 
 petty irascibles, who, if they avoid flights of rhetoric, 
 are not afraid of generous splurges of vulgarity. They 
 preach facts and stick to what men can understand, but 
 they sometimes are not above appeals to the baser pas- 
 sions of greed and class hatred (and, for that matter, 
 neither are the capitalistic orators on their own part). 
 They have no cultural background — they would laugh 
 at it — and they seldom see their problems in larger 
 terms than those of immediate material advantage. They 
 have no concept about society as a whole and their in- 
 fluence hardly tends to interest their followers in any 
 such intangible ideas. When one of the leaders of the 
 curious Interborough Rapid Transit strike boasted that 
 the men would make "Red Mike" walk across the
 
 206 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 bridge, he made an instantaneous hit \\dth the rank and 
 file. I doubt if he would have made the same hit had 
 he talked of social justice. 
 
 In spite of all this, earlier in this chapter I ventured 
 to say that there were indications that leadership with 
 something of the older moral authority and quality had 
 not become obsolete even today. I preferred to delay 
 my defense of that statement until the force and direc- 
 tion of the response to war-weariness and the carrying 
 over of the violence technique from formal war to formal 
 peace, which I hastily sketched above, had been recorded. 
 For even granted that moral leadership revives, it will 
 never be quite of the same complexion as the old. It will 
 be much nearer to men and to their deepest passions and 
 needs. It will have little remote abstractness about it. 
 It will be realistic in a very definitely definable sense. It 
 will be more relevant to the facts of Hfe as they are. 
 It will have more earth in it. It will be more fearless ; it 
 will not shrink from committing itself to specific and 
 radical economic experiments, for it will not be under 
 the necessity of partisanship. 
 
 If tliis new type of moral leadership is not to develop 
 solely out of the rank and file, if the intellectuals are to 
 have any voice or influence in it, as by all odds they ought, 
 our college professors, our young university men, our 
 publicists and editors, will have to take a severe lesson 
 in humility. First of all, they ^vill have to live down the 
 discredit they have brought upon themselves by their 
 activities during the war. They will have to break en- 
 tirely with that American tradition, dating from Emer- 
 son's time, of the isolation of scholars from affairs. They 
 will have to rid themselves of that subtle class snobbish- 
 ness, which finds no better expression than in the patron- 
 izing tone of so many professors when they write
 
 LEADERSHIP 207 
 
 *'down" to the public in an attempt to popularize knowl- 
 edge. They will not merely have to go in to the rank 
 and file ; they must become spiritually a part of it. In 
 a word, they must become not merely verbal but genuine 
 democrats. 
 
 That leadership wdth moral authority will revive can 
 hardly be doubted when we think of thousands of young 
 men sleeping in France, of whom Dean Inge of St. Paul 's 
 said so bitterly, *'We must hope that in the paradise of 
 brave men the knowledge is mercifully hidden from them, 
 that they died in vain." For if the idealistic ends for 
 which so many sincerely believed they w^re giving their 
 hves were not attained, they did put to shame the skeptics 
 who had told us that men had forgotten how to be brave 
 for causes no greater than their bellies. As we have 
 seen, the revelation of the duplicity of governments and 
 political leaders has brought about a profound reaction 
 and men seemed never so skeptical as today of merely 
 moral causes. But that impulse has been only scotched 
 not killed. Even in America we can see it again express- 
 ing itself, slowly and haltingly, to be sure, a little shame- 
 faced, as if it did not want to be discovered. As I write, 
 it is impossible to tell what the Senate will do with the 
 treaty, but whether it ratifies it or not, the growing 
 articulate disgust with some of its patent injustices has 
 been remarkable. Mixed with that moral revulsion of 
 feeling are partisan motives, the bitternesses of German- 
 Americans, the anger of American representatives of the 
 various suppressed races that received no attention at 
 the peace conference (the Irish especially), the personal 
 hatreds of "Wilson, the desire of the radicals to see the 
 whole thing discredited, and so on. Nevertheless the 
 half-conscious wish of the mass of the people to do the 
 just and decent thing is there, and the response of large
 
 208 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 sections of the country to the appeals of Knox and John- 
 son has been nothing kss than remarkable. 
 
 If we turn from the purely political to the industrial 
 world, the prospects for the future are even more hopeful. 
 At the very time the rank and file in many unions are 
 turning with impatience and disgust from their older 
 type of leader, in many other unions and agrarian or- 
 ganizations a distinctly new and better type of leader is 
 emerging. This new type of leader can be sharply dif- 
 ferentiated from either the old uncannily skilful organ- 
 izer, like Mr. Gompers, or the fighting man, like William 
 Z. Foster, who is said to be the real ''brains'* behind 
 the steel strike. In the proposals of the railway brother- 
 hoods, commonly known as the Plumb plan, and in the 
 scheme of nationalization of mines set forth by the 
 miners' unions, the emphasis is not upon increased wages 
 and the accent is no longer the accent of inevitable con- 
 flict between capital and labor. Both the emphasis and 
 the tone of the proposals reflect a new thing, the desire 
 of the workers for industrial responsibility in coopera- 
 tion with the government. "A distinct change has come 
 in the type of leadership which the local unions now 
 seek. In conditions of conflict between the employees 
 and employers, the unions inevitably sought aggressive 
 leaders, good fighters ; now the requirements of success- 
 ful leadership are distinctly different, and the first re- 
 quirement is ability as an intelligent producing work- 
 man. . . . It is the change on the part of the employee 
 from a unit in an organization primarily militant to a 
 unit in an organization primarily productive."* The 
 importance of this can hardly be overestimated, for 
 it shows that the bugaboo of scientific management is 
 
 *From article on employees' control in the Nation (New York) for 
 September 13, 1919.
 
 LEADERSHIP 209 
 
 only a bugaboo until the workers themselves are given 
 the responsibility for and direct pecuniary interest in 
 increased production. Furthermore, it reveals that the 
 decay of the craftsmanship spirit, more or less inevitable 
 in the development of large-scale industry, can easily be 
 offset by the rise in the professional spirit of technical 
 efficiency and smooth-working organization. It reveals, 
 once the economic basis is readjusted, a common meeting- 
 place for science and labor of hand and brain, and points 
 the way for a coalition between the university and the 
 industrial world, now more than ever dependent upon 
 the researches of scholars. In a man like A. C. Townley, 
 head of the Non-Partisan League of Farmers in the 
 North West, we see not only a man who "has come up 
 from the ranks" and one who has the necessary gift of 
 eloquence, but also a man with definite and respectable 
 economic and social theories as well as a vivid sense of 
 the relevancy of scientific methods to agrarian problems. 
 Furthermore, purely economic factors are working to 
 bring about a kind of fusion between the "intellectuals" 
 and the wage-earner and farmer. It is doubtful if even 
 increased subsidy from the ruling classes will be sufficient 
 to keep the level of salary as high for the rank and file 
 of teachers and professors as for the skilled workingman 
 in a highly organized union, and inevitably the unioniza- 
 tion of teachers must follow with the necessary conse- 
 quences of separation in interest from the ruling class 
 (towards whom they are now more or less in the position 
 of charity receivers) and increased sympathy for the 
 laborers. This transformation mil not be confined to the 
 formal intellectuals but also to clerks, doctors, actors (as 
 we have already seen), newspaper writers (and again a, 
 movement has been started in that direction, with an 
 inevitable result that reports of strikes and so on will
 
 210 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 be fairer), even preachers, and perhaps small shopmen — 
 in brief, the despised "middle class" which both in peace 
 and in war has to suffer depredations from aggressive 
 labor on one side and aggressive capital on the other. 
 Without imaginative prophecy, it is possible and sensible 
 to look forward to a new type of leadership in our 
 branches of economic life less demagogic, more disci- 
 plined, more ** intellectual" than the old. With the 
 spreading of university *' extension" work in America, 
 comparable to the workers' universities in England, with 
 the increase in leisure from shorter hours coupled with 
 the perpetual hunger of the masses for more knowledge 
 (a hunger which it is hard for the normal American, I 
 think, even to comprehend; the kind of desperate pathetic 
 hunger we have seen in the proletariat in Russia, and as 
 one can see in the self-supporting night-schools of our 
 own **mill" towns), we shall witness some rehabilitation 
 of the claims of culture in life, at present discredited in 
 popular eyes only because these claims have been the 
 property of a single class and have been used by them 
 exploitatively in class interest. Against these tendencies 
 making towards the emergence of a new liberal, more 
 disciplined and scientific, more morally authoritative 
 leadership will be arrayed all the closely organized forces 
 of reaction which will try to defend themselves by dis- 
 guising their class interests in appeals to greed, to patri- 
 otism, to vanity, and to national pride. They will dis- 
 guise imperialism in terms of national greatness, indus- 
 trial tyranny in terms of individual liberty, economic ex- 
 periment in terms of anarchy and ** Bolshevism." That 
 the leaders who will defend reaction's class interests by 
 these specious pleas will have the strategic advantage of 
 governmental patronage, financial full support, all the 
 great weapons of publicity, goes without saying. Against
 
 LEADERSHIP 211 
 
 them tbey will have the unescapable facts. They may 
 succeed temporarily far enough to plunge us into another 
 great war which may go to the extent of practically de- 
 stroying Western civilization as we have known it; on 
 the other hand, they may be beaten to it and overthrown 
 before then by the forces of democracy. But that they 
 will ultimately prevail in their attempts to kill this new 
 emerging type of leadership so inimical to their own — 
 it is inconceivable. We know that the ultimate future 
 has no place for them and that spiritually they are 
 already dead.
 
 CHAPTER TEN 
 
 THE FUTURE 
 
 "There must te a real peace between the nations. The word recon- 
 ciliation has to be writ large on our sMes. Our hearts have to be 
 emptied of all bitterness and hatred, and the memories of war atrocities 
 should not harden our hearts against the revival of a new international 
 life. . . . 
 
 "The old world is dying around us; let it also die in us. Once more 
 in the history of the hum-an race we hear the great creative Spirit 
 utter those tremendous words, 'Behold, I mofce all things new.' Old 
 ideas of wealth, of property, of class and social relations, of inter- 
 national relations, of moral and spiritual values are rapidly changing. 
 The old political formulas sound hollow, the old landmarlcs by which 
 we used to steer are disappearing beneath a great flood. The furnace 
 through which we have passed has melted the hard crust of our life, 
 and the old fixities and certainties are fluid once more. . . . 
 
 "Let us work for a better, Jiappier world to arise from this fluid 
 mass. Let us move forward with courage and in faith and let us not 
 fall back into the hopeless enmities, the sterile and blasting bitterness 
 of the past. ' ' — General Smuts. 
 
 WILL the spirit of these generous words find ex- 
 pression in our America of the present and im- 
 mediate future? They represent a tolerant and liberal 
 temper for the community to attain which must be the 
 ultimate goal of all men of good will. But when we 
 survey the contemporary American scene, with its emer- 
 ging economic bitternesses and its rapidly increasing 
 race war, the appeal of General Smuts becomes slightly 
 ironical. It is difficult to pick up our morning newspaper 
 and not become dubious of any peaceful and temperate 
 solution of the many problems of readjustment confront- 
 ing us. When we witness the intransigeance of a captain 
 of industry like Judge Gary, the open denial of common 
 civil rights in Pennsylvania, the placing of an industrial 
 
 212
 
 THE FUTUREv 213 
 
 city under martial law because there happens to be a 
 strike in that city, the confirmation of war-time Espion- 
 age sentences by the Supreme Court months after the 
 armistice, the growing reactionism of the Republican and 
 Democratic parties, the espousal of this humbug League 
 of Nations by leaders of the Church and business men 
 and college presidents like President Lowell of Harvard, 
 the language of the government in its dealings with 
 striking ferrymen (an almost word for word duplication 
 of the language used by Lloyd George towards the strik- 
 ing railwaymen of Great Britain), the enforcement of the 
 Slater Bill for military training in New York State and 
 the propaganda for universal service, the frank im- 
 perialism of those who are interested in oil properties 
 in Mexico, the indifference of the countrj^ to our blockade 
 of Soviet Russia, a blockade which is starving millions of 
 innocent women and children, the daily quota of lynch- 
 ings from all parts of the country and not merely the 
 South — when we witness all these things it seems that 
 only the inveterate American optimism could fail to con- 
 clude that we are facing if not a conscious revolution 
 (and in one sense that revolution is already here) at least 
 a decade of strife and economic conflict. The plain truth 
 of our war to make the world safe for democracy is that 
 today there is less freedom of speech and right of assem- 
 blage, less tolerance, more governmental control over 
 political and economic opinion, less liberty for teachers 
 and college professors, more reaction and militarism than 
 was the case the day we declared war on Germany. The 
 worst features of the pathologj^ of war-time have to a 
 certain extent vanished, but the terror of the tories is 
 greater than before the war and instead of learning some 
 of the war's obvious lessons they are running true to 
 form and in every way possible through the government,
 
 214 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 the pres3, and the school, attempting to maintain the 
 status quo and to throttle the emerging forces of democ- 
 racy. They at all events are not letting the old world 
 die in them; instead they are clinging with almost 
 pathetic desperation to its worst features. Furthermore, 
 because of their strategic position they can exercise a 
 power and influence out of all proportion to their num- 
 bers, and in view of the intense natural conservatism of 
 the average man, the prediction that they will be over- 
 thrown only by violence becomes tragically plausible. 
 
 Now I may as well state frankly in the beginning that 
 I consider the prospects for our getting through the im- 
 pending social revolution without widespread violence 
 extremely dubious. We have seen how impotent liberal- 
 ism was in its control of events during the war; and to 
 date we have not witnessed any clear victory of liberal 
 principles as opposed to reactionary and imperialistic 
 principles in a single Western industrialized nation. 
 Even in England, the home of compromise and political 
 good sense, it is much too early to predict the course of 
 events, for as the tories correctly point out, granted a 
 Labor Government duly elected by parliamentary meth- 
 ods of the ballot, Labor in opposition is an entirely differ- 
 ent proposition from Labor in power and there is no 
 guarantee that its constructive administrative ability 
 will equal its destructive critical ability. Nor has the 
 power of the government with its army and its middle 
 class supporters, should the issue frankly come to direct 
 action, been really tested ; there might be civil war, and 
 it is not at all certain that the so-called forces of law 
 and order might not win, which would merely postpone 
 and render incredibly more bitter the ultimate outcome, 
 as we can see, for instance, in Germany. It is merely 
 sentimentalism to believe that the powers in control will
 
 THE P^UTURE 215 
 
 accept the mandate of a country, even when democrat- 
 ically and peaceably expressed by the ballot, without a 
 fight ; for the whole history of the war has shown us that 
 those who profit by the present system will not surrender 
 as long as by fair means or foul they can muster a man 
 or a bayonet. And when we consider our own country 
 the prospect of persuading our reactionaries to give up 
 power by rational argument is even less promising than 
 in the case of the reactionaries of Europe, who after all 
 are more flexible and intelligent. As the phrase has it, 
 our American tories never learn and never forget. To 
 attempt to convince them seems to me for liberalism a 
 futile task. The energy expended brings no proportion- 
 ate returns, as we have had clearly proved during the 
 war when the liberals' flirting with governments and the 
 leaders of finance and affairs brought only disillusion. 
 And in time of war, let us remember, men are ready to 
 make sacrifices previously considered absurd and to think 
 as never before in terms of the common national good — 
 if liberals had so little influence then, is it reasonable to 
 suppose they will have more now, when the forces of 
 greed are again unleashed! 
 
 What is the task of liberals, then, in the face of this 
 impending conflict! There is a preliminary considera- 
 tion before this question can be answered- Although I 
 beUeve the contemporary facts point to a violent rather 
 than a peaceful conflict, there is no intrinsic necessity 
 for the conflict's being violent. Just because such con- 
 flicts in the past have usually been violent, just because 
 nations have persistently refused to learn from each 
 other's mistakes, is no indubitable indication that such 
 will be the case in the future. The issue is still open. 
 We do not yet know if it is possible to go through a 
 fundamental economic readjustment without bloodshed.
 
 216 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 We liave not yet tested to their uttermost the institutions 
 and agencies of peaceful mediation which we have in- 
 herited. It may be as practical, as it certainly is rational, 
 to reconstruct our economic and social relations in the 
 spirit of liberal accommodation. 
 
 Such being a legitimate hope, if even, perhaps, a for- 
 lorn one, the primary task of liberalism is the attempt 
 to make that hope come true. Not much will be accom- 
 plished, in my opinion, by trying to make the reaction- 
 aries gracefully yield up their power, and it -vvill probably 
 be found more expedient to concentrate attention upon 
 those who are gradually acquiring leadership. The new 
 quality of this emerging leadership I suggested in my 
 last chapter, and to the liberal this new leadership ex- 
 tends even more invitations for aid than did the old. It 
 is crude, but it is dependent upon the expert and the 
 scientist for the background of its theoretical ideas — a 
 dependency it is eager to acknowledge. Consequently the 
 liberal does not have to fear that in accepting the new 
 leadership's invitation to cooperation he is under any 
 necessity to patronize or '' popularize" knowledge. That 
 has been a fatal class mistake in the past. On the con- 
 trary, he is asked to contribute the very best objective 
 knowledge he has and the emphasis is upon greater 
 rather than less scientific rigor. In the Plumb plan for 
 railroad control and management, in the miners* demand 
 for nationalization, in the agrarian and economic prob- 
 lems of the farmer members of the Non-Partisan League, 
 the need for expert advice and scientific information is 
 obvious. What is perhaps not so obvious is that such 
 advice is welcomed. 
 
 There are agencies through which to work other than 
 by the contribution of scientific and special knowledge to 
 the new leadership. Organizations of various liberal as-
 
 THE FUTURE 217 
 
 pects do exist — several of the larger labor unions (and 
 in New York and other States an actual labor party), 
 groups with genuine good will, such as the Committee of 
 48, the more constructive and less doctrinaire sections of 
 the Sociahst Party, the Non-Partisan League itself. 
 Many of the churches have presented programmes — the 
 CathoUc Church, in particular, has recommended a lib- 
 eral attitude towards economic problems — which in their 
 general features deserve the encouragement if not always 
 of adoption, at all events of discussion. The liberal can- 
 not neglect a single ally. For allying oneself with these 
 and other organizations — not in the sense of formal 
 allegiance, but sympathetically in the sense of encourage- 
 ment and discriminating support, that is, of support of 
 different features of all of them — is only an indirect 
 method of the larger primary task of the liberal, the 
 spreading and popularization of knowledge and the 
 breaking up of old concepts into new and fertile ones. 
 
 This larger primary task can also of course be under- 
 taken directly. There are hundreds of doctrines current 
 today to which the affections and passions of millions 
 of men are attached. Yet in most cases the causes of 
 their being held are irrational and impulsive, the result 
 of blind prejudice and chance — no new condition per- 
 haps in the history of civilization. Among those most 
 current today are Conservatism, roughly the creed of 
 things as they are and concerned for the most part with 
 the preservation of the conventional rights of property, 
 Trade Unionism, Parliamentiarism, Socialism, Syndical- 
 ism, Guild Socialism, which to Bertrand Russell* offers 
 the best compromise between the ricridity of State Social- 
 ism and the untempered individualistic liberty of an- 
 archism, "Bolshevism," in the sense of advocacy of the 
 
 • Proposed Eoads To Freedom. By Bertrand Russell. Holt ; 1919.
 
 218 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 Soviet form of government, Communism, and so on. (It 
 will be noticed that I do not include Liberalism in this 
 list; consistently throughout this book I have attempted 
 to make Liberalism mean not a body of specific beliefs 
 or a particular creed, but an attitude and a temper and 
 an approach to all beliefs and creeds equally.) All these 
 doctrines are described by their defendants as ** proposed 
 roads to freedom," which is obviously impossible since 
 many of them are inconsistent with, each other. Here 
 again the liberal's task is clear — to define, explain, ex- 
 amine, expound, and popularize, the old, old task of 
 spreading knowledge. In this task alone liberals will 
 find a release for a considerable part of their good will 
 impulses. 
 
 At this point I wish to go back again to the objection 
 to liberalism of Mr. Max Eastman to which I referred 
 in my first chapter. The objection is that liberalism, in 
 a world of action such as we are living in today, is a 
 doctrine of impotence ; one is committed to taking sides ; 
 one has to act; mere assessment and the spreading of 
 objective knowledge and the advocacy of a tolerant tem- 
 per, well enough in themselves, are not sufficient — are, 
 indeed, unimportant compared with the immediate neces- 
 sity confronting us of throwing ourselves into the con- 
 temporary struggles of the day. This seems to me a mis- 
 conception. One may recognize elements of value in all 
 the doctrines I listed above; personally I think all of 
 them, and many others, do contribute. I am sorry that 
 I cannot be partisan enough to say that any one of them 
 completely satisfies me ; I do not believe that the hope of 
 the world is in Bolshevisim or Conservatism or Socialism 
 or in any other narrow and highly formulated economic 
 or social or political creed. I suppose it is fundamentally 
 this attitude which irritates Mr. Eastman — who, if he is
 
 THE FUTURE 219 
 
 advocating only his own special brand of class conflict, 
 is still typical of millions of others with different pana- 
 ceas, which they are only unable to expound as per- 
 suasively as he can his — because he cannot classify the 
 liberal. He cannot, to use a Shakespearian phrase, say» 
 * ' Sir, I take you ^\^th me. ' ' Yet as I have said before the 
 liberal attitude does not inhibit action nor the taking of 
 sides when issues arise — it is an appeal to reason, to a 
 flexible assessment rather than an a priori one of all 
 issues. I admit it is a somewhat slower method of action 
 than the impulsive directness of the doctrinaire who 
 knows how he is going to meet every situation even 
 before it happens; and, of course, it is an exceedingly 
 difficult method. It is, however, fundamentally a method 
 and in no human sense a counsel of withdrawal or of 
 refusal to take part in practical affairs simply because 
 they are muddy and not as carefully defined as the 
 meticulous scientific intelligence might ask. 
 
 Possibly putting this whole discussion into a different 
 field will clarify the point. In medicine, for example, the 
 great doctor — let us say the tuberculosis specialist — is 
 hardly a doctrinaire or a ''party" man about the cure. 
 To be so, is merely to be a faddist. He does not, of 
 course, fail to operate, to advise, to administer, simply 
 because each new patient presents a new specific problem 
 and because he knows that next week a new biological 
 discovery may be made which will revolutionize the whole 
 treatment of the disease. We may say he acts on what 
 knowledge he has, without prejudice, and on the basis 
 of rational possibilities and his empirical experience. 
 His attitude towards the problems of his profession is 
 precisely what I mean by the liberal attitude towards 
 thf> more general social problems of community and indi- 
 vidual life. In the first instance, it is absurd to say that
 
 220 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 because he will not admit that the last word on tuber- 
 culosis has been said, because the facts and theories are 
 constantly changing, action is inhibited. It is equally 
 absurd in the second. 
 
 What ground for hope is there that the liberal by co- 
 operatmg with new leadership, by working indirectly 
 through organizations whenever possible and directly by 
 the creating of new knowledge and the spreading of old, 
 may divert the impending social revolution into rational, 
 peaceable channels? I have frankly stated above why I 
 consider the prospect dubious. Yet there is an optimistic 
 possibility which ought not to be overlooked. Exactly 
 what on the surface might seem discouraging can itself 
 be legitimately made the very ground for hope — I mean 
 the fact that the passions and activities of men can so 
 quickly and easily be mobilized back of feeble shibbo- 
 leths (the phenomenon we saw in the war) suggests that 
 these passions and activities can be attached more per- 
 manently to real ends. In America especially, with its 
 uniformity of opinion, its hatred of any doctrine of isola- 
 tion, one can fancy what might happen if for two months 
 a small but determined minority had control of all the 
 organs of public opinion, the moving-picture houses, and 
 the public speakers either in the church and school or on 
 the secular platform. Ideas which today are accepted 
 without protest simply because everyone else is accepting 
 them might become unpopular over-night. Sentiments 
 which today are hissed might as easily become those 
 which are applauded. I am not suggesting this as^ a 
 programme, of course; no minority, however high its 
 ideals and intentions, could be trusted with such power. 
 But merely imagining it conveys something of the new 
 flexibility of the popular mind, which the wide stretih 
 of intercommunication and printing and cables and wire-
 
 THE FUTURE 221 
 
 less have made so characteristic of the modern world. 
 Ideas today can spread with a rapidity never known 
 before ; indeed, the struggle of those in control by censor- 
 ship, manipulation of false emotions, flattery, plain lying, 
 subsidizing of the press to prevent new ideas from 
 spreading seems pathetically mediaeval. And the liberal 
 philosophy of life, which appeals to the fundamental good 
 sense and impulse for fair play in most men, stands as 
 good a chance as a-ny other philosophy of becoming wide- 
 spread and popular. We focus too much of our attention 
 upon the ostensible rulers of men.* It is they who today 
 seem impervious to new concepts ; great masses of ordi- 
 nary men the world over are upset and disturbed; the 
 old world, quite literally, is dying in them. Whether in 
 this period of conscious reconstruction the popular winds 
 of doctrine can be made to blow steadily towards the lib- 
 eral quarter. I do not know. Nor does anyone else. I 
 am skeptical, but I believe it is the liberal's first duty to 
 do all that he can to make this come true. That is his 
 primary task today, if not his more permanent one, the 
 task of attempting to make the impending social revolu- 
 tion peaceable. 
 
 Well, supposing the economic readjustment we are 
 
 •Compare General Smut's speech quoted at the head of this chapter 
 mth these remarks by Secretary of War Baker at Cleveland, October 15: 
 "Now our national problem, the problem to -which every man and woman 
 must help, is to keep our balance; it is not to yield to weary nerves, not 
 to lend ourselves to siren voices ... to realize that America more than 
 ever, and more than any other nation in the world, is called upon to set 
 an example of the kind of steadiness and order which traditional civilization 
 of our Icind ought to assure. . . . It is our duty not to allow the sus- 
 picion to exist in anybody's mind that we have lost faith, even for a 
 moment, in war weariness, or that we have lost faith in the virility and 
 vi^or and vitality of those principles." (The old ones of the 18th cen- 
 tury.) "It is our duty in our daily comings and goings, wherever we 
 happen to be, and in our casual talks with our friends and neighbors, to 
 proclaim our faith in the ancient principles of democracy and a republican 
 form of institutions, in order that we may set an example of sta'bility and 
 order, and law and .iustice to the rest of the peoples of the world." Not 
 much "forward looking" psychology there!
 
 222 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 facing, in spite of every attempt to the contrary, does in 
 fact involve violence on a wide scale. Must we then say 
 that in this case, having failed in his primary task of 
 making revolution peaceable, the liberal ought to aban- 
 don his attempts at persuasion in favor of direct action 1 
 Again it seems to me the question itself involves a con- 
 fusion, although it is a question I most frequently hear 
 asked by radicals. The violence we have seen involved 
 in a revolution like that in Russia differs only in degree 
 from the violence which is involved m all nations at peace 
 under the present industnal and economic regime. Be- 
 cause in civil life one may find it imperative to resist 
 a highwayman by force does not in the least vitiate one's 
 belief that the conventional concepts of criminology are 
 upon a false basis ; and similarly in time of revolution, as 
 in time of war, the liberal has to settle, after examination 
 of the facts and his own conscience, whether one of the 
 two sides in an issue at dispute is worth fighting for. 
 Ordinaiy common sense will be as good a guide as any 
 in a time of extreme unsettlement. And as a matter of 
 fact it is really open to argument whether in the period of 
 future economic turmoil the honest liberal, who above all 
 things is free of definite class affiliations, will not have a 
 better chance to be effective than in the present period. 
 In the extreme case of Russia, for example, the experience 
 of Maxim Gorky is illuminating. He was bitterly op- 
 posed to the principles and practices of the Bolshevist 
 regime — and as far as I know still is theoretically — but 
 he was neither executed nor in fact molested, for after 
 all it was recognized that his opposition was in no covert 
 way connected with the activities of counter-revolution- 
 ary intriguers. It was open and above board, and it re- 
 lied for what converts it could make upon voluntary 
 persuasion. Later on, when the inexorable facts made
 
 THE FUTURE 223 
 
 clear that attacking the Bolshevist government, for what- 
 ever reason, meant the restoration of a worse reaction in 
 Russia, Gorky came out for practical support of the 
 Soviets, even while, as I said before, his theoretical op- 
 position to many of its principles remained intact. In- 
 deed the conflict between the hberal and the radical, from 
 the psychological point of view, can never be as severe 
 as that between the radical and the conservative or of 
 course between the radical with one theory and the rad- 
 ical with another. No intellectual enmity can be more 
 strong than that between the convinced State Socialist 
 on the one hand and the simon-pure syndicalist on the 
 other. Precisely because the liberal is not committed to 
 any particular doctrine he can never be an opponent in 
 the conventional sense. 
 
 In the above discussion I have constantly used the 
 phrase, **the primary task" of liberals, which I identi- 
 fied with the turning of social revolution into peaceable 
 channels, admitting that the liberals' chance of success 
 in the task was extremely slim. It is perhaps by assum- 
 ing that in any case the future holds in store considerable 
 \dolence and bloodshed that we can see more clearly 
 what is the permanent task of liberals. There are certain 
 great human heritages to maintain, not, as the conserva- 
 tive tends to think of them in terms of encrusted tradi- 
 tion, but of general social inheritance. Graham "Wallas 
 in a forthcoming book* will point out how if we were 
 suddenly to be robbed of all the features of this social 
 inheritance, if we were all to go back simultaneously to 
 the primitive state of man before the development of 
 language, a community like New York would probably 
 
 • On the general subject of social inheritance on which he is now giving 
 a series of lectures. I understand the book is to be published some time 
 in 1920, and ought to be Mr. Wallas 's most valuable contribution.
 
 224 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 not survive over three weeks. No one would know how 
 to use the telephone or the elaborate technical apparatus 
 upon which our transportation, lighting, and heat de- 
 pend; mobs would raid all the restaurants and stores 
 where food was stored. Through the ages has grown up 
 this fund of conunon knowledge, and its essential features 
 have survived the attacks of wars and pestilence and 
 revolution. Since the introduction of machinery and the 
 growth and complexity of modem science the range and 
 extent of that common social inheritance has of course 
 been tremendously broadened and intensified. It is an 
 inheritance loyalty to which is necessarily deeper and 
 more permanent than loyalty to any of of the modern 
 militaristic national States which so arrogantly claim our 
 undivided allegiance at the very time they are employing 
 the scientific features of that inheritance in a futile at- 
 tempt to destroy it. It is the one living force making for 
 internationalism today, for included in this inheritance 
 is the long record of conscious attempts by law and by 
 the widening of intra-State organizations of financiers, 
 scientists, and professional men and artists to make 
 peace between the nations permanent in terms of a com- 
 mon life of humanity that transcends them all. Through 
 whatever tumult and conflict are ahead of us the per- 
 manent task of liberalism is to keep alive the enduring 
 aspects of that inheritance by which we all live today. 
 It seems to me that the liberal of this particular post- 
 bellum era confronted by the dilemma of the current 
 skepticism of the State and the false pretensions of rep- 
 resentative government on the one hand, and the lack of 
 strong allegiance-provoking organizations through which 
 he can work for a common humanity on the other, will 
 find his salvation more and more in the smaller group 
 organizations that are international in scope because
 
 THE FUTURE 225 
 
 their range of interest is special and impersonal and 
 confined to a specific subject. ''The state, then, is not 
 an instrument adapted to international functions. Not 
 until honesty can be produced in a world of thieves will 
 peacedom be possible in a world of national states. To 
 place reliance upon current diplomatic, military, and gov- 
 ernmental agencies to create effective organs of inter- 
 national intercourse and control is to discount our politi- 
 cal hopes from the beginning and to put a premium on 
 disappointment. . . . We must employ, that is to say, 
 the great industrial, professional, and civic associations 
 deliberately to challenge the sovereignty of the state 
 when it steps outside its purely pacific and administrative 
 sphere. For in the growth of voluntary associations, 
 linking across frontiers, lies the possibility of diminish- 
 ing the strength of those compulsive military organiza- 
 tions which still, whether in isolation or in alliance, 
 threaten the peace of the world."* 
 
 * Quoted from an interesting article, ' ' Wardom And The State, ' ' by Mr. 
 Lewis Mumford in The Dial (New York), for October 4, 1919, an article 
 which well reflects the current disillusion with the State as we have known 
 it. The article suggests these two forms of voluntary international organi- 
 zation : 
 
 "These voluntary associations divide into two classes: those that have, 
 and those that do not have economic power. The second kind of associa- 
 tion was thriving before the war; it comprised the scientific societies with 
 international affiliations, the institutes of hygiene, medical research, and 
 town planning; and the purely professional associations like those of 
 lawyers, doctors, and so forth. The International Institute of Bibliography 
 at Brussels was naturally deposited by the current of world interests which 
 seemed visibly before 1914 to be bringing about a unity throughout western 
 civilization. With proper encouragement it may yet develop as a world 
 center for scholarly research — a clearing house for the intellectual trans- 
 actions of mankind. The great universities likewise, through their ex- 
 change professorships, were recovering some of that humane cosmopolitan- 
 ism which characterized them at their best during the Middle Ages. What 
 has been lacking so far is the definite and purposeful attempt to build up 
 a community in thought and purpose which shall run counter to the narrow, 
 partisan, incomplete, and ultimately military purposes of the national state. 
 
 "Associations for international contact and intercourse are necessary 
 in order to supply a favorable atmosphere in which the economic associa- 
 tions of the first type may function. Among the latter we may place the 
 national trade unions like the British Triple AUiance, interaational unions
 
 226 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 Tliat the liberal, however bitter the economic conflict, 
 will be aided in this task of keeping alive the great heri- 
 tages of knowledge and art by the common man and 
 woman seems to me could only be doubted by one who 
 is anti-democratic at heart. As we walk through the 
 streets of New York or Chicago or Boston and survey 
 the sodden, worried, greedy faces that hurry by us it 
 is easy to become pessimistic and to believe that nothing 
 can be done when human beings are so close to the 
 animals. But all of modern civilization, we might say, 
 compels us to put our worst materiahstic foot forward; 
 the competition, especially in big cities where it is a con- 
 stant temptation to judge human nature by its uprooted 
 products, is nerve-wracking; the opportunities for 
 watching people off their selfish guard are extremely 
 rare. Whatever the moral iniquity of the saloon, for 
 the sociologist it was a first-rate experiment station, one 
 of the few places left in a highly industrialized civiliza- 
 tion that had forgotten how to be religious in public 
 where one could watch human nature without its selfish 
 mask. And as the inhibitions slipped away, beneath all 
 the suppressed vulgarity and vanity then bubbUng on the 
 surface, the real qualities of men's dreams and desires 
 emerged: the Anti-Saloon Leaguer may not believe me, 
 but perhaps the psychologist will, when I say it was 
 astonishing how fundamentally decent these dreams were 
 — to do something **big" and unselfish, to become recog- 
 
 like the Amalgamated Ladies' Garment Workers, and consumers* associa- 
 tions of national range like the British and Eussian Cooperatives. Within 
 these several kinds of associations, with their deepening international aflSlia- 
 tions and their growing realization of power, lies the opportunity for a 
 truly federal world-organization which shall begin with the local production 
 or consumption unit and ramify outward in increasing disregard of formal 
 national boundaries. It is obvious that current national divisions are 
 inimical to functional economic adjustments. The national state is out 
 of joint with that Great Society whose frameAvork has been erected during 
 the past century."
 
 THE FUTURE 227 
 
 nized and admired in a profession (not usually that of 
 money-making either), to perform a public service. 
 There was the lust for power and the lust of the devil, 
 of course, but there was also a lust for creative service, 
 frustrated in everyday life by the hard circumstances of 
 a materialistic world. When we turn from the selfishness 
 of the street and dream-world of the saloon, where men 
 made their half -ashamed apology for that selfishness, to 
 workingmen's schools and self-supported lyceums, to 
 their many voluntary organizations for mutual benefit, 
 for reading-rooms, and for lecturers, the eagerness for 
 knowledge of what we patronizingly call the proletariat 
 seems almost pathetic. We have seen it empirically in 
 Russia under the Soviet regime; if those who talk so 
 glibly about " Americanization '^ would go to our night- 
 schools in industrial or mill towns they might learn there, 
 too, of its intensity. One gets a sense in these organiza- 
 tions and these schools of tremendous suppressed cre- 
 ative energy; one feels intuitively that among perhaps 
 the hundred or two hundred gathered together after the 
 day's work are men capable of acquiring responsibility, 
 of leadership, of scientific and intellectual development. 
 At the other end of the scale, to use the old class distinc- 
 tions, we find an increasing number of men and women 
 of good will glad to cooperate with this emerging major- 
 ity of wage-earners that is hungry not merely for better 
 economic circumstances but also for a richer spiritual 
 and creative life. Organizations like the Bureau of In- 
 dustrial Research and the new School for Social Service, 
 whatever their defects, are still an indication that co- 
 operation for the acquisition and spreading of knowledge 
 is possible between groups with different sets of assump- 
 tions. To be sure, the barriers between the privileged 
 and the wage-earner can be re-erected firmly if the cur-
 
 228 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 rent militaristic campaign should prove completely suc- 
 cessful, but the chances are it will not be a complete 
 success — as I write, even the American Legion has as 
 yet refused to commit itself definitely to universal mili- 
 tary service. It is not too sanguine to look forward to 
 increasing cooperation for common community ends be- 
 tween the intellectuals or college-bred and the wage- 
 earners, increasingly conscious of their power and with 
 increased leisure wherein to make that power effective. 
 This whole movement will be accentuated in America, of 
 course, by prohibition, for although the liberal has to 
 regard the movement as an unwarranted infringement 
 upon personal liberty, from the point of view of the 
 social revolutionist the movement could not have been 
 happier had the whole campaign been financed by Messrs. 
 Lenine ajid Trotsky themselves.* 
 
 There remains one more subject about the future of 
 which it is interesting to speculate, the subject of art. 
 From our experience of the last five years I think most 
 artists — and on this point they will be better judges 
 
 *An interesting account of the attitude towards science of the Soviet 
 Government is contained in Le Temps (Paris), quoting a speech by M. 
 Lallemand before the Paris Academy of Science. 
 
 "Institutions . . . new museums have been opened. The intellectual 
 center of Russia is the Academy of Science at Petrograd, which has now 
 taken charge of the museums, laboratories and faculties, A great Com- 
 mission has been started to study the natural resources and power of 
 Russia." 
 
 "Among the newly created institutions, M, Henri cites the Institute of 
 Chemistry; a Platinum Institute, where Russian scientists have succeeded 
 in discovering the secret process of separating platinum from iridium, 
 formerly held by the Germans; an institute of Building Materials; one 
 for the improvement of cattle breeds; another for the study of the soil 
 and fertilizers. Institutes for the study of radium, X-ray, theoretical and 
 applied optics, crystallography, hydrology and labor have been going on for 
 several months. The Petrograd Academy of Sciences has begun a series 
 of geodetical studies and has set out a plan for a magnetic map of Russia. 
 
 "Generally speaking," the report continues, "the Soviet Government 
 has treated scientists and scholars very liberally. It considers that science 
 has nothing to do with politics and has therefore granted all requests for 
 funds. Never has Russian science been so prosperous. ' '
 
 THE FUTURE 229 
 
 than anyone else — are now inclined to say that revolu- 
 tion, even a violent and bloody one, is far less inimical 
 to art than modern nationalistic wars, with their con- 
 comitants of blind destruction and, which is perhaps 
 worse, their seduction of the artist from his true task 
 of the search for beauty by false patriotism. Taste has 
 degenerated more under the passions of war-time than 
 under those of revolution; we witnessed in England and 
 France and Germany and Italy during the war the 
 recrudescence of a barbarous rhetoric and a relapse of 
 the plastic and visual arts into exploitations of martial 
 glory. Neutrals especially — say an observer like George 
 Brandes* — are extremely bitter about the effects of the 
 war; whereas some of the most interesting parts of 
 Mr. Ransome's book on revolutionary Russiaf are those 
 describing the state of the arts under the Soviet' regime, 
 in particular the condition of the ballet and the theatre 
 and poster drawing. All of us have experienced a dis- 
 illusion concerning the effect of war upon literature ; we 
 have already begun to suspect those historians who at- 
 tribute all the verve and splendor of Elizabethan litera- 
 
 * Writing in the Swedish magazine ' ' Literature ' ' he answered the editor 's 
 question about the effect of war upon literature thus: 
 
 "Most of the literature that has come to my notice during the war has 
 been propaganda literature, which goes out to place the enemy in the most 
 shameful light and itself in the most flattering aspects. The significance 
 of these works, if they have any, is practical, not artistic or literary. In 
 my own view, the war has dragged back humanity a century or more. It 
 has exterminated young vigor by the 100,000, the young men from whom 
 a renewal of spiritual life perhaps might otherwise have been expected. 
 It has dried up Europe's economic resources and plunged nations into 
 bottomless debt. By its systematic slander, by a partly bought, partly 
 fanatic press, it has stultified Europe. By its hate, produced by outrages 
 and slander, it has poisoned the soul life of the masses. By its fearful 
 hypocrisy in the name of self -righteousness it has lessened the general stock 
 of love of truth that has been laboriously acquired by the human race. 
 By daily mass murder and mad waste of money on unprofitable and un- 
 productive enterprises it has impoverished, stupefied, poisoned. I, for my 
 part, expect extremely little of the literature that will arise from a soil 
 ■which is nourished by youths ' blood, politicians ' lies, and newspaper filth. ' ' 
 
 t Eussia in 1918. By Arthur Eansome. Huebsch; 1919.
 
 230 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 ture to the defeat of the Armada or who make the Pelo- 
 ponnesian War synonymous with the glory of Athenian 
 civihzation. We can see now that art in Europe for the 
 next generation will be in supine hands to a great extent, 
 and that America has a responsibility for carrying on 
 unbroken the heritage of art of Western civihzation 
 which we had not before suspected. In Europe rehef 
 from strain, lassitude and fatigue, will smother the cre- 
 ative impulses thet are always, in the end, the outgrowth 
 of a gracious and Hberal and economically unworried 
 enviroimient, for art is not a necessary flower of im- 
 poverishment any more than philosophy or verse. With 
 us, for all our difficulties, the next few years will see us 
 an economic paradise compared mth Europe and we 
 shall have — if not the pecuHar release of creative im- 
 pulses which we seem to have witnessed in Russia 
 through revolution — at least the margin of opportunity 
 for artistic effort, which a highly capitalistic civilization, 
 when it is fairly successful, can afford. 
 
 Yet the prospect of the artist in America is not a par- 
 ticularly fortunate one for the present, or rather it is no^ 
 likely that in the near future we shall breed many people 
 vdth the genuine artistic impulse. I am inclined to agree 
 quite fully wdth G. Lowes Dickinson on this point.* '*In 
 the future," he asks, ''when the European environment 
 is as unfavorable to Art as the American, will there be, 
 in the West, any art at all? I do not know; no one 
 knows; but there is this to remark: What I am call- 
 ing commercialism is the infancy, not the maturity, of 
 a civilization. The revolution in morals, in manners, 
 and in political and social institutions which must 
 accompany the revolution in industry, has hardly 
 
 •Appearances. By G. Lowes Dickinson. Doubleday, Page; 1915. Pagea 
 202-204.
 
 THE FUTURE 231 
 
 yet begun its course. It has gone further in Europe 
 than in America. . . . But it has not gone very far 
 even in Europe; and for generations, I conceive, polit- 
 ical and social issues will draw away much of the 
 creative talent that might have been available for Art. 
 ... To return to America, what I am driving at is 
 this: America may have an x\rt, and a great Art, but 
 it will be after she has had her social revolution. Her 
 Art has first to touch ground; and before it can do that, 
 the ground must be fit for it to touch. It was not till the 
 tenth century that the seed of Mediaeval Art could be 
 sown; it was not till the thirteenth that the flower 
 bloomed. So now, our civiHzation is not ripe for its own 
 Art. What America imports from Europe is useless to 
 her. It is torn from its roots ; and it is idle to replant 
 it; it will not grow. There must be a native growth, not 
 so much for America, as of the modern era. ' ' 
 
 In other words the era confronting us will be an era 
 in which the creative impulses of men will in all likeli- 
 hood naturally go into political and social rather than 
 artistic channels. Our civilization must reach some 
 stability and peace before we can really express ourselves 
 in art. Nevertheless during this rather barren inter- 
 regnum spiritual period which we are facing the liberal 
 has a peculiar duty towards the art and culture which 
 is our common inheritatnce from the past and towards 
 those few adventurous people who in a time of turmoil 
 and materialism venture to assert the supremacy of 
 different values. In the first instance, the liberal has to 
 help maintain some warm sympathy with the great tra- 
 ditions of the past — a task, I believe, for which he ^nll 
 receive more encouragement and help from the masses of 
 the people than he now suspects. In the second instance, 
 he will have a more discriminating task; it will be a
 
 232 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
 constant fight against commercialization and for a 
 measure of economic independence on the part of those 
 who can immediately command only an insufficiency and 
 who know too well the dangers of subsidization. The 
 war has precipitated things perhaps faster than those 
 of us who are at all of contemplative temperament would 
 like, but for better or worse the conflict of different social 
 systems is on, and whether we enjoy it or not the battle 
 of economic and political readjustment will be fought 
 out here and now. In such a strident and rather un- 
 gracious era, the artist will be to a certain extent under 
 an unfair cloud, and we must frankly admit that the 
 majority of them will be badly adjusted men who find 
 in the serenity of art a release from the sharp lack of 
 success in the rough, external world. Yet for the sake 
 of the few with the really spontaneous creative impulse 
 attaching itself to artistic ends the liberal ought to be 
 indulgent towards the weaklings. For on these few will 
 depend the maintenance of a craftsmanship and tech- 
 nique which only a juster and happier time will be in a 
 position fruitfully to employ.
 
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 234 LIBERALISM IN AMERICA 
 
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