Bed-Rock

IT is no bad thing to see the deeper strata of one’s being suddenly washed bare. When this happens, we get for once a clear picture of our substructure and foundations. We see whereon our house of life is built.

I know a woman, full of years and disabilities, who has just learned that she is, more than anything else whatsoever in past or present, in heaven or in hell, a middle-class American. It seems to her that she is this, even before she is an immortal soul. And she is satisfied therewith.

The shock of war crystallized the Americanism of us all; but even war did not pierce this woman so utterly as this recent self-revelation. Her husband is past fifty, and her grand-nephews still in rompers. So the great struggle did not take toll of her heart’s blood. Besides, she has the additional disadvantage of living in the Pacific Northwest. Out there they were a little ashamed of knowing themselves to be in one of the most comfortable and least inconvenienced sectors of the round globe during humanity’s war. They worked, conserved, and gave all the more feverishly on that account; but all their sacrifices still left their advantages visible. With a mild climate, with fresh vegetables in their gardens the year round, sea-food at their doors, coal-mines ringing their cities, and even sugar more plentiful for weeks than in the East, their material testing seemed incomplete. War’s menace was not a pistol held directly to their heads.

However, by just so much as these people are farther from Potsdam, by so much are they nearer Petrograd.

The other day there was staged in their chief city an attempted revolution. Its supreme result was to teach them the deeper values of their own civilization.

It is easy to say now that this attempt never had a chance of success, because the overwhelming majority of the citizens, including the permanent organized labor of the town, arc sane, and as satisfied as it is healthy for Americans to become. This is true. It is also true that the mayor, of Norwegian ancestry, is a gritty American who loves a good fight, and the advisory committee of the incapacitated governor was notably strong. And the average citizen was fighting mad and keen for special police duty. Nevertheless, some anxiety about a projected dynamite explosion before the fuse is fired will always be justifiable. So many things may happen! The Seattle situation had, and still has, dangerous elements. It is always possible to mislead the weak and uninstructed. Then, loo, organized labor is no more and no less inert and indolent in a perilous hour than the great mass of unorganized Americans.

We are unused to such perils, God be praised! We have not learned the game of meeting them. To the radicals, conservative labor showed itself reluctant and sullen. One heard denunciation on the street, wherever workmen talked together. ‘It’s the foreigners are pushing it. If they don’t like this country, I say let ’em get out!’ was the generally expressed feeling. Nevertheless, conservative labor allowed a small but noisy minority to play bear-leader, to make it dance to their tunes and lead it whither it would not, finally, go.

As for the radicals themselves, a dishonored few were perverted Americans; others, and these the shrewdest, aliens, unnaturalized Russians sent over by the Terrorist quasi-government for the ends of anarchy — also, incidentally, for the ends of graft; still others, — a considerable body of these, — rowdies brought from Eastern cities to ‘start something’ and to howl down speakers of opposite views at the union meetings; many were unrepentant pro-Germans; the remainder, that flotsam which is always at the mercy of the strident and determined.

These elements had leadership. A Russian gentleman of standing avers that Trotzky himself came over for that purpose, and divided some weeks between this and a near-by city, working up the movement. Russian money was known to have been brought in months before. About the same time, a newspaper was started, camouflaged at first as a legitimate labor-organ, but slyly growing bolder, until at last it approved openly the methods of ‘our brothers in Russia.’

Probably the whole thing was as well organized for a revolution as the American circumstances permit. The archorganizers looked the field well over. They selected the crucial hour of the world’s unrest, and an overgrown Pacific seaport full of transient workers. If they could ‘put it across’ anywhere in America, this was the time and the place. A universal sympathetic strike was to be the signal — for what ?

The woman whose experience I wish to record lives on the edge of an island looking across ten miles to the city whence her bread-and-butter comes. She is gray-haired, rheumatic, useless save in her home and garden. On the morning the Great Strike was called, she limped painfully down to the little grocery, to get a few pounds of rice, some lima beans, and salt pork. In case of long-continued interruption of transportation, or unprecedented disturbance, one could live for many days upon rice, lima beans, and salt pork.

Two men were in animated discussion by the roadside. She recognized a virulent pro-German and the bloodthirsty lad who had announced in her kitchen the day before, ‘We don’t care how we suffer, so we pull down the rich folks.’ He was saying now excitedly, ‘ If we can only “get” that man —' The sentence hung unfinished in the air as she came nearer.

Her errand done, she took the trail homeward along the bluff, past thickets of madrones, underneath high-headed and high-hearted firs. It was close on ten o’clock, the hour set for the strike.

Like most women, this one was sometimes acutely sensitive to those unnamed etheric currents which we vaguely theorize about as transmitters of thought and feeling as well as of light, heat, and Hertzian waves. These currents assailed her now. She was keenly conscious of a strange thrill and tension; her nerves throbbed in response to unseen vibrations that hinted of fear and hate and horror. To her surprise she became aware of a singular nausea, such as comes after the shock of broken bones. Also, the solid ground actually heaved uncertainly as she trod it.

This woman had known the common lot. I do not claim for her much achieved wisdom, but assuredly she had said ‘Yea’ to all of life, the bitter and the bright alike, because from both she learned. She had worked, suffered, rejoiced. The world had looked to her at times beautiful, at times tragic and terrible. Never before had it moved like quicksand beneath her feet. That soft gray city across the Sound dreaming bloody revolution? Absurd!

Yet why absurd? In a world which had been flagrantly sick and insane for four weary years, nothing was impossible. Nothing at all! Doubtless Belgium would have said ‘absurd’ before the beasts in gray-green crossed her borders.

The woman stood motionless, arrested by the thrust of the question — suppose the incredible does take shape before your eyes, what account can you give of yourself in that hour?

This was her country. For ten long generations it had been the country of her fathers, law-abiding and God-seeking men. There came upon her with the vehemence of lightning one of those insights by which the human spirit elects to live and die.

‘Either this is America or it is not,’ she said. ‘I would rather die than see America anything but America. I reject life on any other terms. I will die fighting — even I — for what we have of order and of liberty. And before death I will account for three of Law’s enemies, which are America’s. That shall be my share!’

Fierce resolutions these for gray hair, unsteady knees, and a leaking heart! But with them came quick, curious reassurance. The ground heaved no longer. The sickness passed. The world was suddenly normal and herself confident and calm.

‘Don’t you feel very — well, queer and trembly? ’ asked a neighbor whom she met on the trail.

And she responded equably, disregarding her recent alarms, ‘Not a bit. Everything is going to be all right. I am sure of it.’

She made her way home as speedily as she might. Once there, she took out the huge, old-fashioned six-shooter, recently oiled and cleaned. In the last ditch one turns to such things as these. The prospect of demonstrating her Americanism with a gun was gravely reassuring! Soldiers, no doubt, can better the sensations, but for her they served. I literally cannot overstate the sweetness to this mild, middle-aged creature of the thought of dying out of an incredible world, in a fight for the best that world has achieved of liberty and of law. It was as if she had found at last the very thing for which she had been born.

She saw as clearly as you the absurdity of the fact that willingness to deal death and to die before barricades — happily hypothetical as yet — should bring instant confidence and peace to one of her years and infirmities. She could picture her friends laughing until they cried at the suggestion. Pure farce, of course! But her instantaneous, passionate reaction to the insight vouchsafed her was as undisturbed by the thought of derision as by the thought of death.

One point remained to settle. Every man has his own America. What was hers? She had criticized America often and violently. She had scolded about its greed, its graceless materialism, its movies, its motors. Why was it now so precious that for its sake death looked desirable and dear ?

Facing this issue, first of all she saw, and was glad to see, that the core of America’s meaning to her had little to do with her own life, her own ease and wont. That life was nearly over; she had neither wealth nor power, and was not greatly interested in either. She had, it is true, her home, and that was vital. On a high bluff, in the eye of the sun and the arms of the wind, it lies, far beneath the fir-tops, small, intimate and dear, holding a little beauty and much peace. It was her heart’s fortress, but not for it would she give or take life. Home might be heaven, but it was not, essentially, America. America was nothing that she possessed.

What, then? In answer there came a rush of cherished pictures to her consciousness. With surprise she realized that she had been collecting them all her life and storing them away against this hour when she should demand of herself justification for the faith that was in her. She saw innumerable villages, mile after mile of maple-shady streets and unassuming, comfortable homes. She saw very clearly the laundress’s long, low white cottage with green vines, the new verandah added with a summer’s savings, and the pretty, refined daughters bringing the heaped, snowy baskets home. She remembered one street where a budding genius, a German gardener, and a retired teacher lived side by side, each in his separate dream. She saw rolling, endless Northwestern prairies covered with Scandinavian settlers. A shack with a lean-to for cattle-shed meant one year’s residence in America; a good barn, two years; a comfortable house, from three to five years. She saw a California town, rose-draped and radiant, which most people believe to be inhabited by millionaires; she happened to know that it contained a larger population, retired or semi-active, with incomes of two thousand dollars and under, than any other town in the round world! For each fine ‘place’ there were ten charming cottages, and even the ‘colored quarter’ was a delight to the eye.

But these pictures, of which her brain apparently held an endless procession, had to do with the material comfort possible to America’s vast, industrious middle-class. She rejoiced in that comfort, but she knew that it was chiefly a symbol of America’s real gift.

What that gift is, one picture sums up as well as a hundred. She recalled a freckle-faced little boy who lived forty years ago on one of those maple-shady streets, with his mother, a widow who sewed for their bread. Absolutely he was not talented, and yet he had the will-to-art definitely and consciously. To-day he is a painter whose work has been esteemed good for many years on two continents. ‘Stunning,’ it is not, nor bizarre, but it serves adequately the excellent ends of beauty, restraint, and livelihood. From the moment he began work for those ends, his progress was steady. His purpose did more for him than genius does for most men. He moved toward his desire as a swimmer moves through clear water.

His case is typical. She could recall many, many more. What they all mean, these pictures, she said to herself, is the vital American middle-class thing, so easy to feel, so hard to describe. They illustrate and embroider the theme of liberty. They mean that our fathers lived, and we still live, if and when we so desire, in a land which is essentially mind-stuff. Our American world is a malleable one which the uprushing will of youth can cleave and shape with a facility never elsewhere equaled. If youth is so foolish as to will only material goods, it will achieve only those; but in America youth is offered all.

A psychologist might put it that the structure of our society permits the largest possible response to the ‘total will’ of the individual. The subconscious self draws deeper breath, and will becomes deed with less friction here than elsewhere. America is the soul’s chance, no less than the body’s. It is Opportunity to the whole self. For this, the real, lovable America, elastic, vital, permeable for the spirit of man from bottom to top, one might indeed profitably die.

Whatever America’s faults, a country where the spirit can choose to be supreme is God’s country. It has in posse the thing which the ages will. Revolution here can only turn back the wheels. ‘An industrialized world,’ with a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ is, by comparison, as hell to heaven.

The woman patted the six-shooter, regarding it with benignity, yes, with affection. For the sake of middle-class America, she approved even its dark threat. Then she replaced the pistol in its case. She might need it or she might not. But in any event she was confident, and serene. For the bed-rock of her nature had been laid bare before her eyes and she had found her Cause.

How do I know so well the way this gray-haired, rheumatic person responded to menacing revolution? Of course — she is myself. And because even I, a woman more than middleaged and more than weary, reacted thus to the threat of revolution, I feel that America is still secure. Shall not even her dotards die for her gladly? Imperfect as she is, God be our witness, she is the only land where dreams keep faith with dauntless hearts, where men freely become the thing they truly will. And this, just this, is liberty.