Since We Welcomed Lafayette

I

THE words are not mine. Long ago, Miss Frances E. Willard wrote a poem, which was published; and a stanza thereof read as follows, —

Miss Willard was interested only incidentally in Lafayette, as the rest of the poem shows. One other thing, however, may be worth noting for our purposes: her natural distrust of England crops out even in her fulsome and pathetic address to a British gentlewoman. ‘ England’s hated House of Peers’ is one of her lines, and we get the stanza, —

Optimism, you see, is there: implying the need for optimism.

Miss Willard’s particular partisanships are now ancient history; and no one really cares about the personal part she played. Both ‘suffrage’ and ‘prohibition’ have gathered to themselves armies that Miss Willard never could have raised. She has her statue in the Capitol, and doubtless elsewhere. Even the bad physiology that she and her kind managed to get into the textbooks of our primary and grammar schools has been forgiven. What is peculiarly interesting at the moment is, not her ignorance of physiology or her personal bent in politics, but her rough-andready historical ideas. For these persist. ‘Whether we are dry or wet’ (to quote one last time from the same poem), ‘we’ — the bulk of the American public — feel thus about Lafayette and thus about the House of Lords. In these matters, the American schoolboy, up to 1914, had not progressed one inch beyond Miss Willard.

No single phenomenon of America’s participation in the Great War has been more striking than the instant response, in the average American heart, to the name of Lafayette. It is one of the most curious, the most absurd, the most fortunate, of moral accidents. We did not go into the war because of Lafayette; but who can say what help that name has rendered in sustaining the enthusiasm of the draft army? It has been one illuminating ray in the ordinary American boy’s well-nigh complete ignorance of France. He had to be taught ‘the issues of the war’; but he did not have to be taught about Lafayette and Rochambeau. General Pershing’s first words on arrival—‘Lafayette, we are here’ — were precisely those which American youth would have had him utter. That was a reason they understood, for crossing the seas to fight on French soil.

The late Professor Münsterberg, before his timely decease, did his best to play up Baron von Steuben. Historically speaking, he was quite right; but no historical accuracy had a chance against the public-school textbooks out of which three generations had learned their American history. Those three generations may have developed misgivings, by this time, about the hatchet and the cherry tree; but be sure that the higher criticism has not yet reached the textbook account of the young Frenchman. Allied propaganda had an instrument to its hand which perhaps it did not, itself, suspect. Like a sword from its sheath, like Lazarus from the tomb, the figure of Lafayette leaped forth from the collective memory. People who knew nothing else; people who found it difficult to credit German turpitude or to feel a vital interest, in any European war whatsoever, knew all about him. ‘Why, yes,’ they said, rubbing their eyes; ‘of course we owe a debt to France; we don’t know much about France, but France is a good scout, you bet: she sent Lafayette to help us fight the English.’ For millions, France meant Lafayette, as England meant George III. The propagandists did not need to hold their tongues about Baron von Steuben: nobody cared about him. He has his statue, too; but where is it? Why, in Lafayette Square.

In the East, houses where the distinguished young adventurer slept are as numerous and as notorious as ‘Washington’s headquarters.’ It is a poor town, on our Atlantic seaboard, that does not boast one or the other within an easy radius. In our own village, we never managed anything more historic in the way of a dwelling than the house which was Tory headquarters at the time of the Revolution. But, up the street, the Continental Congress sat, and a Signer lived, and Washington took his farewell of the army, and — in all probability — Lafayette slept. I know of open-air schools where the children are given prizes for sleeping. No one ever got so big a prize for sleeping, here, there, and everywhere, as the Marquis de Lafayette has had. He went to bed like any other man, when he had the chance; and the French Republic, nearly a hundred and fifty years later, has reaped a reward, on the subject of which one would like to hear M. Anatole France.

Let me not seem to decry, or even to minimize, the act of the young marquis. Undoubtedly he heartened our ancestors at a time when things did not look very bright. Washington took to him — they were apparently two aristocrats together. His tact in not continuing to insist, (he started to), at the age of nineteen, on being given the highest military rank after the commander-in-chief, seems to have endeared him to a distraught Congress. But he was never a great fighter, and his military career in America, though respectable, was not distinguished. Except by loving the insurgent. Americans when most people did not, it is hard to know what peculiar and signal service he rendered. Even at that time of counting noses and husbanding pitifully small talent, he was not in dispensable.

So far, history (not out of the schoolbooks). The most amusing aspect of Lafayette’s rôle, in our present connection, is the fact that he never at any moment represented France. His friends advised strongly against his coming; the King positively forbade it; even the American envoys refused to encourage him. He was arrested when he tried to sail. He came as completely ‘on his own ’ as a stowaway — enjoying, undoubtedly (aged nineteen), the flight and disguises and adventures quite as much as the vision of Liberty. Later, of course, he concerned himself with the French Revolution; but he never could ‘go the whole hog,’ and was eventually declared a traitor by the Republican Assembly. The more credit, to him, very likely; but the fact remains that neither monarch nor Republic nor Directory officially countenanced him. The King had him arrested; the Assembly voted him a traitor; the Directory kept him in exile. He played a lone hand; and never at any moment can he have been said to represent France — even with that kaleidoscopic sequence of governments to choose from. No matter: he was a delightful person; and if you cannot hitch your wagon to a star, the next most inspiring thing is probably to hitch it to a comet. How much good Lafayette accomplished in 1777 is problematical; the good he accomplished in 1917 is, frankly, incalculable. We really needed no French propaganda: you said, ’Lafayette,’and you had all the young throats cheering.

It was he who cast that bread upon the waters; and after many days it returned — in staggering proportions. You did not have to defend or explain France to the products of the little red schoolhouse—’no, sir-ee.’ The fact that they knew nothing about France, politically or socially, for the last hundred years, was a help rather than a hindrance. Time was not wasted in expounding. American youths did not stop to read what the Committee on Public Information printed. They had learned what was necessary in their ridiculous, unscientific schoolbooks. Did n’t France help us out? And did n’t France, on top of it, have a revolution of her own and turn into a republic? ‘ France,’ during the greater part of our struggle, never did help us out; and the French Revolution would shock them, if they knew anything about it, almost as much as the invasion of Belgium. But Lafayette was there to make all clear. And the joke of it is that no one had suspected the power of that name. When politicians and public speakers first used it, because there was no argument they dared omit, they did not dream that it would, for so many millions, make any other argument unnecessary. It was sheer, stupendous luck.

No one, I hope, will mistake me to mean that a large section of the American public was not, even before 1917, fully aware of the moral and political issues of the war; or that the Lafayette slogan meant anything to the vast number of aliens who came into the selective draft. Still more, I hope no one will mistake me to mean that the average youth of American stock would not have done his duty as promptly if there had been no Lafayette. But that Lafayette saved time; that he obviated the necessity for a deal of education and propaganda; above all, that the sheer magic of his name injected an invaluable element of personal feeling and sentimental gratitude into the doing of the American job, no one can reasonably deny. In 1917 you would never have got the doughboy to fight as gladly — though that he would have fought as loyally, no one may doubt — on British soil as on the soil of France. Probably he did not know half so much about France as he did about England; but — France? Why, ‘sure’ — Lafayette was a Frenchman.

I had the privilege of talking, not long ago, with a typical young Middle-Westerner — in khaki, aged twenty-one. He had encountered, and been influenced by, all the original Western arguments against our entering the war. He had no doubt that we had to go in when we did, and he had enlisted of his own free will, but he did not rage against the Hun. He still had misgivings about British international behavior; he remarked quite seriously that Germany had given us due warning to keep off British ships; and he repeated objections to the British blockade. In other words, he was completely uneducated in recent international politics. His Western indifference, one saw, had been very real, and quite unillumined by historic perception. With him, being one-hundred-per-cent American meant being literally that: it meant that, up to April 6, 1917, he was not even a fraction of one per cent anything else—Entente Ally, or German. He was not particularly militant, — who is, since the armistice? — but had he got over during the fighting, he would have been one of the best. His original neutrality, his anti-British prejudice, and, incidentally, his announcement that William J. Bryan was almost, if not quite, our greatest ‘mind,’ show his type and his provenience. Yet even so, sensible, clean, upstanding young private, he had a cri du cœur. I doubt if he had ever spoken a French sentence, read a French book — perhaps, even, ever met a French person. But the cri du cœur was spontaneous: ‘I adore France!’ Though he admitted a passion for Napoleon, — and in the same breath declared it illogical, since he was a great believer in democracy, and had no jejune taste for kings and such, — it came back to Lafayette. He did not know it himself; but when I asked him (for the case was beginning to be clear) if it were not the schoolbooks, he said slowly, thinking it out, that he supposed it was. Lafayette — and George III — and Barnes’s (or another’s) History of the United States, in one volume. Great Britain being cocky and piggish, and wrong-mindedly preventing neutral ships from approaching German ports — and ‘I adore France!’

II

There you have it. For what the schoolbooks have given with the right hand, they have taken away with the left. If they have made the schoolboy adore France, they have made him detest England; and there the propagandists have had hard sledding. George III and the War of 1812 have given them as much trouble as Lafayette has saved them. It is not all the Irish in America, or the bad manners of traveling Englishmen, that have wrought this. The antipathy has been strongest (among genuine Americans) in places where the Irish have not penetrated, and whither Englishmen seldom travel. Broadly speaking, there have not been half so many things, in the last hundred years, for England to explain away as for France to explain away. Even if England and we had no common heritage of history, speech, and custom, the dispassionate hundred-per-cent American would, if fairly instructed in nineteenthcentury history, perforce choose England of the two. The fact is that a large number of hundred-per-cent Americans are ill-instructed, and are brought, up to be passionate on this point. It is such a commonplace to many of us that the British monarchy is freer than the French, or even our own, republic, that we do not realize just how even Frances E. Willard could write of ‘England’s hated House of Peers ’ with a good conscience and without a smile. But there are millions to agree with her — if they ever thought about the peers at all. Many of them would have been, in spirit, if not in actual performance, capable of writing the report that the little schoolgirl turned in at her currentevents class on the morrow of the fateful day when the Lords did for themselves: ‘The House of Budgets has rejected the bilk’ Who cares about the House of Lords, anyhow? It might as well be a House of Budgets, for all it mattered to a progressive American. Young America has not cared what happened in England, or known. It has known little of England since the War of 1812 — apart from suspicions that England did not behave very well during our Civil War. But that does not rankle much: it is only what you would have expected, and it never cut much ice. Young America was pretty much pro-Boer in 1900, I remember— for all the wrong reasons.

So much for our ignorance of nineteenth-century England, and our prejudice against it. But young America has been, to put it cautiously, equally ignorant of nineteenth-century France. In point of fact, our schools have carried the Monroe Doctrine into the world of study. Foreign countries have not been welcomed in the textbooks — not since we set up for ourselves. School-children have not been permitted to make any entangling foreign alliances of the mind. The history of the last century, as taught them, has been hundred-per-cent American, too. In spite of the war of 1898, Spain has not existed for them since the days of Columbus. Young America has known nothing of Europe, and no more of France than of England or another country. If it knew about the Third Empire, if it knew about Maximilian’s venture in Mexico, if it knew about French colonial policy in Asia, or about French religious intolerance at home, it would probably be profoundly shocked — more shocked than by anything it could have discovered about England during the same period. For many Americans, — those, for example, who knew French literature and politics, and did not know French people in the flesh and French life in the French home, — the French exhibition of stoic qualities in 1914 was a revelation. To others it was no revelation, because they really knew France. For the vast majority it was, again, no revelation, because they were as ignorant of France as of Siam. England, being all over the place, occasionally obtruded on the American consciousness; and when it did, the American consciousness usually growled a little — in its sleep, as if England were a recurrent bad dream. It did not rouse itself to investigate the merits of the case. But when the great trumpet sounded, waking all sleepers, the American consciousness of which I speak ignored England entirely, — or as far as it officially could, — and went back, as Rip Van Winkle went back, to the day before the long sleep. ‘Why, of course — Lafayette!’ And, a moment later, I adore France! ’

Pathetic, absurd, deeply interesting, have been the enforced ways of propagandists since 1914 —and especially since 1917. If the widely educated think I am talking nonsense about the schoolbooks and how they have had their way with young America, watch the popular appeals that have been made. Admit that folk have had an easy time working for France; and count how often Lafayette’s name has been used in public addresses, spoken and written, from President Wilson’s down. (Congress, too, was brought up on the schoolbooks.) With all the atrocities that Germany has committed since 1914, familiar to all and sundry through newspapers, through ‘movies,’ through speeches by Allied veterans and returned American relief-workers — in spite of the multitudinous testimony to German barbarism, people found it necessary to drag the Hessians out of their eighteenth-century graves. And — luckily, perhaps — the Hessians were there. They were in the schoolbooks, even.

English propaganda has been the most difficult, as French has been the easiest. If Burke had only been a gentleman-adventurer, instead of a British statesman, and had been moved to disguise himself and flee to America, to fight for us in the field instead of in Parliament, the rough places might have been made plain. Burke would have been quite as representative of England as the nineteen-year-old Lafayette was of France. But Burke wore his own clothes and stayed at home. Pathetically and truly Englishmen remind us that the greatest statesmen in England were openly opposed to the oppressive policy of George III — ‘ a German King,’ they say, with ‘German mercenaries’ to fight for him. (The Hessians again.) But ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ has not been, for years, the favorite ‘piece’ in seventh-grade ‘declamations’ for nothing.

The propagandists here used Lafayette in the beginning; and General Pershing made him, as it were, official. The French themselves lagged a little behind, but they did not lag for long. They were too well-informed to suspect Lafayette’s importance in the first place; but they were far too intelligent not to use him as soon as they saw what, to uninformed young America, he stood for. I have before me a French Christmas card sent us by an officer in the A.E.F. — a tiny illustrated booklet which celebrates Franco-American comradeship in arms. It begins with our Revolution and French aid; and the first picture shows the handclasp of a Frenchman and an American officer — presumably Lafayette and Washington, though the spirited sketches are hardly portraits. Lafayette aroused a tremendous sentiment in America during his lifetime, and that sentiment was laid away in preservatives which now show themselves to have been of the best quality. It was quite fresh and lifelike when it was exhumed. But could anyone — least of all, Lafayette himself— know that it would positively have bloomed and expanded in its grave? Certainly the French did not suspect; and they must have been intellectually as amused as sentimentally they were touched, by the miracle.

Will the schoolbooks turn scientific, or will they continue to reiterate, misleadingly, that ‘France’ stood by us? Will they fortify their position by playing up d’Estaing and de Grasse — who did indeed ‘stand by’ us, France being then, on her own account, at war with England? They stood by us chiefly by making a naval war on England in the West Indies; but they did incidentally help. I do not say that a case cannot be made out, historically, for French assistance; but that case will have nothing to do with the case we all learned by heart in infancy. And if you bring in d’Estaing and de Grasse, you will also have to bring in Citizen Genet. Better leave it where the American heart has left it, at Lafayette.

No: the history books had probably better not. be entirely rewritten until a few more years have elapsed. The Peace Conference is still before us; and at the moment I write, no one can say definitely what, hidden emotions shall there transpire. We may still need Lafayette; and it is better that we should spontaneously adore France. In point of fact, we shall doubtless continue to adore her: some of us because we know her, and some of us because we do not. For Great Britain’s sake, one might want the text books revised immediately. Perhaps the jackies from Admiral Rodman’s squadron would like to take a hand at it, between parades. I suspect, that they know more about Great Britain now than Mr. Barnes ever did.

Yet it may be that even Great Britain can wait — ‘hated House of Peers’ and all. One of the revelations that the curious expect most eagerly is the official statement of the number of Americans who have enlisted, since August, 1914, with the Canadian forces. There has been hardly a day, for four years, when American names have not been published in the Canadian casualty lists. One has lived to hear American schoolchildren sing ‘God save the King’ in public places— ‘Long to reign over us,’ and all. Frankly, in my own childhood, you could not have got them to do it. I fancy (if one can reach the real sources of so complex a thing) the British colonies did the job for the mothercountry. A few Americans went over and enlisted in the British and the French armies — ’effete Easterners,’mostly; but it is only in the Canadian forces that Americans enlisted in great numbers. We are told that the Australians, who never salute anyone, and fight so well that the wise British authorities (who have a knack, the world over, of making allowances for little differences of temperament) ignore the informality — we are told, I say, that the Australians go out of their way to salute American officers, and that the doughboy and the ‘gumsucker’ are blood-brothers at sight. If it is true, why not? We were British ‘colonials’ for two hundred and fifty years, and have been independent ‘Americans’ for less than a hundred and fifty.

Discussion of Anglo-American relations would have been beside the point, were it not that you cannot laugh at the textbooks for misrepresenting the French rôle without mentioning their misrepresentation of the British rôle.

The two errors are indissolubly joined — in the schoolbooks and in the heart of young America. Yet American misunderstanding of Great Britain is quite another story from that which could easily be entitled the ‘Luck of Lafayette.’ Real historians might be tempted to annotate the ‘ Luck of Lafayette ’ in the temper of Ecclesiastes. For the layman, it is merely that rare thing, a psychological story with a happy ending; a tale of misunderstandings that turns out fortunately for all concerned. The near-historian might point to the Lafayette legend as one of Bismarck’s ‘imponderables.’ But we, if you please, will let it go at what it most obviously is: an Arabian-Night-ish tale of irrelevant magic and incommensurate rewards; a proof that Haroun-al-Raschid and Abraham Lincoln were both right; that not only to the gayety, but to the positive benefit, of nations, you can fool all the people some of the time.