The Rebound From Prosperity

I

MORALE is a curious thing. There is no factor more vital to the success of individuals or communities; and there is no factor more difficult to define or to secure. In the armies of the Great War it showed itself in very various ways. For the British it was intimately associated with certain standards of form and appearance. A man who ceased to keep himself as clean as circumstances permitted, who neglected to shave, to shine his buttons and his boots when he could, was in danger; neglect those symptoms, and within a week the man might be shell-shocked and raving. The French were different. Their trenches might look like deserted fairgrounds and their poilus like hoboes on vacation; yet out of this apparent mess and confusion they would leap like panthers and fight like devils. What Mussolini did for the Italians, after the collapse of 1918, was to put the nation on parade. To the rest of us it seemed that there was a lot of unnecessary swagger and flag waving; but it restored the national morale — the one thing, the basic thing, the liberals could not do. Without that achievement, and all it cost, the nation would probably have lapsed into anarchy.

For morale is no less a factor in peace than in war. Peace has its trials as well as its triumphs; the triumphs are rarer, and the trials more protracted. And democracy — which implies the sacred right of people to make fools of themselves — has before now landed considerable nations in situations to which their morale was not equal. The United States may be in such a situation to-day; it Would not be surprising.

Most people’s minds are full of the trade depression and the slump in securities; but consider what went before. The war hysteria lasted longer in America than elsewhere, inasmuch as it was more extravagant at the outset. As late as 1925, Germans were being cut in socially respectable circles. Then came a reaction that is now equally extravagant. One hears Americans everywhere saying that they were tricked into entering the war, that they were merely fooled when they thought they were fighting for a cause, that the whole thing was a diplomatic swindle or a Wall Street conspiracy — depressing notions even if true, which they are not. The defeat of Wilson inflicted a deeper wound on American self-respect than is even yet realized — including the self-respect of those who differed from him. For Wilson stood, after all, for the one constructive idea that the chaos threw up. It was then, it is still, the League and the Court or nothing. American liberals are still squirming in that dilemma. American diplomacy has ever since been on the defensive — a trying position for morale, even if justified.

And if the average man could forget all that, — as he has tried to do, — he could not ignore the blow to national self-esteem inflicted by Harding and the Ohio gang. That the Republican Party survived it is a reflection on Democratic leadership rather than on the popular conscience.

By that time the depression of the West had set in. But Western politics has never yet produced a man well enough equipped to give Western problems their true place in the national economy. Even the older La Follette failed completely to unite agrarian discontent with Eastern liberalism. The agrarian issue became once more the prey of sectionalism and economic fallacy; liberalism took a bitter lesson in its own inadequacy. The vested interests of the East persuaded themselves, as they had done before, that they could maintain an indefinite prosperity while the West went bankrupt. The East alone was in touch with the true causes of Western depression; it chose to ignore them. Now it has landed where the West landed four years ago. And even in the ditch there is no unanimity.

The situation, and the record, might well strain the morale of more mature democracies; and the American mass mind owes its predominant characteristics precisely to its lack of political maturity. Not that the mass mind is anywhere else so very different; but nowhere else does it exert so unmitigated an influence on the national temper. The present crisis exhibits, however, not merely the childish quality of the mass mind, but an almost unique failure of self-confidence on the part of all the groups from which leadership might come. And the conjunction of these two factors renders a real breakdown of national morale unpleasantly possible. Their interplay is worth examining.

II

Part of the fun of being a child is that experience so readily runs to superlatives. Life dramatizes itself on that little stage with a success it seldom equals when the stage is all the world. Beauty kindles into ecstasy, joy into bliss, ordinary human beings and events into heroes and sagas, so often and so swiftly that mere existence is a thrill. When things go well, they go magnificently; the wildest dreams come easily within the realm of the possible. When things go ill, there is nothing left to hope for.

The average American — and the politicians, the advertisers, the broadcasters, the movie magnates, the denizens of Grub Street and Tin Pan Alley, all attest there is such a being — is touchingly childlike in these respects. When things go well, the sky’s the limit — and the sky is very blue and far away. When things go ill, his hopes, his very ideals, come clattering down upon his head; he rakes the fragments together with a trembling hand, buries them in the back yard, and sits and howls on the wreckage. The wildest jazz turns overnight into the very bluest of the blues. It matters nothing to him that other nations have suffered more, and longer, and on the whole kept pretty quiet about it. You cannot console him with stories of what happened to his father when his father was his age. He must live his little drama for all there is in it; and he does so with a naivete that is both exasperating and delightful.

For the dramatic — or at least the melodramatic — is in his very bones. There is no limit to the things he can do, provided he can get excited enough about them. To put up the highest building in the world; to have the fastest vehicles or the biggest ships; to fight a European war on principle; to waive a national indemnity in the interests of Chinese education ; to cut himself off from the rest of mankind over a political squabble with which it had nothing whatever to do — all things, crazy or sublime, are possible so long as they can be made sufficiently exciting. He can lash himself into an ecstasy, this child-American, over the sorriest shows of sock and buskin, once the spotlights of his local stage are focused on them.

A recent morning’s paper brought the report of one Glover, apparently a person of some authority over postmasters in a Mid-Western state. ‘You are a part of this administration,’ said Glover to the humble postmasters.

‘ When you hear anybody assailing that man Hoover, remember what I said, or go and read a book, and answer them. As long as you do that, you are filling the job of postmaster. To make the world safe again for democracy, you must stand behind that man of peerless leadership. I ask your faith in God, that our country shall not fail. I’ll be back in Washington Monday, and I’ll be glad at that time to take the resignations of any of you postmasters who don’t want to do it.’ This Glover was certainly unaware that he was knocking yet more props away from a shaky system of government. He had worked himself into a passion in which Hoover and God and democracy and America were all mixed up; and for the time being, at all events, he probably meant what he said — deplorable as it sounds.

But there you have the difficulty. It is not wise to put all your emotional eggs, childlike, in one basket. It is not safe for the eggs; and it is not fair to the basket. Yet that is what the average American, this past decade, has been doing. Having found his relations with the rest of the world — military, political, economic — less exhilarating than he would have liked, he resolved to ignore them, and concentrated his hopes on a purely domestic millennium. Material prosperity was a simple, tangible end — an end that America could achieve for itself and by itself; and by a process of pure wishful thinking (with more wishing than thinking) it seemed promptly attainable without limit.

The prospect was smiled upon by the highest authority. ‘Patriotism,’ said the Yankee oracle in the White House, ‘ means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country. . . . Our first duty is to ourselves. American standards must be maintained. . . . It is because America as a nation has held fast to the higher things of life that a great material prosperity has been added unto it.’ So men took the ‘higher things’ for granted, and got in the way of expecting no more than material prosperity from the deity, the nation, or the government. And now that that ideal has collapsed on their hands there seems nothing left to believe in: nothing left, because they demanded too little in the first place — too little, not too much.

III

In such a mood Americans will say things about themselves — and mean them — that no foreigner would dream of uttering. It is a peculiar, and striking, American characteristic.

Here, for example, is one of the Captains of Industry — Mr. William Guggenheim —on recent economic developments: ‘We muddled out of the war, and then sought to rebuild the world on the top of ruin and disaster by the most stupid thing imaginable — a fictitious era of prosperity that amazed all thinking and sensible people. After having indulged in years of financial recklessness and folly, we imagined that recovery from our excesses could be brought about quickly, like curing a headache after a night’s carousal. . . . We are fast drifting from capitalism to communism, and a cessation is imperative if we are to preserve the Constitution and save the nation.’

Here is Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler on the political state of affairs: ‘The entire working of the political machine would be in the highest degree ludicrous were its results not so tragic and so ominous.’ ‘Artificial and fraudulent,’ Dr. Butler terms the present party system, and ‘a pathetic spectacle’ is one of his milder epithets for the House of Representatives.

Here is the educational system, as described by one of its prominent directors — Dr. A. C. Ellis of Western Reserve University — to a national convention: ‘The primary justification for our expensive public-school system, and to a great extent, for the numerous kinds of schools and colleges, has been that they educated our citizens for the responsibilities of citizenship. But events in recent years have proved that they have failed utterly to meet this responsibility.’ The mass product of all the elaborate system Dr. Ellis dismisses as ‘blind followers of empty slogans’; and he modestly adds, ‘We are confessedly the most lawless of the educated nations of the world.’

Here, finally, is the cultural state of America, summed up by Edmund Wilson: ‘It is doubtful whether any other period of human history has ever been so contemptuously treated by its poets and thinkers as our own.’

These are merely sample indictments out of a vast number. One wonders, as one comes across them in private talk as well as public oratory, whether the supply of sackcloth and ashes can much longer prove equal to the demand.

IV

Now far be it from me to suggest that there is not ample occasion for this melancholy chorus. It does not tell the whole story; but that there is in fact very substantial justification for it no reasonable person would doubt. The more or less of that, however, is not my theme; what I find most significant, and in a certain sense most menacing, about the situation is the psychological effect of the coexistence of all this disappointment and disillusion with the extreme paucity of solutions in which anyone wholeheartedly believes.

Look at some of the issues.

Very few people, I suppose, would dispute the broad statement that recent experience reveals a basic weakness somewhere or other in the economic system; and that fundamental reform of that system is desirable and necessary if future experiences of the same kind are to be avoided. But is there any probability that any fundamental reform will be initiated along any lines whatever in the near future? Not the slightest. We all know this — including the people who proclaim its necessity.

The ‘reconstruction’ operations of the government are in reality salvage operations, and nothing more. Even at that, they have not been especially successful; and they bear no practical relation to what everybody knows is the basic problem — the problem of increasing the purchasing power of consumers without in the same act adding to the existing oversupply of goods. The banks finance production, not consumption. Governor Roosevelt was probably right when he said recently, at Atlanta, that in future capital must take a smaller share of the national income and the mass of consumers a larger one; but does anyone suppose that either the banks or the Captains of Industry are likely to encourage steps in that direction?

What do they want, these gentlemen? What does Mr. Guggenheim want? It is easier to say what he does not want. He wants, he tells us, no inflation, no increased public expenditures, no bonuses, no ‘doles’ — above all, no impatience. There, as Humpty Dumpty said, ‘there’s glory for you!’ Then along comes Mr. Schwab, to demand lowered taxation, a balanced budget, and no deflation. All down the line there is voluminous counsel as to what should not be done; and that is all — in spite of a widespread sentiment that something ought to be done.

What the rulers of economic America want is, in fact, to be let alone; and we all know that, short of a miracle, they will have their way. What of it? Nothing at all — if it were a way in which they, and a substantial part of their subjects, could and did wholeheartedly believe. But that is precisely what it is not. ‘Men who have been accustomed to exercise well-nigh undisputed authority in industry, in transportation, and in finance,’ said Dr. Butler, ‘find that they have not only destroyed public confidence, but that they have lost confidence in themselves.’ Anyone who has kept track of the business suicides, or has heard the sort of talk that goes on behind closed doors in down-town New York or Chicago, knows how terribly true that is.

In such a time men need a faith of some sort to sustain them; but it is hardly too much to say that not only faith in government, but faith in America, is radically undermined. Certainly the old American maxims have lost their hold. Individualism, free initiative, the sufficiency of competition, may still have their solitary devotee in the White House; but they lack adherents in the ranks of big business. The thought and the talk of big business are all the other way: integration, centralization, loosening of the anti-trust laws, planning. But, along these lines, no general creed or policy has been arrived at, and no sufficient success has been achieved to justify thoroughgoing confidence. There is, in fact, a well-founded suspicion that a planned economy of any sort cannot be attained except at a much higher price than business is willing to pay.

The result is a psychological stalemate. Not only financial confidence, but moral confidence, is lacking. The business world is hamstrung. It is not quite sure where it wants to go, and doubts whether it could get there if it tried; so it stands still, with its knees quivering and its teeth chattering and the rain leaking through its hat.

V

Consider a special case, and some of its implications. Ever since 1925, when Secretary of Labor Davis made certain constructive proposals, it has been admitted on all sides that the bituminous coal industry needs drastic and immediate reconstruction. Nothing has been accomplished. So far as government is concerned, nothing has been tried. And year by year the shame, the misery, the horror, have eaten deeper and deeper into West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Tennessee. The public knows the facts of the situation, deplores them, tries to forget them. Students, liberals, journalists, see in human terms the appalling consequences of inaction. Judges and politicians of both parties face the impasse in a mood of cynical helplessness. Hope and civilization vanish together; savages get loose in the social chaos. Time goes on.

Then comes Mr. Owen Young, appealing for a quarter of a million for the Democratic Party chest, and uttering these words: ‘I do not believe that we can do anything really fundamentally constructive unless we maintain intact our political order, which rests upon the effective functioning of the bi-party system.’ Thousands of mildmannered citizens who care for civilization in America ask Mr. Young, ‘ What does your bi-party political system amount to in terms of Harlan County? What real claim has it, on its record of seven years past, to our faith or our allegiance?’

Mr. Young may be right or wrong about the system; but if it is to serve as Mr. Young would have it, if it is to remain the corner stone of the political faith of the next generation, it will have to justify itself more signally than it has been doing in this and other cases. Otherwise the young people will seek — as they are seeking — a different sort of system to believe in. And if the faith they find is of a sort Mr. Young does not like, that will not be altogether their fault. You cannot ask people to go on believing indefinitely in a system that persistently disappoints their reasonable aspirations. We all need faith of some kind, though not all of us have the energy to find it. Those who have will find it where they can.

VI

The rôle played by the prohibition issue in American public life is another notorious example of this blocking of the channels of social action and aspiration. An individual, denied all means of self-expression in a situation from which he cannot escape, rapidly becomes neurotic; and the results in political psychology are not less serious. As to the issue itself, there is nothing new to be said. What will prove, I think, to be the final verdict was succinctly put to me in mid-Atlantic ten years ago, when I was approaching these shores for the first time, by a Canadian barrister whose name I never knew. ‘The Eighteenth Amendment has made a legal crime,’ said he, ‘ out of what most people do not regard as a moral offense; and you can’t work law that way.’

But, while there is nothing new to be said, the country has been an interminable time waiting for something effective to be done, one way or the other; all of which would not matter if the whole wretched business could be successfully forgotten or ignored. That, however, is precisely what it will not permit; and the result to date is a psychological impasse which I shall ask leave of some of my colleagues to illustrate.

We were discussing — a dozen of the academic fraternity — the perennial topic. Professor Q had the floor, and, in obedience to some inner urge, was bringing his training in jurisprudence to bear on the problem of conduct. What were the limits, if any, to the obligation of obeying the law? With the aid of citations and precedents, he established two alternatives, and two only: either one must obey the law while it lasted, whether or no one approved it, or one must deliberately defy it with intent to overthrow the government. Either of these he was prepared to defend on ethical grounds; but no intermediate position.

So much Q demonstrated — I was going to say, to his own satisfaction; but it was manifestly not altogether to his own satisfaction. Q comes of an old and liberal New England stock, and there was obviously something in him that made the position uncomfortable. None the less he defended it stoutly and successfully against the rest of us until the oldest member of our group, who in his long life has done more cultural pioneering than all the rest, pulled his big bulk forward in the armchair and concentrated a leonine stare on Q.

‘You mean to say, Q, that I am to sit here quietly and obey any law, whatever I feel about it, unless I’m prepared to start a revolution?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, I may be no lawyer, but’ — the room shook as his fist came down on the table—‘I say to you, that’s damned nonsense!'

And in the mind of the one Englishman present rose the thought, ‘There, at last, is something I should have called authentically American.’

Now I invite the reader to consider the position of Professor Q (I am sure he will forgive me for taking him as a text) and his kind. The country is full of them. They are people of high ideals and liberal sympathies, reared in the finest American tradition, striving for continuity of principle and consistency of conduct in situations that give little ground for hope that their ideals can any longer be advanced along such lines, and therefore subject to an increasing and painful inner tension. They stand for a tradition, a technique, in social affairs that is, they rightly feel, entitled on its record to loyalty and respect; but the task of defending this tradition in application to contemporary problems leaves them exhausted and at times exasperated, to a point at which they can sympathize with Elijah in his debate with the priests of Baal. For they have to defend it not merely against the assaults of skepticism and radicalism from without, but against its own patent failure, in the hands of those in power this past decade, to deal adequately with any single issue of first-class importance, domestic or international. They have, in fact, to defend it against itself, as currently interpreted.

The ‘American tradition,’ in current political oratory, is now almost exclusively appealed to in the negative sense, as a limiting factor, an argument against adventure and experiment in thought or deed. We see a signal example of this misuse when the Chief Executive condemns public unemployment relief as ‘un-American’ — as if that settled the matter! There may be good arguments against public unemployment relief; if so, let us have them. But do not let us abuse the American tradition by appealing to it solely as a reason for not doing things.

That tradition, as I understand it, is a positive thing; it is a dauntless faith in ends that are ever renewed, and in the power of ordinary human beings to attain those ends. It bids us try this means and that means and the other means, with our eyes fixed on the goal, and try and fail and try again, and in the end get there.

But that is not the prevalent version to-day. And the resultant impasse leaves American liberals without real faith or confidence in their own position. Thousands of the best citizens in the country find themselves in an attitude of passive — sometimes cynical — acquiescence in abuses that arouse their deepest indignation, because their tradition, as they have absorbed it, offers them no effective means of action or self-expression. It is a peculiarly miserable state of mind to be in. Some of them rationalize their impotence by going to absurd and ingenious lengths in defense of the status quo. They will agree with every criticism made by the radical, and then turn on him with an ultrasophisticated argument in defense of their vote for whatever party hack happens to be on the ballot — the real reason being that they do not know what the devil else to do. They want to do something, but suspect that anything they can do is useless.

Others, in increasing numbers, end by throwing overboard all the heritage of tradition and political continuity, and find at least an emotional release in subscribing to new and untried faiths. It is hard to blame them. For an untried faith, whatever its terms, has an a priori advantage over a faith that has failed: it does not slam the door in the face of hope and aspiration.

In this connection I have an urgent personal complaint to utter. Many of us who stand, or have hitherto stood, for what may be called the method of empirical liberalism as opposed to the method of revolutionary radicalism are being placed in an impossible position by the inertia of the men who have the power of action. We try to persuade our students, or our public, that improvement without limit can be achieved by evolutionary, constitutional, realistic methods. We expose the temerity of the assumptions on which the revolutionary schools of thought rely. We dwell on the extravagant and unsupported optimism which is implicit in all their programmes. We assert the fundamental soundness of human instincts under honest leadership. We refuse, in any case, to wait indefinitely for a dubious revolution, and assert that here and now, within the world of things as they are, lie ample opportunities for social betterment awaiting seizure by men of courage and good will.

Then we open our brief (no very extravagant fee is marked on the cover) and find — dozens and dozens of empty pages! We look around for evidence for the defense, for witnesses from the world of action — and where are they? We cannot choose the ground on which the attack may come; it may be the coal industry, the World Court, the Mooney case, the war-debts issue, the power lobbies, the tariff scramble, the holding-company racket, the unemployment situation, the stockmarket swindles. Wherever it falls, we need at least some evidence of power to act, some measure of achievement, some show of leadership, to back our case. And where do wc find them? We find only inertia or hostility on the part of those who have the biggest stake in the maintenance of social order and continuity. We find the economic interests blocking the way of change, and an elaborate under-cover machine working in both political parties precisely to prevent the emergence of a positive leadership.

It is too much to expect us to go on forever without more support — more open support — from the men in power than we are getting. Private sympathy is no longer enough. Men like William Z. Ripley, E. M. Hopkins, Walter Lippmann, Nicholas Murray Butler, Felix Frankfurter, William Allan Neilson, Benjamin Cardozo,Newton D. Baker, — men who stand, whatever their individual differences, for the tradition and technique of liberalism as opposed to revolution, — have an imperative claim on far more positive endorsement from political and industrial magnates than they are receiving. For there is a time limit on this issue. Either liberalism or revolulution will win within this generation; and, to match the ammunition of Messianic hopes and utopian programmes loosed by the other side, liberalism needs the evidence of deeds and accomplishments in far fuller measure than modern America is providing. If it goes down to defeat, I have put on record this warning. Revolutionary idealism cannot be disposed of merely by condemning it.

VII

A final, and broader, aspect of this issue brings it back within the sphere of personal psychology. One does not have to be a nationalist to discern that there is a very deep connection between one’s nation and one’s inner life — a connection which is seldom fully present to consciousness. Just as some dogs will die when they feel their master has betrayed them, so some men have died when they felt their country had betrayed them. We are all a little like that. Some very deep and dangerous ill assails us when we feel that our country has failed to come within reasonable distance of our personal ideals; and that ill is very prevalent in America to-day. Men in all countries are locked in a bitter struggle with circumstances in the world without, and in a still more bitter struggle against despair in the world within. The latter is by far the more dangerous conflict. Let despair prevail within, and circumstances will always prove too much for humanity in the world without.

In America the struggle is harder in proportion as men’s hopes and ideals of their country have been set on a level that does less than justice to their personal aspirations. We are all familiar, more or less, with the disappointment of our hopes; and most of us, as life goes on, learn to stand a good deal of it. The collapse of our ideals is a far more dangerous trial; and it is a trial that many Americans to-day are undergoing. It is not merely that the poets and the artists and the visionaries are discontented — it is their business to be discontented. What strikes one in America to-day — many foreigners have remarked it — is the tone of moral defeatism one meets on every hand.

It is hardly too much to say that, among the leaders of business and industry, faith in what James Truslow Adams calls ‘ the American dream ’ — the dream George Eastman’s career almost perfectly fulfilled — is now permanently undermined. The basic assumptions of American life and American doctrine now appear to many men whose lives have been built up on them as doubtful, as inadequate to the problems of the present and the future; and there remains little in which such men can whole-heartedly believe. Further, they have every encouragement to believe the worst rather than the best of themselves, as they survey their collective lineaments reflected in the nation; and it demands courage of no mean order to retain one’s faith in America and at the same time steadfastly reject the picture of it that is day by day conveyed by its common politicians, its publicity men, its radio and movie and pulp magazine proprietors.

In this respect England, at least, is more fortunate. Complex as politics has been in recent years, the nation has in its collective capacity accomplished certain things that satisfy the more spiritual aspirations of the average man. I will mention only one — the settlement of the American war debt, coupled with the recent undertaking to maintain external payments on a gold basis. Whether that settlement was either good politics or good business is still very debatable. It was undoubtedly rash, it was extraordinarily expensive, it may in spite of every effort prove ultimately impossible. But it was the sort of gesture that satisfied the average citizen’s expectations of his country. It showed — primarily to Englishmen — that England stood firm, even in the depths of disaster, for what their very schoolbooks had told them was the English way of doing things. And from that reassurance the nation has derived strength and selfrespect to steel it through years of suffering.

Such acts, however arrived at and however costly, are in truth a higher sort of policy. For, most of all in hard times, men need something to believe in; and they may justly expect to find that something in their collective image that they call their nation. If they cannot find it there, if they find only a caricature of themselves, there is no telling where they may look or what they may find. Men act often foolishly and shortsightedly, even cruelly and brutally, under stress of excitement; but they are not altogether fools and brutes, and they look to their nation for the better part of themselves. Disappointment of their material hopes they can stand, and understand. Betrayal of their spiritual ideals — crude as those may be — works upon them a more lasting damage, even when they pretend, pathetically enough, to laugh at it.

Americans need, therefore, above all else to-day, the kind of leadership which will give them moral reassurance. They need to be reminded that America is a far greater nation than the picture of it which they — and, unfortunately, their transatlantic brethren — get in the newspapers; that it has latent powers of spiritual achievement — which have at times been revealed — equal to its material achievement; that there is more in the American tradition than Americans in recent years have been getting out of it.

Such faith, I have suggested, is to-day at a low ebb because men pitched their collective aim too low in the scale of values. Asking too little of themselves and their nation, they got what they asked — and it turned to ashes in their hands. Despondent, they cease to believe in themselves, their tradition, or their destiny; and, so ceasing, lose the powder to solve their own problems — not because the power is gone, but because the faith is lacking.

If I, an Englishman, now presume to confirm the faith of Americans in America, it is because, despite appearances, I hold that faith to be well founded. It is also because, in sober truth, Europe must either share that faith or resign itself to a despair that will not bear the telling.