The Progressive Tradition
I
IT was Mr. Lincoln Steffens who accused Theodore Roosevelt of making his major decisions ‘in his hips,’ rather than with his head. Whether or not this was true of the first progressive President we had after the Civil War, it is certainly true of the American people — or, I suppose, of any people — as a whole. The student of our history is likely to neglect this, to ignore the inarticulate; and to yield to a complementary tendency for valuing documentary evidence out of all proportion to its genuine significance.
Every responsible statesman, and, indeed, every politician save one who relies exclusively on machine organization, realizes that the American people have a wholesome propensity for confounding intellectual predictions by decisions which spring from the heart — if not the hips — rather than from the head. For the head can be led astray by selected facts, and the chains of reasoning which spring from them, but the hips and the heart do not resort to rational processes for determining what they want or to charted plans for getting it. Such statesmen therefore understand, even if they do not analyze.
The stream of American purpose has flowed strongly and steadily like an underground river, beneath the artificially ordered and documented legal landscape, often un watched, frequently ignored. Now and then it has come boiling to the surface, surmounting some obstacle; and then it has carried everything before it with irresistible power. The task of American statesmanship, as I see it, is to study the direction and the force of this current and to moderate and direct rather than to oppose it. Failure to understand, attempts to oppose, involve a swift and final penalty which is exacted ruthlessly. Statesmen must have an instinct, a feel for their peoples’ spirit; and they must have a sense of timing which takes tides at their flood. They must be facilitators.
The New Deal has sometimes been pictured as a kind of academic brain storm. This is, of course, either a humorous or a malicious attribution. No group of pallid professors huddled around a desk in order to concoct its main features; nor did President Roosevelt invent it. His sense of history has been accurate and so he has understood and taken advantage of the progressive drift. He is, indeed, merely one of a long line of statesmen who have gathered up and given shape to this imponderable. The policies which are spoken of as new have an entirely honorable lineage in American history; they are an expression of the American faith. ‘The American faith,’it seems to me, is preferable to the usual expression, ‘the American dream.’ A dream implies the unreal and the unrealizable. Faith is the substance of things actually hoped for; it has served to raise men by infinitely slow but certain stages into civilization. It will carry them further. The speed of the process will be determined by the wisdom of leaders, but the fact will not. That is set in the cultural core of our race. There will be sorties and withdrawals, but there will be no turning away to other fundamental purposes. Objectives define themselves temporarily; they are reached and passed, or they are defined, regarded, and abandoned. Faith that objectives can be useful to racial purposes persists and is not discouraged by achievements which turn out to be less than Utopian.
What is the American faith? What is the attitude which again and again has thrown into disarray the neat calculations of our business and political manipulators? It is not easy to describe, and has never been satisfactorily defined. Our nation came into existence as a protest against the aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and commercial privileges of the Old World, and within a generation of the adoption of our Federal Constitution we had wiped out formal political and religious discriminations. The greater task, that of conquering economic discriminations and privileges, has not been accomplished; but it has been approached repeatedly, by the Declaration of Independence and our Revolution, by Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian policy, by Andrew Jackson’s banking policy, by Abraham Lincoln’s free-soil policy, and by the economic legislation associated with the names of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Both natural forces and social privileges have been regarded, with us, as obstacles to be overcome for some deeper purpose. The thrust of this purpose has been repeatedly deflected by the clever dodges of the privileged; but it has not been stopped, nor has its momentum been more than temporarily lost.
To define this deeper thrusting purpose is to approach the realm of morals and religion, and to deal with life itself. The law of nature is that life is the purpose of life. This law is obeyed blindly by certain fast-breeding Asiatics, whose religions stress the importance of fecundity. The law of the Western religions on which our civilization is based is that virtue — the good life — is the object of life. It is a qualitative approach to destiny, which argues that, under certain conditions derogatory to human dignity, life is of no importance and not worth having. To Asia’s argument that the womb is man’s only weapon against the universe, we answer that living and achieving constitute our strategy. We form our Western tactics in that faith.
II
The conditions of life which we have made for ourselves in the past emphasize this continuing aspiration. Economic hardships have never greatly mattered to our people, so long as elemental human virtues were possible. This had nothing to do with manners, but a great deal to do with morals. Those early Americans were doubtless sufficiently uncouth — but they were men! The settlers at Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay Colony, the men and women who peopled the West, the Mormons who fled from persecution in New York and Illinois to settle the deserts of Utah, the men who suffered and died in the War between the States, submitted cheerfully to privation, suffering, and death, so long as what they regarded as their rights were preserved and so long as they felt it within their power to create for themselves and for their progeny a life which seemed worth having, in which people could found homes, raise and educate their families with self-respect, and grow old in customary comfort. We made our economic gains as a kind of by-product of this effort, living with them carelessly, giving them up for something better without reluctance. It has always seemed strange to me that we should often be accused of living for material things. Those who say this betray their failure to penetrate the surface of our life. The ingenuity which produces goods for use has a source outside the things themselves. They are instruments of a temporary sort and we cleave to them less, perhaps, than those who regard us as materialists.
The whole point of the tremendous protest against the way of life which came to crisis in 1929 is that our political and business institutions had affronted human dignity, as we conceive it, and had blasted human life — literally blasted it. The best measure we have of life’s value is whether it is considered worth possessing and transmitting to others. Since the war, the birth rate has declined to a point below that which is required to maintain a stable population, with the easily predictable result that by 1970 at the latest our numbers will begin to decline unless we change the system. The methods of private industrialism and capitalism in the present era of machine power, with concentration of ownership, have, in fact, completely transgressed the canons of the good life, and the American people have shown, in their birth rate, that they no longer are confident about life under the present terms.
By their votes in 1932 and 1934, and by the tremendous, silent, and continuous pressure upon the Administration and their representatives in the Congress, they have also shown their determination to change those terms so that they may have life and have it more abundantly. This is, I say, a religious attitude and one which reflects both the law of nature and the rule of thought throughout the Western world. There is no sense in saying that Americans are wrong to have such an attitude. There is no arguing with it. It poses the alternative: either their leaders will discover a system which makes possible the good life for the mass of our people or they will cease to play the game together. This withholding of consent is the sign to which conformity is imperative.
In their own incoherent way, our industrial leaders have tried to charm us away from the severe logic of this alternative, by dangling pretty economic toys and contraptions before us as though we were crying babies: so many automobiles, so many radios, so many electric ice boxes, so many car loadings, and all the other paraphernalia of materialism. Yet Americans remain wholly aware that they lived the good life before there were automobiles, radios, electric refrigerators, or boxcars; and they shrewdly know that there is no profit in all the gadgets in creation if their price is the loss of that dignity which is man’s most precious possession and which Americans, especially, have had in the past and are determined to regain.
It is easy now to indict the American leaders of the years just past. The exposure has been pitiless enough. It is more useful to ask what lessons have been learned and whether those leaders are ready now to conform to the cultural faith. A great parade has been made of contrition and conversion; but we are wholly justified in skeptical waiting for the decisions of conformity. Something deeper and more reconstructive is required than any actions so far taken. I refer now not to government, as we usually think of it, of cities, states, or the nation; I refer to government of productive enterprises, of social bodies of all sorts. Are the decisions being taken there of a kind which will assure the economic wellbeing and security our ingenuity has made possible? Are they of the kind which recognizes the necessity of democratic participation in direction? I profoundly hope that I may be mistaken in believing that they are not. For we shall have some amazingly disturbed and unhappy years if our present social and industrial leaders prove themselves unable to conform to the American faith. Have they rediscovered our lack of attachment to a given set of things and our driving impulse toward the dignity of life? Rather than feverishly scan all horizons — England whose fiscal recovery so enamors our bankers, Russia whose collectivism is so enchanting to our radicals, Italy and Germany upon whose systems some of our industrialists cast so wistful a gaze — it would pay them to study the American spirit, our ideas, our institutions, in a disciplined effort to find and cling to the social ethic which must give direction to our national policy now as it always finally has done.
III
Just now American society is struggling again, after years of apathy, to find its adaptation to this as yet undefined social ethic, this feeling that the good life for the individual is the end and purpose of civilization, and to find that adaptation through the materials put at its disposal by the recent technological revolution in industry and agriculture. To chart the course of this recurrent ethical struggle, to judge its direction and force, is extremely difficult. Each of us ought to do it for himself, I suppose; and I have reached at least a few bearings in which for myself there is some satisfaction.
One of these suggests a characteristic invincible determination to get the necessary thing done regardless of the cost. The colossal frauds and speculations which accompanied the construction of our transcontinental railways seem to have been accepted quite calmly as part of the necessary price for a national transportation system. So, too, we have accepted, over long periods of time, indefensible political graft and business profiteering, as part of the price for obtaining the necessary political services and economic commodities with a minimum of effort and thought on our own part. This is another form of the spirit which has often led us to neglect our national defenses in time of peace and to sacrifice men and resources without reserve in time of war; and which complacently accepts the accidents of traffic as part of the cost of running a system of individualistic automotive transportation, regarding the traffic officer — and the policeman generally — as a sort of chartered spoil-sport whose frustration is wholly worthy of praise.
Another bearing on the American spirit suggests that the individual American has a passionate desire to be let alone, not to be bothered with irksome details, not required to think things out or to fill out official forms. Among the first assignable causes of the American Revolution was a British tax — a nuisance tax we should call it to-day — on merchandise and on business transactions. The first organized defiance of the Federal Government was a rebellion against Alexander Hamilton’s excise tax on whiskey, a rebellion which has persisted, with the Federal Government unable to obtain any decisive victory, for a hundred and fifty years among the Appalachian mountaineers. It is merely a continuation of this attitude which leads us to accept the dilatory administration of the criminal law and which manifests itself in an otherwise inexplicable attitude of sympathy toward the individual who is in the clutches of police and prosecutors. Possibly the orthodox demand for prompt detection and arrest, speedy trial, and immediate condign punishment of the criminal is not a true representation of the popular attitude, which might regard such efficiency with grave uneasiness — as evidence that the police power had become so strong as to threaten effective interference with our daily lives. Perhaps we really feel that it is better that a few thousand men should be murdered each year than that 125,000,000 free citizens should submit to really effective policing.
Another related aspect of our attitude indicates that we have no more tenderness for basic property rights than we have for human life, when they interfere substantially with what we want to do. For example, from the dawn of our history on this continent a determined effort was made, through royal grants, through chartered companies, through conservation policies and restrictive laws, to deny to our people free access to the then illimitable lands of this continent. We know that the wandering pioneer — the ‘squatter,’ as he was later called — effectively nullified this prohibition. Finally, after generations of controversy, a Homestead Act was passed during the Civil War giving an effective and easy access to the public domain which facilitated its settlement. Those scientific conservationists who criticize the wastefulness of our recent easy land policies may fail to give sufficient weight to the fact that the earlier policy of conservation did not make sense in terms of what people wanted, and that it did not work. Our new land policies will certainly have to be worked out in such ways that we shall not stumble over the stubborn fact that a people which violated laws, fought Indians, robbed and cheated right and left, to acquire the land will not easily adjust themselves to even the wisest reversal of this indiscriminate process.
Possibly, as the squatter was the economic symbol of the unreality of our attempt at a conservative land policy, so may the bootlegger be the true symbol of the unreality of some of our present restrictive industrial methods and policies. It is true that we did not hesitate to destroy vested property rights by our legal abolition of chattel slavery and by our national prohibition of the liquor traffic. Yet we quickly accepted a sort of bootleg slavery in the form of share cropping and Jim Crow legislation and, as we all remember, raised the art of alcoholic bootlegging to a national institution. And I am inclined to wonder whether the recent appearance of bootlegged petroleum, the so-called ‘hot oil,’ and the practice of ‘chiseling’ under the restrictive NRA codes are not a reassertion of some basic national characteristic of which in the long run our laws must take account. We must shape our policy so that impulses to squatting and bootlegging are taken advantage of or are sublimated in a programme which is an expression of competing impulses, rather than undertake the repression of drives too strong to be overcome by police methods.
Certainly, no account of our national attitude could fail to consider our ability to accept false objectives with whole-hearted enthusiasm for a while and then to abandon them unostentatiously when we realize that we have gone astray. We hesitate to admit openly our past mistakes. For many years we professed an unquenchable ambition to conquer or annex the entire North American Continent. We fought one unsuccessful war to conquer Canada, and another, more successful, to conquer a large part of Mexico, and spacious talk of our ‘Manifest Destiny’ crops up in our history again and again. Yet in practice this particular ‘Manifest Destiny’ has been laid away in mothballs for over thirty years, and there is to-day no doubt that any serious proposal for aggression against either Mexico or Canada would meet with instantaneous and effective opposition on the part of our own people.
So, too, in 1898, under the stimulus of an almost hysterical demand for colonial expansion by Big Business, we embarked on a course of political imperialism in the West Indies and the Pacific Ocean. To-day finds us recoiling from the naval and political consequences of this policy, and while we shall never admit that our colonial escapade was either wrong or unwise, I believe that in practice we shall rapidly withdraw our sovereignty and responsibility for defense from distant lands inhabited by peoples who share neither our blood, our language, our ideas, nor our institutions, and who have no desire to do so.
For these reasons I feel that our industrial leaders who keep down production and reduce employment are doomed to be pushed aside, goodnaturedly but ruthlessly, by the American people, so long as the present system operates to prevent them from getting what they want in the way of goods, services, and opportunities, and so long as its operation, whether as a carnivorous competitive system or under effectively policed NRA codes, results in a restriction of the life or a threat to the welfare of the individual. Certainly there is nothing in our social history which suggests that the American people will long be restrained, by any reverence for vested property rights or by any plea of consistency, from dealing with our economic institutions as ruthlessly and as completely as may be necessary to make them deliver the goods.
For, in spite of all our veneration for the successful self-made man and of our desire to maintain the possibility of his rise to industrial power on his own merits, we have never hesitated to lay rude hands on our business system. The fact that modern technology has multiplied the force and impact of our economic problems has introduced no new element in our political life, but has simply intensified our traditional purpose to resolve these problems in a manner satisfactory to our undefined concept of the good life. This is nothing new, and the New Deal is new only in that it is the first great chance we have had to do this coherently.
These indications may sometimes seem irreconcilable. Yet they all have a relevance to the course we must follow. They point to an impatience with things, methods, techniques, when they seem unmotivated by gains we care about; they point to an incorrigible withdrawal of reverence for leaders and thinkers who depart from the tradition and when that departure is clearly exposed; they point to a positive desire for life lived in completeness and dignity after which no striving is too rigorous, no sacrifice too great; they point to acceptance of disciplines only when they are willfully undertaken and seem certain to produce results which are worth what is given up in the way of freedom; they point to an administration of government and industry which proceeds by the careful fostering of consent.
All this is of the stuff which we call, sometimes loosely, democracy, as to general method; experimentalism, as to technique; and, perhaps, the good life, as to faith. At any rate it intimates our direction and something of how we can get there.
Some of the problems arising by the way, particularly those relating to currency and finance, originated long before the American Revolution. Others, such as the rise of the huge industrial concentrations known as trusts and the concomitant appearance of imperialism and of economically disenfranchised masses, have originated within the lifetime of now-living men. For nothing could be more misleading than to pretend that our present difficulties are altogether new and unique. They are the direct and logical outcome of certain ways of doing things, and unless we find other forms of behavior we can look forward in the future only to newer and greater crises and to more disastrous depressions, culminating finally either in political revolution or in racial withdrawal. The New Deal aspires to obviate these alternatives.
IV
I myself have thought of the New Deal as a battle for democracy. It is perhaps rather a battle to determine whether the political forces of democracy are yet sufficiently wise and strong to rearrange the economic and social environment on terms which will be satisfactory to the general ethical and moral sense. It is, in fact, the third of three great battles for that purpose which have been waged within the last forty years. There will be other battles, no doubt, if the systole and diastole of our public life maintains its rule. Yet this is the most hopeful battle in which the American people have yet joined. And, if it should be measurably successful, it will be the most merciful of recorded human revolutions. For our enemies are not individuals so much as they are institutions created by those who misread the strength of our cultural purpose. We shall need no firing squads, no guillotines, no deportations or concentration camps. A few disconsolate millionaires may take refuge on the Riviera and a scattering of selfconscious entrepreneurs may go into eager exile in Greece or any other country whose extradition laws are flexible.
An institution can perish without bloodshed or a habit can be changed without political compulsion if people discover that it leads to individual or collective disaster. This is the promise of democracy, that men can alter their social arrangements without killing each other.
The New Deal is, as I have said, the third of three great recent efforts to do so. The first battle was that which we associate with the names of Cleveland and Bryan in the 1890’s. Twenty years after the American people had established the political conditions precedent to great industrialism, through the Civil War and the protective tariff and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, they looked upon the results and found them very bad indeed. The trusts, the railroads, and the banks which flowered in the hothouse of privilege constructed by the Republican Party, had inflicted a series of panics, including two serious crises in 1873 and 1893, an era of falling prices and depression, an era of agricultural distress and bloody labor conflicts, and had given rise to a mood of revolt. Henry George had written Progress and Poverty and Edward Bellamy had added to the literature of Utopia with his Looking Backward and Equality. The growing effect in Europe of the publication of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, with its political consequences in the Paris Commune of 1871 and the rise of the Social Democrats under the ægis of the Second International, combined with a heavy European immigration, had at last served to introduce the principles of philosophical anarchism and of syndicalism, with their associated actions, into the American scene. The new industrialism was spawning millionaires and armies of tramps with amazing indifference to social and economic consequences. Those were the days of the Haymarket riot in Chicago, of the Pullman and Homestead strikes, of the use of federal injunctions and federal troops to crush the labor movement, of Coxey’s army, and of profound social uneasiness.
This first battle was doomed from the start. The Sherman Antitrust Law, enacted to restrain the trusts, found its most practical application in judicial injunctions against labor strikes as being ‘in restraint of trade.’ When Governor Altgeld of Illinois refused to interfere in the Pullman strike, the Federal Government, without clear Constitutional warrant, sent the United States Army into Chicago and broke the effort of organized labor to win better working conditions. When Henry George, the Single-Taxer, ran for Mayor of New York, it created much the same panic as certain Californians felt toward the recent candidacy of Upton Sinclair, and he was ruthlessly opposed with all the methods of political assassination. When the farmers and populists and currency reformers of the time combined behind the candidacy of Bryan for the Presidency, in 1896, the conservatives attacked him in unbridled terms. His following was branded as a ‘league of hell,’ and wholesale intimidation, corruption, and wild campaigning were employed to defeat him. Wall Street and the gold standard — then hailed as the Ark of the Covenant, though long since stranded on the Mount Ararat of arid facts — went openly and joyously to war against the farmers and the monetary reformers, and then smothered the resulting bitterness with an avalanche of gold from Alaska and South Africa and with a successful foreign war. The answer of privilege to the demand for a better way of life was the Full Dinner Pail and the Martial Spirit; freedom for Cuba and the great privilege of being allowed to go to work with enough to eat. So ended the first battle for economic and social democracy, amid the meretricious yelpings of the yellow press, the antics of Ward McAllister’s Four Hundred socially elect, and the Gargantuan vulgarities of the newly rich. Of twenty years of social and political agitation little survived except an ambiguous Antitrust Act and the beginnings of federal control of the railways through the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Yet it was only an armed truce, not a final victory for privilege. The mighty stream flowed underground a little longer and then boiled to the surface again in the time of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the years which began with muckraking and trust-busting and the Rooseveltian Square Deal, and took final form in Wilson’s New Freedom and the emergence of the Republican Progressives under Theodore Roosevelt and the elder La Follette.
For neither the capture of San Juan Hill nor the promised filling of the workman’s dinner pail sufficed to resolve the economic and social maladjustments which had accompanied the concentration of industrial and banking power in relatively few hands. The literature of dissatisfaction, as exemplified in the writings of Miss Tarbell, Mr. Steffens, and Mr. Sinclair, among others, was there to remind the public of a certain rottenness in their affairs. The American people, along with Theodore Roosevelt, did a good deal of thinking ‘with their hips’ in those days. This time the forces of democracy succeeded in gaining a foothold in the business system. A Pure Food and Drugs Act was passed which at least reduced a few significant privileges. The railways were legislated into a greater degree of control. The Sherman Antitrust Law was invoked against corporations, instead of labor unions; and Theodore Roosevelt’s career of trust-busting included the dissolution of a great railway merger and led up to the dissolution of the Tobacco Trust and the Standard Oil Company, although the Supreme Court intervened promptly with its ‘rule of reason’ to save other industrial concentrations. A short reaction under Taft was powerless to check the movement, and in 1912 Wilson proclaimed the New Freedom and, with the aid of the Progressive movement which split the Republican Party, was elected as a Democratic President on a great wave of reform.
His first administration saw the fruition of an entire generation of social and economic agitation. The tariff, that citadel of industrial privilege, was somewhat rationalized. The Sherman Law was amended by the more stringent Clayton Antitrust Act, which ended the use of federal injunctions against labor unions in the name of antitrust legislation. The Federal Trade Commission was established to function as a sort of Economic Supreme Court for preserving competition in our business system. The Federal Income Tax, with its principle of graduation, was established by Constitutional Amendment. The chaotic field of banking was invaded and reorganized by the government, through the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, with its hoped-for decentralization of the money power. For a few golden moments it looked as though economic democracy had really begun to flower.
Then came the war, compelling us, both for reasons of national safety and because of the determination of our bankers, manufacturers, and farmers to obtain profits from the urgent necessities of the belligerents, to go easy on further changes. In 1917 we were ourselves drawn into the conflict and our participation wrecked any hope that the Wilsonian movement would continue. The Espionage Act curbed political liberties and the Communist Revolution in Russia put panic at the disposal of our economic leaders in buttressing their position. The progressive idealists floundered after the mirage of international and institutional justice, while a grotesque ‘Red Scare’ usurped the headlines of the newspapers. The idealism which had originated in an attack on domestic injustices degenerated into a futile effort to extend the political frontiers of democracy, without any parallel effort to extend its economic or social frontiers. When the second battle for democracy had come to an end, the Treaty of Versailles and the Empty Whiskey Bottle had been used as, twenty years before, San Juan Hill and the Full Dinner Pail had been used — as red herrings to distract the public from the pursuit of objectives consistent with our deeper purpose. The faith had not been kept, but its adherents had, for the time being, been driven to the catacombs.
V
This time the truce was longer and more tense. No Progressive Republican President arose to follow Harding, as Theodore Roosevelt arose to follow the murdered McKinley, and in 1924 the Progressive movement under the elder La Follette was crushed. Mass production, accompanied by reckless foreign lending and the forced sale of goods through the installment-selling system, kept the lid on for eight bitter years. The struggle of the farmers for justice was met with the illusion of tariff protection for agricultural produce, while the genuine relief measures which they espoused were vetoed by successive Republican Presidents. The public utilities were encouraged to form massive and privileged systems of exploitation, of which that associated with the name of Insull is the type, while the government was debarred from operating the power facilities which it had itself constructed at public expense at Muscle Shoals. Speculation on the New York and Chicago exchanges became a mania from which huge fortunes were extracted by the insiders, and control of the directorates of the Federal Reserve Banks converted what was to have been a scientific banking system into one which failed as others had when the pinch came. The tariff system of protection was intensified by three upward revisions, and the labor movement was liquidated in a wave of indiscriminate expansion of plant facilities and output.
The climax and then the catastrophe came, as all will remember, in October 1929, when the stock market crashed. Then bankruptcies multiplied, banks failed, the lines of the unemployed grew longer and longer, until in the winter of 1932 they numbered over 14,000,000 able-bodied wage earners for whom no work could be provided by the business system as it was then run. The utter irrelevance of Prohibition as either a moral or an economic reform had been completely demonstrated, and the rise of dictatorial governments throughout the world demonstrated with equal clarity that our participation in the World War had not succeeded in establishing political democracy on a solid basis. And when the League of Nations failed effectively to restrain the Japanese aggressions in Manchuria, and when the system of treaties for the settlement of the Pacific and the Far East proved equally impotent to control a nation which found the status quo intolerable, the end was clearly in sight.
This time, whatever the result, there could be no alibi either for the institutions which sought to function in despite of the people or for the agents of the people themselves. The forces of economic privilege rallied behind the conservative candidate, only to see him defeated in one of the most amazing reversals ever recorded in an American election. The progressives, the liberals, the independents, the laboring men and women, voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt and a New Deal in 1932. Two years later they reversed all prognostications and all conservative hopes for the traditional swingback by giving the New Deal stronger Congressional majorities than in 1932. The conservatives can claim no trickery in the light of these popular majorities, and the administration can offer no excuses if it fails to give the American people what they demand.
That life is good which seems good to the men and women who live it. With us, with our free traditions and our healthy dislike of the doctrinaire, it is conditioned on free institutions and comprehensive if unavowed desires. It reflects our belief that human dignity is more important than either numbers or wealth. We are, in fact, a nation of poor people. Most of us habitually live on the border line of destitution or below it. Yet we have survived and flourished under far more difficult material conditions than those which today beset us, because we believed in ourselves and had confidence that our ethical system and the institutions we continually create and re-create could be made to serve our purposes. To-day that belief and confidence have been so gravely shaken that unless we can restore them we shall fail as a nation and as a civilization. The New Deal is an affirmation of our purpose not so to fail. In this, as in its myriad manifestations, it is merely an extension of the national heritage which gave us both our independence and our forms of government. If they fail us, we can change them; but if this purpose departs, then we are lost indeed. The New Deal is something worked for, reshaped, every day by all of us joined in a great national task. No man, no group of men, possesses it. It belongs to our people, to their tradition. It can persist, a living and aspiring thing, in its present emergence if, this time, it can be defended from perversion or strangulation.