American Dream

I

THE Communist Party of the United States, assembled in convention in New York City last summer, nominated its candidate for President as ‘the new John Brown of Osawatomie.’ This leather-faced Kansan, with a prairie twang in his voice, conducted a campaign which was patently not planned from Moscow. Over national radio networks, on the platforms of union meeting halls, and from a cell in the Terre Haute, Indiana, jail, he insisted on the legitimate and historical right of his followers to the title of sons and daughters of the American Revolution, and defenders of American liberty.

‘John Brown’s Body’ blared from the party’s bands in alternation with the ‘Internationale.’ The American flag festooned the rafters of the party’s meeting places. Mr. Browder’s zeal for American democracy, which led him to single out the Republican Party as the tool of big business interests, to be defeated at all costs, made his party’s campaign for the first time a factor in national political discussion.

This borrowing of American symbols was more than a political stratagem, or a knavish trick of Communist expropriation. The seventh world congress of the Communist International in Moscow a year ago had bent the ‘party line’ more sharply in this direction. But in its membership, its growing press, and its special language of exhortation, the Communist Party had for several years been naturalizing itself in the American scene.

Mr. Albert Jay Nock has properly rebuked, in the October issue of the Atlantic, the word-mongers who foist ‘impostor-terms’ upon a gullible public, twisting their meanings to serve new ends. But the true study of semantics is more than invective against philological jugglery; it is the attempt to learn the reasons for real changes in the meaning of words. The success or failure which the Communists may have in adopting the slogans of 1776 and 1861, and infusing them with new life, will show how far and why these terms have changed their meanings.

Many of them, coined or borrowed in a simpler time, when words and slogans could be held in the mouth until even their taste was fixed, have inevitably changed since they first set the pattern of American speech. Since then, the rich have compounded their riches and the poor their poverty. Mr. Browder can find ample evidence in the reports of college deans, relief administrators, or industrial-relations experts, that freedom, liberty, revolution, the American dream, are being given, in many American minds, new definitions not to be found in McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers.

Every crackpot third party may appropriate for its own purposes the word American, and the song ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ But in Mr. Browder’s campaign some of the fighting words were not mere borrowings; they were already a part of the Communist vocabulary. Even in the maze of Marxist rhetoric these words may be made for many Americans to sing with something of an older throbbing rhythm. They lose the bitter, anxious note given them in so many latter-day speeches or in Mr. Hearst’s editorials, the flatted pitch betraying fear that our liberties may be something less imperishable than the rocks and rills which cradled them. They can carry confidence and faith to millions of Americans for whom the old American dream has not yet curdled.

II

That dream itself was largely one of freedom. It was born in the hearts of men who wanted freedom enough to fight the wilderness for it. And for the greater number of them, from Daniel Boone who wanted room enough ‘to rassle b’ars in ’ to the Polish immigrant who wanted a loom and a less crowded ghetto and no more pogroms, the wilderness and its simple, natural freedom were forthcoming.

Sir Charles Lyell, English geologist, traveled through the Eastern seaboard of the United States in 1841, as openmouthed as any Englishman of his time could be at its geological wealth and at the freedom of its people. When he asked the keeper of his inn at Corning, New York, to find his coachman for him, that free-born Yankee called into the barroom: ‘ Where is the gentleman that brought this man here?’ It was, Sir Charles concluded, the young country’s chief blessing.

‘I am also aware that the blessing alluded to,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and many others which they enjoy, belong to a progressive, as contrasted with a stationary, state of society; that they characterize the new colony, where there is abundance of unoccupied land, and a ready outlet to a redundant labouring class. They are not the results of a democratic, as compared with a monarchical or aristocratic, constitution, nor the fruits of an absolute equality of religious sects, still less of universal suffrage.’

Karl Marx paraphrased Sir Charles on this point a few years later, but the identification of freedom with political liberty was already frozen in American thinking. Twenty years later, at the beginning of the Civil War, more than half the entire area of the United States, over a billion acres, still belonged to the government. The opening of the West had hardly started. So long as a man could move, and stretch his arms, and ‘ rassle ’ new bears, he was not far wrong in thinking himself free. And if he thanked the Constitution or his right to vote for this blessing of freedom, it was an error which history and the inviting, empty prairies overlooked.

To-day the sons and grandsons of these searchers for freedom have reached a full stop in the expansive pressure of a young people into its promised land. For a few hundred farmers, crowded from the soil by the relentless growth of tenancy, — which has climbed in Iowa until 60 per cent of the state’s 222,000 farms are tenantoperated in 1936, and 80 per cent are mortgaged, — there is the Matanuska Valley in Alaska. For a few hundred textile workers in New York City, whose very looms have been transported to the cheaper-labor cities of the South, there is Mr. Tugwell’s Hightstown, New Jersey, resettlement project. Both were designed as symbols to revive the old American confidence in the invincibility of the pioneer. But both serve to-day to remind Americans that there is no longer an open geographical frontier offering freedom to large numbers of those who seek it.

There are still drought and grasshoppers and business depressions and tax-collecting politicians, it is true. But without unoccupied land for a redundant laboring class the older pioneer virtues of indiv idual strength and character have been seen for nearly seven years to falter badly against even these old adversaries. You can’t ‘rassle,’ many Americans have learned, a public utility or the United States Steel Corporation.

Instead, a few have learned, you can organize. It is among these few that Mr. Browder still numbers most of his 51,000 enrolled supporters. But his party’s campaign to become a mass revolutionary party has been planned in larger figures. Only an embittered class of industrial workers can be won by talk of dialectics, proletarian dictatorship, and ‘Hands Off China.’ Besides them, the black-browed Marxist has slowly but carefully learned, he must win the support of millions of Americans who still feel themselves the sons of pioneers and who dream the great American dream.

For most of these, he argues, property has become an empty word, a memory, like stone walls and rail fences to an Iowa farmer. Where the title deeds and gilt-printed certificates have survived, the cold, enlacing grip of finance capital on management has wrenched both profit and the sense of ownership from the shell of property to which the middle class has clung. The old controversy of Marxist scholars as to the relative rates of growth of the so-called middle and working classes has been forgotten. It has been dwarfed by the blunt, unpleasant fact that every year, growing by geometrical progression through prosperity and depression, there are more men and women dependent for a living on a job, the surplus value of their labor taken from them, the spectre of unemployment staring them in the face.

The interests of these Americans, Mr. Browder and his board of strategy have seen, lie with those of the working class. Only their loyalties, the accumulated pressure of a strong tradition, keep them befuddled by a Liberty League which works for liberty only for the rich. The Communists have set out this year to change these loyalties.

They have premised their plans on the assumption that the new allegiance of these millions need not be to Moscow, but to Bunker Hill and Harper’s Ferry. They have found in the American dream issues which are fresh and vital to-day. By a policy of ‘united front’ with other groups which recognize these issues, and by working on social and economic problems which have replaced the geographical frontier, they propose to use the American dream in a new search for freedom.

III

The primary purpose of the Yankees moving westward across the American continent, and of the later Americans who came as immigrants to a country already settled, was to make a living. A better living has been the first promise they have demanded of those who wished to change their homes or their ways of thinking. In recent years the depression, unemployment, and increasing fear of an accelerating spiral of boom and panic leading to some undefined disaster have prepared many Americans to listen to tales of greener pastures.

This the Communists have recognized, and their appeal for new support rests squarely on a promise of abundance. To support the promise, they can point with powerful effect to the constricting scope of human life and enterprise in the middle-class nations of the modern world. With much less effect as yet, at least for Americans, they can cite the rising standard of living and the widening world of the Soviet Union. But while they wait for these two converging lines to meet in inevitable revolution, there are other elements of the American dream which they can shape to their own purposes.

The first of these is the desire for security. The depression has been blamed, perhaps too much, for the rising clamor which has enlisted even the Republican Party in support of the principles of social insurance. The true cause may have been rather the prosperity of postwar years, which sucked farmers to the cities and undermined the independence of the small merchant and producer. Merger and monopoly were the order of the day, and the economics of self-sufficiency were relegated to the textbooks, unlearned and unpractised.

How far this change has already gone may be seen in the increasing repudiation by large numbers of citizens, not all of them on relief rolls, of the venerable American maxim that insecurity is a necessary incentive to hard work. What would make men work, we used to ask, if it were not for the wolf at the door?

How can they work, many now ask instead, if they have no access to the tools with which to work? These are no longer the axe and flintlock with which Daniel Boone made insecurity his blessing of freedom. To-day they are jobs, for corporations, banks, and railroads, work to be done with hand or brain for someone else, and a wage at the end of the week. Even the farmers, caught in the spider web of mortgages and closing markets, have begun to learn that the incentive of fear, when independence has dried up with the free land, is small defense against the wolf.

Another traditional element of the American dream, according to the Communist analysis, is the revolt against injustice. To a nation familiar with Abolitionists, Quakers, and pacifists, this is nothing new. Even its most recent forms have only put into the conversation of increasing numbers of Americans what Ruskin knew about himself sixty-five years ago.

‘For my own part,’ he wrote, ‘I will put up with this state of things, passively, not an hour longer. I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very fight of the morning sky has become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly. Therefore, as I have said, I will endure it no longer quietly.’

I once knew a missionary in China, a man of fine, explosive moral indignation. His ancestors had been Connecticut Yankees, whose tombstones in the cemeteries of Litchfield County, the Western Reserve, Iowa, and California marked one of the trails of American history. Its last expansive thrust sent him into China, equipped with little but his Bible and the American dream. The misery he saw around him made him rage and quiver.

A few days ago I met his son, organizing unemployed workers in New Jersey. With him one of the driving forces of American life had come full circle. The religious character of the older emotional protest had changed. But no one who has seen a Yankee agitator, like this missionary’s son, forced by the misery he sees to break his silence, can doubt that his accents are those of his father, and of Emerson and of Thorcau.

Much the same ethical basis underlies still another of the elements in modern American thinking, especially that of a younger generation, on which the Communists have based their strategy and shaped their language. This is the desire for a world of ideas that makes sense. It is the belief that the values and the æsthetics of a civilized people, like its economics and its social mores, are not predestined to perpetual confusion and debasement.

It is this half-inarticulate conviction that has enlisted so many younger writers in the United States under the banner of a still-nascent proletarian literature. The treason of the intellectuals has become a series of mass desertions from the standards of a business society. The present confusion of many of these younger writers belies their avowed desire for synthesis and order. Yet large numbers of them have joined the chorus of revolt, apparently for some personal satisfaction they derive from looking at the still dim outlines of an integrated world.

It may be that the attraction to them of the Marxist world is nothing more than the ageless appeal of any church to any believer. It may be simply a rock on which to rest a weary head. But there are few such syntheses left with equally compelling vitality inside the world of middle-class culture and ideas, according to the Communists; and they claim to be embarrassed by the number of their recruits who come to them for faith alone.

All these things, it may be argued, are not new, by very token of the ease with which the Communists can find American words with which to fit them. We have sought, freedom and security before, and rebelled against injustice, and looked with patience for integration in a world that moves too fast for any simple hypothesis to hold it. Those who have failed have become cynical, but have gone on living, and there has been little change.

Some young Americans have found two new and ponderable changes, which have made the whole equation new. The first is Soviet Russia. To the imagination of a Montana wheat grower or a Detroit mechanic, hard empiricists in their American dream, the scale of Five-Year Plans and their tough and palpable reality may make them compelling visions. Americans know of their own experience that steel and wheat and machines rank high among the things for which men live.

The second is Marxism. It is not the ‘party line5 of any orthodox or schismatic group, but the tool for understanding which a few scholars, and fewer leaders, have learned to use. To the English world it is still fresh and untested; and it has the plausible ring in many ears that only those doctrines have which promise the millennium — in this case, a society without classes and without poverty, where men may be really free.

‘The objective, external forces which have hitherto dominated history,’ Engels promised, and the promise still holds good, ‘will then pass under the control of men themselves. It is only from this point that men, with full consciousness, will fashion their own history; it is only from this point that the social causes set in motion by men will have, predominantly and in constantly increasing measure, the effects willed by men. It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.’

IV

For some years it has been easy to dismiss the Communists as foreigners in the fatal sense of that term, alien to our people and to our land, speaking a language few men understood. Only out of our own soil, it was cheerfully repeated, could roots spring that would fulfill what Herbert Croly called the ‘promise of American life.’

In one sense the Communists have admitted the validity of this claim in their adoption of Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, and John Brown for their political iconology, and their campaign to capture the American dream. In another, they have repudiated it, in their steadfast insistence that there is no exception to the rules of capitalist decay.

The continent is no longer virgin, they insist. Its people count their ancestors in all the corners of the world. They make their living and sell their labor as in any other industrial country. The exceptional scale and speed of American life serve only to telescope the inexorable changes inherent in all industrial civilization. The spectre that was haunting Europe in 1848 has appeared mysteriously lurking in the shadows of America.

This spectre may not be conjured away so easily in the years to come as in the last decade. In Gary, Indiana, along the Monongahela River, on the San Francisco docks, and in the rayon mills of North Carolina, it is reported, the Communists have found new men, speaking the American tongue, unhampered by doctrinaire orders from Moscow, to spread their naturalized doctrine.

William Z. Foster, the party’s elder statesman and three times candidate for President, is the son of a Taunton, Massachusetts, carriage washer, who learned his economics not from Karl Marx but from Lester F. Ward. On a platform he chews gum with the slow, deliberate rhythm of a baseball fan. Robert Minor, Communist candidate in November for Governor of New York State, is a grandson of a first cousin to General Sam Houston, first president of Texas. At the 1936 convention he nominated, as ‘an average American,’ Earl Browder, former bookkeeper and Standard Oil employee, who wears a gold wedding ring and lives in Yonkers, speaks with the slow, dry irony of a Kansas farmer, and writes in a style that suggests a little of Daniel Webster mixed with much of ‘Sockless Jerry’ Simpson.

These men spoke at Communist meetings during the campaign to shirtsleeved mechanics and miners, organizers from Alabama textile mills, sailors and stevedores from three American coasts. Most of their lieutenants appeared to be young. Few were women. A surprising majority had Scotch or Irish names and Yankee cheekbones. On these men, more than on Browder or Foster, depends the success of this new experiment with the American dream.

Even more will it depend, perhaps, on the competition they encounter. It would be comforting to think that there was a reasonable body of ideas being shaped by liberals or conservatives to bring the old American dream into line with new realities in American life.

The depression has uprooted many families and with them many loyalties and ways of thinking. When they settle again, it will inevitably be in new patterns.

In the short run, most of these appear to be of two kinds. On the one hand, conservatives bold out the nostalgic hope of a return to the older agrarian virtues, confused themselves between the laissez-faire spirit of independence they preach and the controlled monopoly they practise. On the other hand there is a fumbling effort to trim and cut the American dream by endless compromise, a liberal muddlingthrough which promises only scarcity to the sons of men who wanted abundance and freedom.

Given time, either of these sets of ideas might bend the tradition of Daniel Boone and the American pioneer to the new and imperious demands that daily living makes on millions of confused Americans. But there may well be no time. In a world where war and Fascism are bacteria in the air we breathe, the few who see the danger and prepare to struggle against it may win the title they have claimed — spiritual inheritors of the Founding Fathers.