The Unimagined America

by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

1

THE proposition can be put as follows: that the American future is in issue in our time as it has been in issue nly twice before; that in so far as the determination of the American future depends upon the American people, it depends upon their power to imagine such a future as they want and can believe in; that they have not imagined such a future, but seem rather to be unable or unwilling to consider what they wish their lives to be; that this failure of imagination will affect our victory in this war and may, indeed, lose us our victory.

I think it will not be questioned that the American future is in issue. There are some, I know, who do not wish to think so. There are some who would like to suppress the future for the duration of the war and to forbid the people to discuss it. They are noisy but not numerous. The great majority of the American people understand very well that this war is not a war only, but an end and a beginning — an end to things known and a beginning of things unknown. We have smelled the wind in the streets that changes weather. We know that whatever the world will be when the war ends, the world will be different.

There is hardly a meeting of three men in earnestness that does not say so. The talk about war aims, about peace aims, about post-war plans, is talk, at bottom, about nothing else but this. It is not the formal negotiation of a treaty of peace which concerns us, but the human negotiation of our personal lives: not the determination of the frontiers or the ratification of the international agreements, but the actual and present world that men will live in when the war ends.

It will not be too seriously questioned either, I believe, that the determination of the American future in this time of change depends, in so far as it depends upon ourselves, upon our power to imagine such a future as we can believe in. There is, it is true, a theory that the future of any society depends very little on the purposes of men themselves — that their systems of industry and economics determine what they must become.

That theory has not appealed to Americans. We remember that a hundred and sixty-seven years ago, at another moment of decision in our history, our predecessors did imagine such a future as they could believe in, and that the image they conceived had consequences. We remember also that after another war, a war that many living men took part in, we left the future to the laws of economics to construct. And we recall that future: it is now our past. We recall a future that should have been peace and freedom and became the radio, the automobile, and the depression of 1929.

There may be some who would like to repeat that future with cheap planes in the place of the automobile, and plastics succeeding refrigerators. There may be some, but not many. Most of us have learned the lesson once for all. Most of us know now that you do not fight a war for the privilege of buying things and then not buying them — for the privilege of becoming the world’s most numerous consumers and thereafter the world’s most numerous unemployed. Most of us know now that if you leave your future to the markets and the manufacturers to plan, you will get the future that the markets and the manufacturers can think of. And we know that future. Planes instead of cars, plastics instead of radios — we know it all. We know it and have lived it, and we don’t propose, I think, to live it through again.

Nevertheless, — and this is the strange and contradictory heart of our dilemma, — nevertheless, we are apparently not willing to propose our future for ourselves. We are unwilling or we are unable to commit the act of the imagination for ourselves — to say for ourselves what we mean our lives to be. We know, if we know anything, that the disaster of 1929 was a failure not of wealth but of will, and not of will so much as of the purpose of the will. Starvation in the midst of plenty is not a paradox. It is a declaration of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. For if the means to cure the ill exist and are not used, the failure is a failure of decision, an inability to choose. And yet, in all our present talk of change, there is no talk of choice, no talk of affirmative purpose — none, to be blunt, of a people’s dream of its future, a people’s vision of the future it proposes to create.

There is, it is true, a deep, unreasoning conviction in the minds of people here, as in the minds of people elsewhere, that this war, whatever was true of wars before, must have consequences — that anything that costs in life and suffering what this war is costing must purchase, not merely an end to itself, but something else, something admirable, something of human worth and human significance. It is a profoundly held conviction and one that neither the superior wisdom of wise men nor the cheapening cynicism of cynical men can dispose of. Those indeed who try to silence that conviction, or to laugh it off, or trick it, will end certainly where the cynical and the wise who fool with the terrible sincerity of the people have always ended. The people of the world believe that all the anguish of this generation cannot go for nothing. They believe it in spite of the lessons of history. They believe it in spite of the last war and the war before that and the war before that one.

But their belief is the passive belief of powerful hope, not the active belief of determined purpose. All our talk is of the world we should avoid and of the ways we should avoid it — how to police our enemies, how to disarm the aggressors, how to avoid unemployment, how to escape the errors of the peace we made before. At the worst we talk like fortune-tellers of the dangers we foresee. At the best we talk like lawyers of devices — ways and means.

We debate bitterly whether business should do it or government should do it, but what it is that government should do or that private business should do, we do not even ask. We argue whether to do it by air, and, if so, on what conditions; we consider the question whether to do it at home or to do it abroad, but what we propose to do by the use of the air or at home or wherever, we have not said — what we propose to do in terms of men, of men’s lives, of human realities. Never at any point or by any mouth have we talked as a virile and creative people talks in its moments of decision — as men, for example, talked in Philadelphia in a certain summer when they pledged their sacred honor, and their lives.

Our silence on these things, moreover, is not merely silence. We are not all of us mute and dumb. We have words to say. But the words are contemptuous words. We are shamefaced and selfconscious when we hear the talk of purposes — of our purpose as a nation, of our purpose to construct the greatness of this nation. The word itself and the whole conception of “planning” distress us. We think of ourselves—some of us anyway think of ourselves — as a practical, hard-headed people who aren’t taken in by utopias, who can’t be fooled by the talk about better worlds, who know too much for talk like that — a people famous for salt, ironical, practical, hard good-sense who can’t be bamboozled with talk about dreams and visions.

2

IT is a strange and curious picture of Americans. If ever a people had behind them a tradition of great purposes, tremendous dreams, the people of America have that tradition. There is not one of us, there is not a child in this Republic, who does not know the story. The whole history of our continent is a history of the imagination. Men imagined land beyond the sea and found it. Men imagined the forests, the great plains, the rivers, the mountains — and found these plains, these mountains. No force of terror, no pressure of population, drove our ancestors across this continent. They came, as the great explorers crossed the Atlantic, because of the imagination of their minds — because they imagined a better, a more beautiful, a freer, happier world; because they were men not only of courage, not only of strength and hardiness, but of warm and vivid desire; because they desired; because they had the power to desire.

And what was true of the continent was true of the Republic we created. Because our forefathers were able to conceive a free man’s government, they were able to create it. Because those who lived before us in this nation were able to imagine a new thing, a thing unheard of in the world before, a thing the skeptical and tired men who did not trust in dreams had not been able to imagine, they erected on this continent the first free nation — the first society in which mankind was to be free at last.

The courage of the Declaration of Independence is a far greater courage than the bravery of those who risked their necks to sign it. The courage of the Declaration of Independence is the courage of the act of the imagination. Jefferson’s document is not a call to revolution only. Jefferson’s document is an image of a life, a plan of life, a dream — indeed a dream. And yet there were men as careful of their own respect, as hardheaded, as practical, as eager to be thought so, as any now in public life, who signed that Declaration for the world to look at.

The truth is that the tradition of imagination is behind us as behind no people in the history of the world. But our right to live as we imagine men should live is not a right drawn from tradition only. There are nations of the earth in which the act of the imagination would be an act in the imagination only —an action of escape. But not with us.

We have, and we know we have, the abundant means to bring our boldest dreams to pass — to create for ourselves whatever world we have the courage to desire. We have the metal and the men to take this country down, if we please to take it down, and to build it again as we please to build it. We have the tools and the skill and the intelligence to take our cities apart and to put them together, to lead our roads and rivers where we please to lead them, to build our houses where we want our houses, to brighten the air, to clean the wind, to live as men in this Republic, free men, should be living. We have the power and the courage and the resources of good-will and decency and common understanding — a long experience of decency and common understanding — to enable us to live, not in this continent alone but in the world, as citizens in common of the world, with many others.

We have the power and the courage and the resources of experience to create a nation such as men have never seen. And, more than that, we have the moment of creation in our hands. Our forefathers, when they came to the New England valleys or the Appalachian meadows, girdled the trees and dragged the roots into fences and built themselves shelters and, so roughly sheltered, farmed the land for their necessities. Then, later, when there were means to do it, when there was time, when the occasion offered, they burned the tangled roots and rebuilt their fences and their houses — but rebuilt them with a difference: rebuilt them as villages, as neighborhoods; rebuilt them with those lovely streets, those schools, those churches which still speak of their conception of the world they wanted. When the means offered, when the time offered, men created, on the clearings of the early useful farms, the towns that made New England and the Alleghenies.

Now is the time for the re-creation, the rebuilding, not of the villages and towns but of a nation. Now is the time to consider that the trees are down, that the land has been broken, that the means are available and the continent itself must be rebuilt. Our necessities have been accomplished as men have always accomplished their necessities — with wastefulness, with ugliness, with cruelty, as well as with the food of harvests. Our necessities have been accomplished with the roots of the broken trees along the fences, the rough shelters, the lonely lives. Now is the time to build the continent itself— to take down and to rebuild; and not the houses and the cities only, but the life itself, raising upon the ready land the brotherhood that can employ it and delight in it and use it as a people such as ours should use it.

We stand at the moment of the building of great lives, for the war’s end and our victory in the war will throw that moment and the means before us. But to seize the moment and the means we must agree, as men in those New England valleys were agreed, upon the world we mean to bring about. We must agree upon the image of that world.

3

AND this precisely is the thing we have not done and seem incapable of doing. Neither in these years of war nor in the years before them; never since America became a land of wealth, a country of abundance, a nation which could bring its dreams to pass; never since the industrialization of the continent and the opening of its vast American resources of men and ore and grain and cloth and cattle — never have we considered as a people what we meant to be, what we desired.

When we speak of our ideal conception of ourselves, we speak still in terms of the agricultural and sparsely settled nation Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries had in mind. The ideal landscape of America which Jefferson painted hangs unaltered in the American imagination — a clean, small landscape with its isolated figures, its pleasant barns, its self-reliant rooftrecs, its horizons clear of the smoke and the fumes of cities, its air still, its frontiers protected by month-wide oceans, year-wide wildernesses. No later hand has touched it, except Lincoln’s maybe, deepening the shadow, widening the sky, broadening the acreage of the name of freedom, giving the parts a wholeness that in brighter, sharper light they lacked. For fifty years and longer it has been a landscape of a world that no man living could expect to see except behind him, a landscape no Americans could bring to being, a dream — but of the past, and not the future.

And yet we keep this image in our minds. This, and not the world beyond us, is the world we turn to: the lost, nostalgic image of a world that was the future to a generation dead a hundred years. No other image has been made to take its place. No one has dreamed a new American dream of the new America — the industrial nation of the huge machines, the limitless earth, the vast and skillful population, the mountains of copper and iron, the mile-long plants, the delicate laboratories, the tremendous dams. No one has imagined this America — what its life should be; what life it should lead with its great wealth and the tools in its hands and the men to employ them.

The plants and the factories and their products have been celebrated often enough — perhaps too often. The statistics have been added up. The camera has held its mirror to the great machines. But the central question we have never asked. What are they for, these plants and products, these statistics? What are they for in terms of a nation of men — in Jefferson’s terms? What is the ideal landscape of this new America? What are we trying to become, to bring about? What is our dream of ourselves as a great people? What would we be if we could: what would our lives be? And how will we use this skill, this wealth, this power to create those lives?

What is demanded of us in this time of change, what our whole history and our present need demand of us, is that we find the answers to these questions — that we consider what we wish this new America to be. For what we wish to be we can become.

And if we cannot wish — we shall become that also.

4

THERE are men, it is true, who believe there are no answers. There are men, and among the wisest of our time, who do not believe that an image of this new America can be conceived — who do not believe in a world of plenty; do not believe in it with their hearts whatever their senses tell them; do not believe that the lives of men can be good lives in the industrialized society which alone makes plenty possible.

Judge Learned Hand spoke not for Mr. Justice Brandeis alone, but for many others, when he summarized the Justice’s position as resting on the strong belief that “most of our positive ills have directly resulted from great size. With it has indeed come the magic of modern communication and quick transport; but out of these has come the sinister apparatus of mass suggestion and mass production. . . . The herd is regaining its ancient and evil primacy. . . . These many inventions are a step backward . . . our security has actually diminished as our demands have become more exacting: our comforts we purchase at the cost of a softer fiber, a feebler will, and an infantile suggestibility.”

And in the concluding sentences of his noble tribute to the great Justice, Judge Hand used words which many of the best of his contemporaries would speak after him without the alteration of a syllable: “You may build your Towers of Babel to the clouds; you may contrive ingeniously to circumvent Nature by devices beyond even the understanding of all but a handful; you may provide endless distractions to escape the tedium of your barren lives; you may rummage the whole planet for your case and comfort. It shall avail you nothing; the more you struggle the more deeply you will be enmeshed.”

They are eloquent words and noble words. They respond to a strong strain in the American character. But are they necessarily and inevitably true? Is it inevitable that men who contrive ingeniously to circumvent nature should live tedious and barren lives and fall into the fatness of the spirit we, as well as Justice Brandeis, have seen and hated? Is it inconceivable that men should achieve a life with the machines as disciplined and honorable and as free as the life that Jefferson believed they could achieve with mules and oxen? Is it certain that the human spirit can survive and flourish only in a world where need and hardship drive with stinging whips?

Is the fault with the machines or with ourselves? Is it because we have automobiles to ride in, because we can purchase certain commodities easily, because our presses can turn out tons of printed paper in a day, that our fiber is soft, our will feeble, our suggestibility infantile? Or is it because we do not use these things as we should use them — because we have not made them serve our moral purpose as a people, but only contribute to our private comfort as their owners?

Is the whole question indeed not a question of ourselves instead of our devices? Is it not for us to say how these devices, these inventions, should be used? Does their use not rest upon the purpose of their use? And does the purpose not depend upon our power to conceive the purpose — our power as a people to conceive the purpose of the tools we use; our power as a people to conceive and to imagine?

A hundred and fifty years ago de Crevecoeur asked a famous question1 which has echoes now: “What then is the American, this new man?” But what then is he? What then is he now? A man incapable of the act of the imagination or a man to whom it is native and natural? A man to dare the dream of plenty with all its risks and dangers, or a man to hold to the old nostalgic landscape with the simple virtues safely forced upon him by the necessary self-denial?

A man who has the courage — or the foolishness perhaps — to think a nation may have physical abundance and still retain, or still not lose, its soul? Or a man to accept the shamefaced verdict of the twenty years just past and return to the discipline of want and hunger?

A man who has the hardihood or the courage to believe that the machines which have enslaved his fathers will make his children free — free as no human beings in the world have yet known freedom; free of the twisting miseries and hungers; free to become themselves? Or a man to reject the hope of that enfranchised freedom and to seek his independence in the ancient narrow circle of his old dependence on himself?

Which of these two men is the American? We should have said a while ago we knew. We should have said the American character was self-evident: A restless man. A great builder and maker and shaper, a man delighting in size and height and dimensions: the world’s tallest.; the town’s biggest. A man never satisfied — never — with anything: his house or the town where his grandfather settled or his father’s profession or even his own, for that matter. An inveterate voyager and changer and finder. A man naturally hopeful; a believing man, believing that things progress, that things get forwarder. A skillful man with contraptions of one kind and another — machines, engines, various devices: familiar with all of them. A man of certain unquestioned convictions — of a strong, natural attachment to certain ideas and to certain ideals. But first of all and foremost of all a restless man and a believing man, a builder and changer of things and of nations.

We should have said, a generation back, there was no possible doubt or question of the will and power of this nation to propose the kind of future for itself which would employ the means of plenty for a human purpose. We should have said the principal characteristic of the American people was a confidence in the future and themselves — confidence that the future was the thing they’d make it. I cannot think, for myself, we have so changed that we do not believe this now. I cannot believe we are so changed that we’ll let ourselves go with the drag and the current of history — that we’ll let the future happen to us as the future happens to chips on a river or sheep in a blizzard; that we’ll let the peace make us: not us the peace. I cannot believe we have so changed that we do not believe in ourselves and the future.

And yet we have not done what must be done if we believe the future is the thing we’ll make it. We have not named that future.

And the time is short.

It is many years since Matthew Arnold saw his generation standing between two worlds, one dead, the other waiting to be born. Our time is still the time between these worlds; and the wars we suffer, the disasters, the uneasiness, are natural to the time we live in like the continuing and violent storms that drive the days between the seasons. We shall not have peace in truth, peace for our lives, peace for the purposes of our lives, until the world we wait for has been born. But it will not be born until we recognize it, until we shape it with our expectation and our hope. The new worlds do not bring themselves to being. Men’s minds, when they are ready for them, find them. The labor and the longing must be ours.

They must be ours as men and also — and this is the truth our generation in this country must accept — as Americans. For the future is America’s to make. It is not our future, as a few Americans have asked us to believe, to master or exploit. It is not an American future for some vast imperial enterprise, some huge dominion of the earth or sky. And yet it is our future. It is ours to shape. It is ours to shape, not because we have many planes or great numbers of ships or rich industrial resources but for a different reason: because we have the power as a people to conceive so great a future as mankind must now conceive — because we have behind us a tradition of imagination in the people.

But because we have the power we have also a responsibility to use the power. While there still is time.