UNTIMELY
  PAPERS




  _BY RANDOLPH BOURNE_

  UNTIMELY
  PAPERS

  FOREWORD BY THE EDITOR

  JAMES OPPENHEIM

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH MCMXIX




  COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY B. W. HUEBSCH

  PRINTED IN U. S. A.




EDITOR’S FOREWORD


Van Wyck Brooks has said of Randolph Bourne that he was the very
type of that proletarian-aristocrat which is coming into being. When
Brooks and Waldo Frank and Louis Untermeyer and Paul Rosenfeld and
I--a nucleus at the heart of a group including so many of the “younger
generation”--were joyfully publishing _The Seven Arts_ we inevitably
found the phrase “the young world,” and by this phrase we characterized
nothing local, but a new international life, an interweaving of groups
in all countries, the unspoiled forces everywhere who share the same
culture and somewhat the same new vision of the world. There was in
it the Russian mixture of art and revolution, the one a change in the
spirit of man, the other a change in his organized life.

At first Randolph Bourne was separated from us. He had not yet ended
his apprenticeship to that “liberal pragmatism” which he effectually
destroys in “Twilight of Idols.” He was still relying on the intellect
as a programme-maker for society. But when America entered the war, his
apprenticeship ended. That shock set him free, and it was inevitable
then that he should not only join _The Seven Arts_ but actually in
himself gather us all together, himself, in America, the very soul of
“the young world.” No nerve of that world was missing in him: he was
as sensitive to art as to philosophy, as politically-minded as he was
psychologic, as brave in fighting for the conscientious objector as
he was in opposing current American culture. He was a flaming rebel
against our crippled life, as if he had taken the cue from the long
struggle with his own body. And just as that weak child’s body finally
slew him before he had fully triumphed, so the great war succeeded in
silencing him. When Randolph Bourne died on December 22, 1918, all of
us of the “younger generation” felt that a great man had died with a
great work unfinished.

He had been quite silent for over a year, for _The Seven Arts_ was
suspended in September, 1917, its subsidy withdrawn because of our
attitude on the war. He was nowhere wanted. It was difficult even for
him to get publication for book reviews. Backed only by a few friends,
he held a solitary way, with hardly the heart for new enterprise.
Nevertheless he began a book, “The State,” in which he planned the
complete expression of his attitude, both destructive and creative.
This was never finished. We have only what amounts to an essay; but
undoubtedly this essay is the most effective and terrible indictment of
the institution of the State which the war has yet brought forth. It
furnishes a natural climax to _The Seven Arts_ essays; together they
make a book, both historic and prophetic.

We have nothing else like this book in America. It is the only living
record of the suppressed minority, and is, as so often the case, the
prophecy of that minority’s final triumph. Everything that Bourne wrote
over two years ago has been vindicated by the event. A great chorus
takes up now the song of this solitary, and like so many pioneers he
has not lived to see his truth made into fact.

This book is but the first of several. We shall have, under Van Wyck
Brooks’s editorship, his volume of cultural essays, his reviews, and
a “Life and Letters.” When the complete picture of Randolph Bourne
emerges he will be seen as the pioneer spirit of his age, a symbol of
our future. His place in the American tradition is secure. His life
marks the beginning of our “coming-of-age.”

This book relates to the war and the present crisis of the world. It
does a great service for our country. Without it our showing would
be weak and impoverished compared with the Older Nations. We may
rejoice that as England had her Bertrand Russell, France her Rolland
and Barbusse, Germany her Liebknecht and Nicolai, so America had her
Randolph Bourne.




CONTENTS


       EDITOR’S FOREWORD, 5

    I--OLD TYRANNIES, 11

   II--THE WAR AND THE INTELLECTUALS, 22

  III--BELOW THE BATTLE, 47

   IV--THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN STRATEGY, 61

    V--A WAR DIARY, 90

   VI--TWILIGHT OF IDOLS, 114

  VII--UNFINISHED FRAGMENT ON THE STATE, 140




I

OLD TYRANNIES

(A Fragment, written in 1918.)


When you come as an inhabitant to this earth, you do not have the
pleasure of choosing your dwelling, or your career. You do not even
have the privilege like those poor little shivering souls in “The Blue
Bird,” of sitting about, all aware and wondering, while you are chosen,
one by one to take up your toilsome way on earth. You are a helpless
victim of your parents’ coming together. There is denied you even the
satisfaction of knowing that they created you, in their own bungling
fashion, after some manner of a work of art, or of what they imagined
an adequate child should be. On the contrary, you may be merely an
accident, unintentioned, a species of catastrophe in the life of your
mother, a drain upon the resources that were none too great already.
And your parents have not only not conceived you as a work of art, but
they are wholly incapable after you are born of bringing you up like a
work of art.

The last indignity perhaps is that of being born unconscious, like
a drugged girl who wakes up naked in a bed, not knowing how she got
there. For by the time you do dimly begin to apprehend your relation
to things and an intelligible world begins to clarify out of the buzz
and the darting lights and dull sensations, you are lost, a prisoner of
your surroundings inextricably tangled up with your mother’s soul and
all the intimate things around you. Your affections have gotten away
from your control and attached themselves to things that you in later
life discover you never intended them to touch. You depend for comfort
on attitudes of your mother or father or nurse or brothers and sisters,
that may be taken away from you, leaving you shivering and forlorn.
Your impulses have had no intuition of reality. They have leaped forth
blindly and have recoiled against or been satisfied with things of
which you did not have the choosing, and which only very partially
seem to concern themselves with your desires. For a few years, with
infinite tribulation, you have to dodge and butt and back your way
through the little world of other people and things that surround you,
until you are a little worn down to its shape and are able to predict
its reactions.

Everything about you is given, ready, constituted, rigid, set up when
you arrive. You always think that some day you are going to catch up
to this givenness, that you will dominate instead of falling in line.
Fortunate you are if you ever come to dominate! Usually as your world
broadens out more and more around you, you merely find a tougher
resistance to your desires. Your world at home is simple, personal,
appealed to by all sorts of personal manifestations. You can express
intense resentment and affect it, or you can express intense joy and
affect it. Mother and father have an invincible strength over your
feebleness, but your very feebleness is a weapon to break their harsh
domination. Their defenses melt against your scream or your chuckle. As
you grow older you become stronger to manipulate the world. But just
in proportion does the world become stronger to manipulate you. It is
no longer susceptible to your scream or your smile. You must use less
personal instruments. But that requires subtlety and knowledge. You
have still painfully to ferret out the ways of this world, and learn
how to use all sorts of unsuspected tools to gain your ends.

For there stands your old world, wary, wily, parrying easily all your
childish blows, and beating you down to your knees, so that you must
go back and learn your long apprenticeship. By the time you have
learned it, and have become master, behold! your life is inextricably
knotted into it. As you learned your apprenticeship, you did as the
world did, you learned the tricks in order that you might get your
revenge on this world and dominate it as it has tantalizingly held you
off and subjugated you. But by the time you have learned, are you not
yourself firmly established as a part of the world yourself, so that
you dominate nothing. Rather are you now a part of that very flaming
rampart against which new youth advances. You cannot help being a part
of that very rampart without extinguishing your own existence.

So you have never overtaken the given. Actually you have fallen farther
and farther behind it. You have not affected the world you live in; you
have been molded and shaped by it yourself. Your moral responsibility
has been a myth, for you were never really free enough to have any
responsibility. While you thought you were making headway, you were
really being devoured. And your children are as casually begotten as
you were, and born into a world as tight and inelastic as was yours.
You have a picture of great things achieved, but Time laughs his
ironical laugh and rolls you in the dust.

You would perhaps the more easily become free and strong if you could
choose your qualities, or regulate the strength of your impulses. But
you cannot even do that. Your ancestors have implanted in you impulses
which very seriously inhibit you and impede you in your grappling
with the world. There is anger which makes you misinterpret people’s
attitudes towards you, and makes you resist when you often should
accept. There is fear, which makes you misinterpret the unfamiliar and
haunts you with its freezing power all through life. There is love,
which ties you irrationally and too strongly first to your mother and
your father, and then to people who have no real part with you. And
there is the swift revulsion into hatred, when the loved one resists or
refuses you. These impulses, which are yours just because you are an
animal, soon become your masters, and further tie your hands in your
response to the bewildering world into which you have come.

We grow up in the home that society has shaped or coerced our parents
into accepting, we adopt the customs and language and utensils that
have established themselves for our present through a long process
of survival and invention and change. We take the education that is
given us, and finally the jobs that are handed out to us by society.
As adults, we act in the way that society expects us to act; we submit
to whatever regulations and coercions society imposes on us. We live
almost entirely a social life, that is, a life as a constituted unit
in society, rather than a free and personal one. Most people live a
life which is little more than a series of quasi-official acts. Their
conduct is a network of representations of the various codes and
institutions of society. They act in such a way in order that some
institutional or moral scripture may be fulfilled, rather than that
some deep personal direction of growth should be realized. They may
be half aware that they are not arrived at the place towards which
their ardors pointed. They may dimly realize that their outward lives
are largely a compulsion of social habit, performed, even after so
many years, with a slight grudgingness. This divorce between social
compulsion and personal desire, however, rarely rises to consciousness.
Their conscious life is divided between the mechanical performance
of their task, the attainment of their pleasures, and the wholly
uncriticized acceptance and promulgation of the opinions and attitudes
which society provides them with.

The normal, or the common, relation between society and the individual
in any society that we know of is that the individual scarcely exists.
Those persons who refuse to act as symbols of society’s folk-ways,
as counters in the game of society’s ordainings, are outlawed, and
there exists an elaborate machinery for dealing with such people.
Artists, philosophers, geniuses, tramps, criminals, eccentrics, aliens,
free-lovers and free-thinkers, and persons who challenge the most
sacred taboos, are treated with great concern by society, and in the
hue and cry after them all, respectable and responsible men unanimously
and universally join. Some are merely made uncomfortable, the light of
society’s countenance being drawn from them; others are deprived of
their liberty, placed for years in foul dungeons, or even executed. The
heaviest penalties in modern society fall upon those who violate any
of the three sacred taboos of property, sex and the State. Religion,
which was for so many centuries the most exigent and ubiquitous symbol
of society’s demand for conformity, has lapsed in these later days and
bequeathed most of its virus to the State. Society no longer demands
conformity of opinion in religion, even in those countries where
nominal adherence is still required.

There is nothing fixed about the objects to which society demands
conformity. It is only the quantity that seems to be constant. So much
conformity, like the conservation of physical energy in the universe,
but the manners in which people shall think alike, or behave, or what
objects they shall consider sacred, differ in myriad ways throughout
different social groupings and in different eras. Diametrically
opposite ideas are held in two social groups with the same vigor and
fury; diametrically opposite conduct is considered equally praiseworthy
and necessary; two social groups will visit with the same punishment
two diametrically opposite actions. To any student of primitive
societies or of the history of Western civilization, these facts are
commonplaces. But the moral is not a commonplace as yet. Yet it must
be evident that most of the customs and attitudes of these societies
were almost wholly irrational, that is, they were social habits which
persisted solely through inertia and the satisfaction they gave the
gregarious impulse. The latter had to be satisfied, so that anything
which cost the least in invention or reasoning or effort would do. The
customs, therefore, of primitive tribes seem to practically everybody
in a modern Western society outlandish and foolish. What evidence is
there that our codes and conformities which perform exactly the same
rôle, and are mostly traditional survivals, are any the less outlandish
and irrational? May they not be tainted with the same purposelessness?
Is not the inference irresistible that they are? They seem to us to
be intelligent and necessary not because we have derived them or
invented them for a clearly imagined and desired end, but because they
satisfy our need for acting in a herd, just as the primitive savage is
satisfied.

The most important fact we can realize about society is that to every
one of us that comes into the world it is something given, irreducible.
We are as little responsible for it as we are for our own birth. From
our point of view it is just as much a non-premeditated, non-created,
irrational portion of our environment, as is the weather. Entering it
in the closing years of the Nineteenth century, we find it as it exists
and as it has developed through the centuries of human change. We had
nothing whatever to do with its being as it is, and by the time we have
reached such years of discretion as dimly to understand the complex of
institutions around us, we are implicated in it and compromised by it
as to be little able to effect any change in its irresistible bulk. No
man who ever lived found himself in a different relation to society
from what we find ourselves. We all enter as individuals into an
organized herd-whole in which we are as significant as a drop of water
in the ocean, and against which we can about as much prevail. Whether
we shall act in the interests of ourselves or of society is, therefore,
an entirely academic question. For entering as we do a society which
is all prepared for us, so toughly grounded and immalleable that even
if we came equipped with weapons to assail it and make good some
individual preference, we could not in our puny strength achieve
anything against it. But we come entirely helpless.




II

THE WAR AND THE INTELLECTUALS

(June, 1917)


To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against
war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which
the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of
war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists,
college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of
literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their
intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the
war-mind on a hundred million more of the world’s people. And the
intellectuals are not content with confirming our belligerent gesture.
They are now complacently asserting that it was they who effectively
willed it, against the hesitation and dim perceptions of the American
democratic masses. A war made deliberately by the intellectuals! A
calm moral verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of inexorable
facts! Sluggish masses, too remote from the world-conflict to be
stirred, too lacking in intellect to perceive their danger! An alert
intellectual class, saving the people in spite of themselves, biding
their time with Fabian strategy until the nation could be moved into
war without serious resistance! An intellectual class, gently guiding
a nation through sheer force of ideas into what the other nations
entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist
madness! A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that will
secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the world! This
is the picture which the more self-conscious intellectuals have
formed of themselves, and which they are slowly impressing upon a
population which is being led no man knows whither by an indubitably
intellectualized President. And they are right, in that the war
certainly did not spring from either the ideals or the prejudices,
from the national ambitions or hysterias, of the American people,
however acquiescent the masses prove to be, and however clearly the
intellectuals prove their putative intuition.

Those intellectuals who have felt themselves totally out of sympathy
with this drag toward war will seek some explanation for this
joyful leadership. They will want to understand this willingness of
the American intellect to open the sluices and flood us with the
sewage of the war spirit. We cannot forget the virtuous horror and
stupefaction which filled our college professors when they read the
famous manifesto of their ninety-three German colleagues in defense
of their war. To the American academic mind of 1914 defense of war
was inconceivable. From Bernhardi it recoiled as from a blasphemy,
little dreaming that two years later would find it creating its own
cleanly reasons for imposing military service on the country and for
talking of the rough rude currents of health and regeneration that
war would send through the American body politic. They would have
thought any one mad who talked of shipping American men by the hundreds
of thousands--conscripts--to die on the fields of France. Such a
spiritual change seems catastrophic when we shoot our minds back to
those days when neutrality was a proud thing. But the intellectual
progress has been so gradual that the country retains little sense of
the irony. The war sentiment, begun so gradually but so perseveringly
by the preparedness advocates who came from the ranks of big business,
caught hold of one after another of the intellectual groups. With
the aid of Roosevelt, the murmurs became a monotonous chant, and
finally a chorus so mighty that to be out of it was at first to be
disreputable and finally almost obscene. And slowly a strident rant
was worked up against Germany which compared very creditably with the
German fulminations against the greedy power of England. The nerve of
the war-feeling centered, of course, in the richer and older classes
of the Atlantic seaboard, and was keenest where there were French or
English business and particularly social connections. The sentiment
then spread over the country as a class-phenomenon, touching everywhere
those upper-class elements in each section who identified themselves
with this Eastern ruling group. It must never be forgotten that in
every community it was the least liberal and least democratic elements
among whom the preparedness and later the war sentiment was found.
The farmers were apathetic, the small business men and workingmen
are still[1] apathetic towards the war. The election was a vote of
confidence of these latter classes in a President who would keep the
faith of neutrality. The intellectuals, in other words, have identified
themselves with the least democratic forces in American life. They
have assumed the leadership for war of those very classes whom the
American democracy has been immemorially fighting. Only in a world
where irony was dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head
of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-liberalism and
world-democracy. No one is left to point out the undemocratic nature
of this war-liberalism. In a time of faith, skepticism is the most
intolerable of all insults.

Our intellectual class might have been occupied, during the last two
years of war, in studying and clarifying the ideals and aspirations
of the American democracy, in discovering a true Americanism which
would not have been merely nebulous but might have federated the
different ethnic groups and traditions. They might have spent the time
in endeavoring to clear the public mind of the cant of war, to get rid
of old mystical notions that clog our thinking. We might have used the
time for a great wave of education, for setting our house in spiritual
order. We could at least have set the problem before ourselves. If
our intellectuals were going to lead the administration, they might
conceivably have tried to find some way of securing peace by making
neutrality effective. They might have turned their intellectual energy
not to the problem of jockeying the nation into war, but to the problem
of using our vast neutral power to attain democratic ends for the rest
of the world and ourselves without the use of the malevolent technique
of war. They might have failed. The point is that they scarcely tried.
The time was spent not in clarification and education, but in a mulling
over of nebulous ideals of democracy and liberalism and civilization
which had never meant anything fruitful to those ruling classes who
now so glibly used them, and in giving free rein to the elementary
instinct of self-defense. The whole era has been spiritually wasted.
The outstanding feature has been not its Americanism but its intense
colonialism. The offense of our intellectuals was not so much that they
were colonial--for what could we expect of a nation composed of so
many national elements?--but that it was so one-sidedly and partisanly
colonial. The official, reputable expression of the intellectual class
has been that of the English colonial. Certain portions of it have been
even more loyalist than the King, more British even than Australia.
Other colonial attitudes have been vulgar. The colonialism of the other
American stocks was denied a hearing from the start. America might
have been made a meeting-ground for the different national attitudes.
An intellectual class, cultural colonists of the different European
nations, might have threshed out the issues here as they could not
be threshed out in Europe. Instead of this, the English colonials
in university and press took command at the start, and we became an
intellectual Hungary where thought was subject to an effective process
of Magyarization. The reputable opinion of the American intellectuals
became more and more either what could be read pleasantly in London,
or what was written in an earnest effort to put Englishmen straight
on their war-aims and war-technique. This Magyarization of thought
produced as a counter-reaction a peculiarly offensive and inept German
apologetic, and the two partisans divided the field between them. The
great masses, the other ethnic groups, were inarticulate. American
public opinion was almost as little prepared for war in 1917 as it was
in 1914.

The sterile results of such an intellectual policy are inevitable.
During the war the American intellectual class has produced almost
nothing in the way of original and illuminating interpretation.
Veblen’s “Imperial Germany”; Patten’s “Culture and War,” and addresses;
Dewey’s “German Philosophy and Politics”; a chapter or two in Weyl’s
“American Foreign Policies”;--is there much else of creative value in
the intellectual repercussion of the war? It is true that the shock of
war put the American intellectual to an unusual strain. He had to sit
idle and think as spectator not as actor. There was no government to
which he could docilely and loyally tender his mind as did the Oxford
professors to justify England in her own eyes. The American’s training
was such as to make the fact of war almost incredible. Both in his
reading of history and in his lack of economic perspective he was badly
prepared for it. He had to explain to himself something which was too
colossal for the modern mind, which outran any language or terms which
we had to interpret it in. He had to expand his sympathies to the
breaking-point, while pulling the past and present into some sort of
interpretative order. The intellectuals in the fighting countries had
only to rationalize and justify what their country was already doing.
Their task was easy. A neutral, however, had really to search out the
truth. Perhaps perspective was too much to ask of any mind. Certainly
the older colonials among our college professors let their prejudices
at once dictate their thought. They have been comfortable ever since.
The war has taught them nothing and will teach them nothing. And they
have had the satisfaction, under the rigor of events, of seeing
prejudice submerge the intellects of their younger colleagues. And they
have lived to see almost their entire class, pacifists and democrats
too, join them as apologists for the “gigantic irrelevance” of war.

We have had to watch, therefore, in this country the same process which
so shocked us abroad,--the coalescence of the intellectual classes
in support of the military programme. In this country, indeed, the
socialist intellectuals did not even have the grace of their German
brothers and wait for the declaration of war before they broke for
cover. And when they declared for war they showed how thin was the
intellectual veneer of their socialism. For they called us in terms
that might have emanated from any bourgeois journal to defend democracy
and civilization, just as if it was not exactly against those very
bourgeois democracies and capitalist civilizations that socialists had
been fighting for decades. But so subtle is the spiritual chemistry of
the “inside” that all this intellectual cohesion--herd-instinct become
herd-intellect--which seemed abroad so hysterical and so servile, comes
to us here in highly rational terms. We go to war to save the world
from subjugation! But the German intellectuals went to war to save
their culture from barbarization! And the French went to war to save
their beautiful France! And the English to save international honor!
And Russia, most altruistic and self-sacrificing of all, to save a
small State from destruction! Whence is our miraculous intuition of our
moral spotlessness? Whence our confidence that history will not unravel
huge economic and imperialist forces upon which our rationalizations
float like bubbles? The Jew often marvels that his race alone should
have been chosen as the true people of the cosmic God. Are not our
intellectuals equally fatuous when they tell us that our war of all
wars is stainless and thrillingly achieving for good?

An intellectual class that was wholly rational would have called
insistently for peace and not for war. For months the crying need has
been for a negotiated peace, in order to avoid the ruin of a deadlock.
Would not the same amount of resolute statesmanship thrown into
intervention have secured a peace that would have been a subjugation
for neither side? Was the terrific bargaining power of a great neutral
ever really used? Our war followed, as all wars follow, a monstrous
failure of diplomacy. Shamefacedness should now be our intellectuals’
attitude, because the American play for peace was made so little more
than a polite play. The intellectuals have still to explain why,
willing as they now are to use force to continue the war to absolute
exhaustion, they were not willing to use force to coerce the world to a
speedy peace.

Their forward vision is no more convincing than their past rationality.
We go to war now to internationalize the world! But surely their
League to Enforce Peace is only a palpable apocalyptic myth, like
the syndicalists’ myth of the “general strike.” It is not a rational
programme so much as a glowing symbol for the purpose of focusing
belief, of setting enthusiasm on fire for international order. As far
as it does this it has pragmatic value, but as far as it provides a
certain radiant mirage of idealism for this war and for a world-order
founded on mutual fear, it is dangerous and obnoxious. Idealism
should be kept for what is ideal. It is depressing to think that the
prospect of a world so strong that none dare challenge it should be
the immediate ideal of the American intellectual. If the League is
only a makeshift, a coalition into which we enter to restore order,
then it is only a description of existing fact, and the idea should be
treated as such. But if it is an actually prospective outcome of the
settlement, the keystone of American policy, it is neither realizable
nor desirable. For the programme of such a League contains no provision
for dynamic national growth or for international economic justice. In
a world which requires recognition of economic internationalism far
more than of political internationalism, an idea is reactionary which
proposes to petrify and federate the nations as political and economic
units. Such a scheme for international order is a dubious justification
for American policy. And if American policy had been sincere in its
belief that our participation would achieve international beatitude,
would we not have made our entrance into the war conditional upon a
solemn general agreement to respect in the final settlement these
principles of international order? Could we have afforded, if our war
was to end war by the establishment of a league of honor, to risk the
defeat of our vision and our betrayal in the settlement? Yet we are in
the war, and no such solemn agreement was made, nor has it even been
suggested.

The case of the intellectuals seems, therefore, only very speciously
rational. They could have used their energy to force a just peace
or at least to devise other means than war for carrying through
American policy. They could have used their intellectual energy to
ensure that our participation in the war meant the international
order which they wish. Intellect was not so used. It was used to lead
an apathetic nation into an irresponsible war, without guarantees
from those belligerents whose cause we were saving. The American
intellectual, therefore, has been rational neither in his hindsight nor
his foresight. To explain him we must look beneath the intellectual
reasons to the emotional disposition. It is not so much what they
thought as how they felt that explains our intellectual class.
Allowing for colonial sympathy, there was still the personal shock in
a world-war which outraged all our preconceived notions of the way
the world was tending. It reduced to rubbish most of the humanitarian
internationalism and democratic nationalism which had been the
emotional thread of our intellectuals’ life. We had suddenly to make a
new orientation. There were mental conflicts. Our latent colonialism
strove with our longing for American unity. Our desire for peace strove
with our desire for national responsibility in the world. That first
lofty and remote and not altogether unsound feeling of our spiritual
isolation from the conflict could not last. There was the itch to be in
the great experience which the rest of the world was having. Numbers
of intelligent people who had never been stirred by the horrors of
capitalistic peace at home were shaken out of their slumber by the
horrors of war in Belgium. Never having felt responsibility for labor
wars and oppressed masses and excluded races at home, they had a large
fund of idle emotional capital to invest in the oppressed nationalities
and ravaged villages of Europe. Hearts that had felt only ugly contempt
for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with the struggle for
freedom abroad. All this was natural, but it tended to over-emphasize
our responsibility. And it threw our thinking out of gear. The task of
making our own country detailedly fit for peace was abandoned in favor
of a feverish concern for the management of the war, advice to the
fighting governments on all matters, military, social and political,
and a gradual working up of the conviction that we were ordained as a
nation to lead all erring brothers towards the light of liberty and
democracy. The failure of the American intellectual class to erect a
creative attitude toward the war can be explained by these sterile
mental conflicts which the shock to our ideals sent raging through us.

Mental conflicts end either in a new and higher synthesis or
adjustment, or else in a reversion to more primitive ideas which have
been outgrown but to which we drop when jolted out of our attained
position. The war caused in America a recrudescence of nebulous ideals
which a younger generation was fast outgrowing because it had passed
the wistful stage and was discovering concrete ways of getting them
incarnated in actual institutions. The shock of the war threw us back
from this pragmatic work into an emotional bath of these old ideals.
There was even a somewhat rarefied revival of our primitive Yankee
boastfulness, the reversion of senility to that republican childhood
when we expected the whole world to copy our republican institutions.
We amusingly ignored the fact that it was just that Imperial German
régime, to whom we are to teach the art of self-government, which our
own Federal structure, with its executive irresponsible in foreign
policy and with its absence of parliamentary control, most resembles.
And we are missing the exquisite irony of the unaffected homage paid
by the American democratic intellectuals to the last and most detested
of Britain’s tory premiers as the representative of a “liberal” ally,
as well as the irony of the selection of the best hated of America’s
bourbon “old guard” as the missionary of American democracy to Russia.

The intellectual state that could produce such things is one where
reversion has taken place to more primitive ways of thinking. Simple
syllogisms are substituted for analysis, things are known by their
labels, our heart’s desire dictates what we shall see. The American
intellectual class, having failed to make the higher syntheses,
regresses to ideas that can issue in quick, simplified action. Thought
becomes any easy rationalization of what is actually going on or what
is to happen inevitably to-morrow. It is true that certain groups
did rationalize their colonialism and attach the doctrine of the
inviolability of British sea-power to the doctrine of a League of
Peace. But this agile resolution of the mental conflict did not become
a higher synthesis, to be creatively developed. It gradually merged
into a justification for our going to war. It petrified into a dogma
to be propagated. Criticism flagged and emotional propaganda began.
Most of the socialists, the college professors and the practitioners
of literature, however, have not even reached this high-water mark of
synthesis. Their mental conflicts have been resolved much more simply.
War in the interests of democracy! This was almost the sum of their
philosophy. The primitive idea to which they regressed became almost
insensibly translated into a craving for action. War was seen as the
crowning relief of their indecision. At last action, irresponsibility,
the end of anxious and torturing attempts to reconcile peace-ideals
with the drag of the world towards Hell. An end to the pain of trying
to adjust the facts to what they ought to be! Let us consecrate the
facts as ideal! Let us join the greased slide towards war! The momentum
increased. Hesitations, ironies, consciences, considerations,--all were
drowned in the elemental blare of doing something aggressive, colossal.
The new-found Sabbath “peacefulness of being at war”! The thankfulness
with which so many intellectuals lay down and floated with the current
betrays the hesitation and suspense through which they had been. The
American university is a brisk and happy place these days. Simple,
unquestioning action has superseded the knots of thought. The thinker
dances with reality.

With how many of the acceptors of war has it been mostly a dread of
intellectual suspense? It is a mistake to suppose that intellectuality
necessarily makes for suspended judgments. The intellect craves
certitude. It takes effort to keep it supple and pliable. In a time of
danger and disaster we jump desperately for some dogma to cling to.
The time comes, if we try to hold out, when our nerves are sick with
fatigue, and we seize in a great healing wave of release some doctrine
that can be immediately translated into action. Neutrality meant
suspense, and so it became the object of loathing to frayed nerves. The
vital myth of the League of Peace provides a dogma to jump to. With war
the world becomes motor again and speculation is brushed aside like
cobwebs. The blessed emotion of self-defense intervenes too, which
focused millions in Europe. A few keep up a critical pose after war
is begun, but since they usually advise action which is in one-to-one
correspondence with what the mass is already doing, their criticism is
little more than a rationalization of the common emotional drive.

The results of war on the intellectual class are already apparent.
Their thought becomes little more than a description and justification
of what is going on. They turn upon any rash one who continues idly to
speculate. Once the war is on, the conviction spreads that individual
thought is helpless, that the only way one can count is as a cog in
the great wheel. There is no good holding back. We are told to dry
our unnoticed and ineffective tears and plunge into the great work.
Not only is every one forced into line, but the new certitude becomes
idealized. It is a noble realism which opposes itself to futile
obstruction and the cowardly refusal to face facts. This realistic
boast is so loud and sonorous that one wonders whether realism is
always a stern and intelligent grappling with realities. May it not be
sometimes a mere surrender to the actual, an abdication of the ideal
through a sheer fatigue from intellectual suspense? The pacifist is
roundly scolded for refusing to face the facts, and for retiring into
his own world of sentimental desire. But is the realist, who refuses
to challenge or criticize facts, entitled to any more credit than that
which comes from following the line of least resistance? The realist
thinks he at least can control events by linking himself to the forces
that are moving. Perhaps he can. But if it is a question of controlling
war, it is difficult to see how the child on the back of a mad elephant
is to be any more effective in stopping the beast than is the child
who tries to stop him from the ground. The ex-humanitarian, turned
realist, sneers at the snobbish neutrality, colossal conceit, crooked
thinking, dazed sensibilities, of those who are still unable to find
any balm of consolation for this war. We manufacture consolations here
in America while there are probably not a dozen men fighting in Europe
who did not long ago give up every reason for their being there except
that nobody knew how to get them away.

But the intellectuals whom the crisis has crystallized into an
acceptance of war have put themselves into a terrifyingly strategic
position. It is only on the craft, in the stream, they say, that
one has any chance of controlling the current forces for liberal
purposes. If we obstruct, we surrender all power for influence. If we
responsibly approve, we then retain our power for guiding. We will
be listened to as responsible thinkers, while those who obstructed
the coming of war have committed intellectual suicide and shall be
cast into outer darkness. Criticism by the ruling powers will only
be accepted from those intellectuals who are in sympathy with the
general tendency of the war. Well, it is true that they may guide,
but if their stream leads to disaster and the frustration of national
life, is their guiding any more than a preference whether they shall
go over the right-hand or the left-hand side of the precipice?
Meanwhile, however, there is comfort on board. Be with us, they call,
or be negligible, irrelevant. Dissenters are already excommunicated.
Irreconcilable radicals, wringing their hands among the débris, become
the most despicable and impotent of men. There seems no choice for
the intellectual but to join the mass of acceptance. But again the
terrible dilemma arises,--either support what is going on, in which
case you count for nothing because you are swallowed in the mass and
great incalculable forces bear you on; or remain aloof, passively
resistant, in which case you count for nothing because you are outside
the machinery of reality.

Is there no place left, then, for the intellectual who cannot yet
crystallize, who does not dread suspense, and is not yet drugged with
fatigue? The American intellectuals, in their preoccupation with
reality, seem to have forgotten that the real enemy is War rather than
imperial Germany. There is work to be done to prevent this war of ours
from passing into popular mythology as a holy crusade. What shall we do
with leaders who tell us that we go to war in moral spotlessness, or
who make “democracy” synonymous with a republican form of government?
There is work to be done in still shouting that all the revolutionary
by-products will not justify the war, or make war anything else than
the most noxious complex of all the evils that afflict men. There must
be some to find no consolation whatever, and some to sneer at those who
buy the cheap emotion of sacrifice. There must be some irreconcilables
left who will not even accept the war with walrus tears. There must be
some to call unceasingly for peace, and some to insist that the terms
of settlement shall be not only liberal but democratic. There must
be some intellectuals who are not willing to use the old discredited
counters again and to support a peace which would leave all the old
inflammable materials of armament lying about the world. There must
still be opposition to any contemplated “liberal” world-order founded
on military coalitions. The “irreconcilable” need not be disloyal. He
need not even be “impossibilist.” His apathy towards war should take
the form of a heightened energy and enthusiasm for the education, the
art, the interpretation that make for life in the midst of the world of
death. The intellectual who retains his animus against war will push
out more boldly than ever to make his case solid against it. The old
ideals crumble; new ideals must be forged. His mind will continue to
roam widely and ceaselessly. The thing he will fear most is premature
crystallization. If the American intellectual class rivets itself to a
“liberal” philosophy that perpetuates the old errors, there will then
be need for “democrats” whose task will be to divide, confuse, disturb,
keep the intellectual waters constantly in motion to prevent any such
ice from ever forming.




III

BELOW THE BATTLE

(July, 1917)


He is one of those young men who, because his parents happened to mate
during a certain ten years of the world’s history, has had now to put
his name on a wheel of fate, thereby submitting himself to be drawn
into a brief sharp course of military training before being shipped
across the sea to kill Germans or be killed by them. He does not like
this fate that menaces him, and he dislikes it because he seems to find
nothing in the programme marked out for him which touches remotely
his aspirations, his impulses, or even his desires. My friend is not
a happy young man, but even the unsatisfactory life he is living
seems supplemented at no single point by the life of the drill-ground
or the camp or the stinking trench. He visualizes the obscenity of
the battlefield and turns away in nausea. He thinks of the weary
regimentation of young men, and is filled with disgust. His mind has
turned sour on war and all that it involves. He is poor material for
the military proclamation and the drill-sergeant.

I want to understand this friend of mine, for he seems rather typical
of a scattered race of young Americans of to-day. He does not fall
easily into the categories of patriot and coward which the papers
are making popular. He feels neither patriotism nor fear, only an
apathy toward the war, faintly warmed into a smoldering resentment
at the men who have clamped down the war-pattern upon him and that
vague mass of people and ideas and workaday living around him that he
thinks of as his country. Now that resentment has knotted itself into
a tortured tangle of what he should do, how he can best be true to
his creative self? I should say that his apathy cannot be imputed to
cowardly ease. My friend earns about fifteen hundred dollars a year as
an architect’s assistant, and he lives alone in a little room over a
fruitshop. He worked his way through college, and he has never known
even a leisurely month. There is nothing Phæacian about his life. It
is scarcely to save his skin for riotous living that he is reluctant
about war. Since he left college he has been trying to find his world.
He is often seriously depressed and irritated with himself for not
having hewed out a more glorious career for himself. His work is
just interesting enough to save it from drudgery, and yet not nearly
independent and exacting enough to give him a confident professional
sense. Outside his work, life is deprived and limited rather than
luxurious. He is fond of music and goes to cheap concerts. He likes
radical meetings, but never could get in touch with the agitators. His
friends are seeking souls just like himself. He likes midnight talks
in cafés and studios, but he is not especially amenable to drink. His
heart of course is hungry and turbid, but his two or three love-affairs
have not clarified anything for him. He eats three rather poor
restaurant meals a day. When he reads, it is philosophy--Nietzsche,
James, Bergson--or the novels about youth--Rolland, Nexö, Cannan,
Frenssen, Beresford. He has a rather constant mood of futility, though
he is in unimpeachable health. There are moments when life seems quite
without sense or purpose. He has enough friends, however, to be not
quite lonely, and yet they are so various as to leave him always with
an ache for some more cohesive, purposeful circle. His contacts with
people irritate him without rendering him quite unhopeful. He is always
expecting he doesn’t know quite what, and always being frustrated of he
doesn’t quite know what would have pleased him. Perhaps he never had a
moment of real external or internal ease in his life.

Obviously a creature of low vitality, with neither the broad vision to
be stirred by the President’s war-message, nor the red blood to itch
for the dummy bayonet-charge. Yet somehow he does not seem exactly
weak, and there is a consistency about his attitude which intrigues
me. Since he left college eight years ago, he has been through most of
the intellectual and emotional fads of the day. He has always cursed
himself for being so superficial and unrooted, and he has tried to
write a little of the thoughts that stirred him. What he got down
on paper was, of course, the usual large vague feeling of a new time
that all of us feel. With the outbreak of the Great War, most of his
socialist and pacifist theories were knocked flat. The world turned out
to be an entirely different place from what he had thought it. Progress
and uplift seemed to be indefinitely suspended, though it was a long
time before he realized how much he had been corroded by the impact of
news and the endless discussions he heard. I think he gradually worked
himself into a truly neutral indifference. The reputable people and
the comfortable classes who were having all the conventional emotions
rather disgusted him. The neurotic fury about self-defense seemed to
come from types and classes that he instinctively detested. He was
not scared, and somehow he could not get enthusiastic about defending
himself with “preparedness” unless he were badly scared. Things got
worse. All that he valued seemed frozen until the horrible mess came to
a close. He had gone to an unusually intelligent American college, and
he had gotten a feeling for a humane civilization that had not left
him. The war, it is true, bit away piece by piece every ideal that made
this feeling seem plausible. Most of the big men--intellectuals--whom
he thought he respected had had so much of their idealism hacked away
and got their nerves so frayed that they became at last, in their
panic, willing and even eager to adopt the war-technique in aid of
their government’s notions of the way to impose democracy on the world.

My poor young friend can best be understood as too naïve and too
young to effect this metamorphosis. Older men might mix a marvelous
intellectual brew of personal anger, fear, a sense of “dishonor,”
fervor for a League of Peace, and set going a machinery that crushed
everything intelligent, humane and civilized. My friend was less
flexible. War simply did not mix with anything that he had learned to
feel was desirable. Something in his mind spewed it out whenever it was
suggested as a cure for our grievous American neutrality. As I got all
this from our talks, he did not seem weak. He merely had no notion of
the patriotism that meant the springing of a nation to arms. He read
conscientiously _The New Republic’s_ feast of eloquent idealism, with
its appealing harbingers of a cosmically efficacious and well-bred
war. He would often say, This is all perfectly convincing; why, then,
are we not all convinced? He seemed to understand the argument for
American participation. We both stood in awe at the superb intellectual
structure that was built up. But my friend is one of those unfortunate
youths whose heart has to apprehend as well as his intellect, and it
was his heart that inexorably balked. So he was in no mood to feel
the worth of American participation, in spite of the infinite tact
and Fabian strategy of the Executive and his intellectualist backers.
He felt apart from it all. He had not the imagination to see a healed
world-order built out of the rotten materials of armaments, diplomacy
and “liberal” statesmanship. And he wasn’t affected by the psychic
complex of panic, hatred, rage, class-arrogance and patriotic swagger
that was creating in newspaper editors and in the “jeunesse dorée”
around us the authentic élan for war.

My friend is thus somehow in the nation but not of the nation. The
war has as yet got no conceivable clutch on his soul. He knows
that theoretically he is united with a hundred million in purpose,
sentiment and deed for an idealistic war to defend democracy and
civilization against predatory autocracy. Yet somehow, in spite of all
the excitement, nobody has as yet been able to make this real to him.
He is healthy, intelligent, idealistic. The irony is that the demand
which his country now makes on him is one to which not one single cell
or nerve of idealism or desire responds. The cheap and silly blare
of martial life leaves him cold. The easy inflation of their will to
power which is coming to so many people from their participation in
volunteer or government service, or, better still, from their urging
others to farm, enlist, invest, retrench, organize,--none of this
allures him. His life is uninteresting and unadventurous, but it is not
quite dull enough to make this activity or anything he knows about war
seem a release into lustier expression. He has ideals but he cannot see
their realization through a desperate struggle to the uttermost. He
doubts the “saving” of an America which can only be achieved through
world-suicide. He wants democracy, but he does not want the kind of
democracy we will get by this war enough to pay the suicidal cost of
getting it in the way we set about it.

_Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_, sweet and becoming is it to die
for one’s country. This is the young man who is suddenly asked to die
for his country. My friend was much concerned about registration. He
felt coercive forces closing in upon him. He did not want to register
for the purposes of being liable to conscription. It would be doing
something positive when he felt only apathy. Furthermore, if he was
to resist, was it not better to take a stand now than to wait to be
drafted? On the other hand, was it not too much of a concession to
rebel at a formality? He did not really wish to be a martyr. Going
to prison for a year for merely refusing to register was rather a
grotesque and futile gesture. He did not see himself as a hero,
shedding inspiration by his example to his fellows. He did not care
what others did. His objection to prison was not so much fear perhaps
as contempt for a silly sacrifice. He could not keep up his pose of
complete aliency from the war-enterprise, now that registration
was upon him. Better submit stoically, he thought, to the physical
pressure, mentally reserving his sense of spiritual aliency from the
enterprise into which he was being remorselessly molded. Yet my friend
is no arrant prig. He does not pretend to be a “world-patriot,” or
a servant of some higher law than his country’s. Nor does he feel
blatantly patriotic. With his groping philosophy of life, patriotism
has merely died as a concept of significance for him. It is to him
merely the emotion that fills the herd when it imagines itself engaged
in massed defense or massed attack. Having no such images, he has no
feeling of patriotism. He still feels himself inextricably a part of
this blundering, wistful, crass civilization we call America. All he
asks is not to be identified with it for warlike ends. He does not feel
pro-German. He tells me there is not a drop of any but British blood in
his veins. He does not love the Kaiser. He is quite willing to believe
that it is the German government and not the German people whom he is
asked to fight, although it may be the latter whom he is obliged to
kill. But he cannot forget that it is the American government rather
than the American people who got up the animus to fight the German
government. He does not forget that the American government, having
through tragic failure slipped into the war-technique, is now trying
to manipulate him into that war-technique. And my friend’s idea of
_patria_ does not include the duty of warlike animus, even when the
government decides such animus is necessary to carry out its theories
of democracy and the future organization of the world. There are ways
in which my friend would probably be willing to die for his country.
If his death now meant the restoration of those ravaged lands and the
bringing back of the dead, that would be a cause to die for. But he
knows that the dead cannot be brought back or the brotherly currents
restored. The work of madness will not be undone. Only a desperate war
will be prolonged. Everything seems to him so mad that there is nothing
left worth dying for. _Pro patria mori_, to my friend, means something
different from lying gaunt as a conscript on a foreign battlefield,
fallen in the last desperate fling of an interminable world-war.

Does this mean that if he is drafted he will refuse to serve? I do
not know. It will not be any plea of “conscientious objection” that
keeps him back. That phrase to him has already an archaic flavor
which implies a ruling norm, a stiff familiar whom he must obey in
the matter. It implies that one would be delighted to work up one’s
blood-lust for the business, except that this unaccountable conscience,
like a godly grandmother, absolutely forbids. In the case of my friend,
it will not be any objective “conscience.” It will be something that
is woven into his whole modern philosophic feel for life. This is what
paralyzes him against taking one step toward the war-machine. If he
were merely afraid of death, he would seek some alternative service.
But he does not. He remains passive and apathetic, waiting for the
knife to fall. There is a growing cynicism in him about the brisk and
inept bustle of war-organization. His attitude suggests that if he is
worked into war-service, he will have to be coerced every step of the
way.

Yet he may not even rebel. He may go silently into the ranks in a mood
of cold contempt. His horror of useless sacrifice may make even the
bludgeoning of himself seem futile. He may go in the mood of so many
young men in the other countries, without enthusiasm, without idealism,
without hope and without belief, victims of a tragically blind force
behind them. No other government, however, has had to face from the
very start quite this appalling skepticism of youth. My friend is
significant because all the shafts of panic, patriotism and national
honor have been discharged at him without avail. All the seductions of
“liberal” idealism leave him cold. He is to be susceptible to nothing
but the use of crude, rough, indefeasible violence. Nothing could be
more awkward for a “democratic” President than to be faced with this
cold, staring skepticism of youth, in the prosecution of his war. The
attitude of my friend suggests that there is a personal and social
idealism in America which is out of reach of the most skillful and
ardent appeals of the older order, an idealism that cannot be hurt
by the taunts of cowardice and slacking or kindled by the slogans
of capitalistic democracy. This is the cardinal fact of our war--the
non-mobilization of the younger intelligentsia.

What will they do to my friend? If the war goes on they will need him.
Pressure will change skepticism into bitterness. That bitterness will
well and grow. If the country submissively pours month after month
its wealth of life and resources into the work of annihilation, that
bitterness will spread out like a stain over the younger American
generation. If the enterprise goes on endlessly, the work, so blithely
undertaken for the defense of democracy, will have crushed out the only
genuinely precious thing in a nation, the hope and ardent idealism of
its youth.




IV

THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN STRATEGY

(August, 1917)


In the absorbing business of organizing American participation in
the war, public opinion seems to be forgetting the logic of that
participation. It was for the purpose of realizing certain definite
international ideals that the American democracy consented to be led
into war. The meeting of aggression seemed to provide the immediate
pretext, but the sincere intellectual support of the war came from
minds that hoped ardently for an international order that would prevent
a recurrence of world-war. Our action they saw as efficacious toward
that end. It was almost wholly upon this ground that they justified
it and themselves. The strategy which they suggested was very
carefully worked out to make our participation count heavily toward the
realization of their ideals. Their justification and their strategy
alike were inseparably bound up with those ideals. It was implicit
in their position that any alteration in the ideals would affect the
strategy and would cast suspicion upon their justification. Similarly
any alteration in the strategy would make this liberal body of opinion
suspicious of the devotion of the Government to those ideals, and would
tend to deprive the American democracy of any confident morale it might
have had in entering the war. The American case hung upon the continued
perfect working partnership of ideals, strategy and morale.

In the eyes of all but the most skeptical radicals, American entrance
into the war seemed to be marked by a singularly perfect union of
these three factors. The President’s address to Congress on April
2, supported by the December Peace note and the principles of the
famous Senate address, gave the Government and American “liberalism”
an apparently unimpeachable case. A nation which had resisted for so
long a time the undertow of war, which had remained passive before
so many provocations and incitements, needed the clearest assurance
of unselfish purpose to carry it through the inevitable chaos and
disillusionment of adopting a war-technique. That moment seemed to
give this assurance. But it needed not only a clear, but a steady
and unwavering assurance. It had to see day by day, in each move of
war-policy which the Administration made, an unmistakable step toward
the realization of the ideals for which the American people had
consented to come into the war. American hesitation was overcome only
by an apparently persuasive demonstration that priceless values of
civilization were at stake. The American people could only be prevented
from relapsing into their first hesitation, and so demoralizing the
conduct of the war, by the sustained conviction that the Administration
and the Allied governments were fighting single-mindedly for the
conservation of those values. It is therefore pertinent to ask how this
conviction has been sustained and how accurately American strategy has
been held to the justifying of our participation in the war. It is
pertinent to ask whether the prevailing apathy may not be due to the
progressive weakening of the assurance that our war is being in any
way decisive in the securing of the values for which we are presumably
fighting.

It will not be forgotten that the original logic of American
participation hung primarily upon the menace of Germany’s renewed
submarine campaign. The case for America’s entrance became presumably
irresistible only when the safety of the British Commonwealth and of
the Allies and neutrals who use the Atlantic highway was at stake.
American liberal opinion had long ago decided that the logic of our
moral neutrality had passed. American isolation was discredited as it
became increasingly evident how urgent was our duty to participate
in the covenant of nations which it was hoped would come out of the
settlement. We were bound to contribute our resources and our good-will
to this enterprise. Our position made it certain that however we acted
we should be the deciding factor. But up to February first, 1917, it
was still an arguable question in the minds of “liberals” whether we
could best make that contribution through throwing in our lot with the
more pacific nations or by continuing a neutrality benevolent toward
their better cause. For this benevolent neutrality, however strained,
was still endurable, particularly when supplemented by the hope of
mediation contained in the “peace without victory” maneuvers and the
principles of the Senate speech.

This attempt to bring about a negotiated peace, while the United States
was still nominally neutral, but able to bring its colossal resources
against the side which refused to declare its terms, marked the
high-water level of American strategy.

For a negotiated peace, achieved before either side had reached
exhaustion and the moral disaster was not irremediable, would have been
the most hopeful possible basis for the covenant of nations. And the
United States, as the effective agent in such a negotiated peace and as
the most powerful neutral, might have assumed undisputed leadership in
such a covenant.

The strategy of “peace without victory” failed because of the refusal
of Germany to state her terms. The war went on from sheer lack of a
common basis upon which to work out a settlement. American strategy
then involved the persistent pressure of mediation. The submarine
menace, however, suddenly forced the issue. The safety of the seas, the
whole Allied cause, seemed suddenly in deadly peril. In the emergency
benevolent neutrality collapsed. Liberal opinion could find no other
answer to the aggression than war. In the light of the sequel those
radicals who advocated a policy of “armed neutrality” seem now to
have a better case. For American action obtained momentum from the
imminence of the peril. The need was for the immediate guarantee of
food and ships to the menaced nations and for the destruction of the
attacking submarines. “Armed neutrality” suggested a way of dealing
promptly and effectively with the situation. The providing of loans,
food, ships, convoys, could ostensibly have taken place without a
declaration of war, and without developing the country’s morale or
creating a vast military establishment. It was generally believed that
time was the decisive factor. The decision for war has therefore meant
an inevitable and perhaps fatal course of delay. It was obvious that
with our well-known unpreparedness of administrative technique, the
lack of coördination in industry, and the unreadiness of the people and
Congress for coercion, war meant the practical postponement of action
for months. In such an emergency that threatened us, our only chance
to serve was in concentrating our powers. Until the disorganization
inherent in a pacific democracy was remedied, our only hope of
effective aid would come from focusing the country’s energies on a
ship and food programme, supplemented by a naval programme devised
realistically to the direct business at hand. The war could be most
promptly ended by convincing the German government that the submarine
had no chance of prevailing against the endless American succor which
was beginning to raise the siege and clear the seas.

The decision, however, was for war, and for a “thorough” war.
This meant the immediate throwing upon the national machinery of
far more activity than it could handle. It meant attaching to a
food and ship programme a military programme, a loan programme, a
censorship programme. All these latter have involved a vast amount
of advertising, of agitation, of discussion, and dissension. The
country’s energies and attention have been drained away from the simple
exigencies of the situation and from the technique of countering the
submarine menace and ending the war. Five months have passed since
the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare. We have done nothing
to overcome the submarine. The food and ship programmes are still
unconsolidated. The absorption of Congress and the country in the
loan and the conscript army and the censorship has meant just so much
less absorption in the vital and urgent technique to provide which we
entered the war. The country has been put to work at a vast number of
activities which are consonant to the abstract condition of war, but
which may have little relation to the particular situation in which
this country found itself and to the particular strategy required.
The immediate task was to prevent German victory in order to restore
the outlines of our strategy toward a negotiated peace. War has been
impotent in that immediate task. Paradoxically, therefore, our very
participation was a means of weakening our strategy. We have not
overcome the submarine or freed the Atlantic world. Our entrance has
apparently made not a dent in the morale of the German people. The
effect of our entrance, it was anticipated by liberals, would be the
shortening of the war. Our entrance has rather tended to prolong it.
Liberals were mistaken about the immediate collapse of the British
Commonwealth. It continued to endure the submarine challenge without
our material aid. We find ourselves, therefore, saddled with a
war-technique which has compromised rather than furthered our strategy.

This war-technique compromises the outlines of American strategy
because instead of making for a negotiated peace it has had the
entirely unexpected result of encouraging those forces in the Allied
countries who desire _la victoire intégrale_, the “knockout blow.” In
the President’s war-message the country was assured that the principles
of the negotiated peace remained quite unimpaired. The strategy that
underlay this, it will be remembered, was to appeal to the Teutonic
peoples over the heads of their rulers with terms so liberal that the
peoples would force their governments to make peace. The strategy of
the American government was, while prosecuting the war, to announce
its war-aims and to persuade the Allies to announce their war-aims in
such terms as would split the peoples of the Central Powers from their
governments, thus bringing more democratic régimes that would provide
a fruitful basis for a covenant of nations. We entered the war with
no grievances of our own. It was our peculiar rôle to continue the
initiative for peace, both by unmistakably showing our own purpose for
a just peace based on some kind of international organization and by
wielding a steady pressure on the Entente governments to ratify our
programme. If we lost this initiative for peace, or if we were unable
or unwilling to press the Entente toward an unmistakable liberalism,
our strategy broke down and our justification for entering the war
became seriously impaired. For we could then be charged with merely
aiding the Entente’s ambiguous scheme of European reorganization.

The success of this strategy of peace depended on a stern disavowal
of the illiberal programmes of groups within the Allied countries
and a sympathetic attitude toward the most democratic programmes
of groups within the enemy Powers. Anything which weakened either
this disavowal or this sympathy would imperil our American case. As
potential allies in this strategy the American government had within
the enemies’ gates the followers of Scheidemann who said at the last
sitting of the Reichstag: “If the Entente Powers should renounce all
claims for annexation and indemnity and if the Central Powers should
insist on continuing the war, a revolution will certainly result in
Germany.” It is not inconceivable that the American government and the
German socialists had at the back of their minds the same kind of a
just peace. The fact that the German socialists were not opposing the
German government did not mean that any peace move in which the former
were interested was necessarily a sinister Hohenzollern intrigue. The
bitterest enemies of Hollweg were not the radicals but the Pan-Germans
themselves. It is they who were said to be circulating manifestoes
through the army threatening revolution unless their programme of
wholesale annexations is carried out. Whatever liberal reservoir
of power there is in Germany, therefore, remains in the socialist
ranks. If there is any chance of liberal headway against the sinister
Pan-German campaign it is through this nucleus of liberal power.
American strategy, if it has to find a liberal leverage in Germany,
will have to choose the socialist group as against the Pan-Germans.
It is not absolutely necessary to assume that the support of the
Chancellor by the socialist majority is permanent. It is unplausible
that the Scheidemann group coöperates with the Government for peace
merely to consolidate the Junker and military class in power after
the war. It is quite conceivable that the socialist majority desires
peace in order to have a safe basis for a liberal overturn. Revolution,
impossible while the Fatherland is in danger, becomes a practicable
issue as soon as war is ended. A policy of aiding the Government in its
pressure toward peace, in order to be in a tactical position to control
the Government when the war-peril was ended, would be an extremely
astute piece of statesmanship. There is no evidence that the German
socialists are incapable of such far-sighted strategy. Certainly the
“German peace” of a Scheidemann is bound to be entirely different from
the “German peace” of a Hindenburg. This difference is one of the
decisive factors of the American strategy. To ignore it is to run the
risk of postponing and perhaps obstructing the settlement of the war.

It is these considerations that make the refusal of passports to
the American socialists seem a serious weakening of the American
strategy. A conference of responsible socialists from the different
countries might have clarified the question how far a Russian peace or
a Scheidemann peace differed from the structure of a Wilson peace. By
denying American participation in the conference, the Administration
apparently renounced the opportunity to make contact with liberal
leverage in Germany. It refused to take that aggressive step in
cleaving German opinion which was demanded by its own strategy. It
tended to discourage liberal opinion in Germany and particularly
it discouraged the Russian democracy which was enthusiastic for a
socialist conference.

This incident was symptomatic of the lessened adjustment which the
Administration has shown toward the changing situation. It was the
hope of the American liberals who advocated American entrance into
the war that this country would not lose thereby its initiative for
peace. They believed that our entrance would make our mediating
power actually stronger. That hope has been disappointed through the
unexpected radicalism of the new Russian government. The initiative for
peace was bound to lie with the people that most wanted peace and was
willing to make the most peremptory demands upon the Allied governments
that they state the war-aims that would bring it. This tactic was an
integral part of the original American strategy. The American liberals
trusted the President to use American participation as an instrument in
liberalizing the war-aims of all the Allied governments. In the event,
however, it has not been America that has wanted peace sufficiently to
be peremptory about it. It has been Russia. The initiative for peace
has passed from President Wilson into the hands of the Council of
Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies. It is the latter who have brought the
pressure to declare democratic war-aims. It is their dissatisfaction
with the original Allied statement that has brought these new, if
scarcely more satisfactory, declarations. In this discussion between
the Governments regarding the restatement of war-aims, it was not upon
Russia’s side that this country found itself. The President’s note to
Russia had all the tone of a rebuke. It sounded like the reaction of
a Government which--supposedly itself the leader in the campaign for
a just peace--found itself uncomfortably challenged to state its own
sincerity. The key to our American strategy has been surrendered to
Russia. The plain fact is that the President has lost that position of
leader which a Russian candor would have retained for him.

What is more serious is that the note to Russia implied not only his
loss of the initiative for a negotiated peace but even the desire for
it. “The day has come when we must conquer or submit.” This has a
very strange ring coming from a President who in his very war-message
still insisted that he had not altered in any way the principles of
his “peace without victory” note. The note to Russia did not attempt
to explain how “peace without victory” was to be reconciled with
“conquer or submit,” nor has any such explanation been forthcoming.
The implication is that the entire strategy of the negotiated peace
has passed out of American hands into those of Russia, and that this
country is committed to the new strategy of the “knockout blow.” If
this is true, then we have the virtual collapse of the strategy, and
with it the justification, of our entrance into the war.

Whether American strategy has changed or not, the effect upon opinion
in the Allied countries seems to be as if it had. Each pronouncement of
America’s war-aims is received with disconcerting unanimity in England,
France and Italy as ratifying their own aspirations and policies. Any
hint that Allied policies disagree with ours is received with marked
disfavor by our own loyal press. When we entered the war, the Allied
aims stood as stated in their reply to the President’s December note.
This reply was then interpreted by American liberals as a diplomatic
programme of maximum demands. They have therefore called repeatedly
upon the President to secure from the Allied governments a resolution
of the ambiguities and a revision of the more extreme terms, in order
that we might make common cause with them toward a just peace. In this
campaign the American liberals have put themselves squarely on the side
of the new Russia, which has also clamored for a clear and liberal
statement of what the war is being fought for. Unfortunately the
Administration has been unable or unwilling to secure from the Allies
any such resolution or revision. The Russian pressure has elicited
certain statements, which, however, proved little more satisfactory to
the Russian radicals than the original statement. Our own war-aims have
been stated in terms as ambiguous and unsatisfactory as those of the
Allies. Illiberal opinion in the other countries has not been slow in
seizing upon President Wilson’s pronouncements as confirming all that
their hearts could wish. Most significant has been the satisfaction of
Italian imperialistic opinion, the most predatory and illiberal force
in any Allied country. The President has done nothing to disabuse
Italian minds of their belief. He has made no disavowal of the Allied
reactionary ratification. The sharp divergence of interpretation
between the Allied governments and the Russian radicals persists. In
lieu of any clear statement to the contrary, opinion in the Allied
countries has good ground for believing that the American government
will back up whatever of their original programme can be carried
through. Particularly is this true after the President’s chiding of
Russia. The animus behind the enthusiasm for Pershing in France is
the conviction that American force will be the decisive factor in the
winning back of Alsace-Lorraine. It is no mere sentimental pleasure at
American alliance. It is an immense stiffening of the determination to
hold out to the uttermost, to the “peace with victory” of which Ribot
speaks. Deluded France carries on the war to complete exhaustion on
the strength of the American millions who are supposedly rushing to
save her. The immediate effect of American participation in England and
Italy as well has been an intense will to hold out not for the “peace
without victory” but _pour la victoire intégrale_, for the conquest so
crushing that Germany will never be feared again.

Now the crux of American strategy was the liberalization of Allied
policy in order that that peace might be obtained which was a hopeful
basis for a League of Nations. American participation has evidently not
gone one inch toward liberalizing the Allies. We are further from the
negotiated peace than we were in December, though the only change in
the military and political situation is the Russian revolution which
immensely increased the plausibility of that peace. As Allied hope of
victory grows, the covenant of nations fades into the background. And
it is Allied hope of victory that our participation has inflamed and
augmented.

The President’s Flag Day address marks without a doubt the collapse of
American strategy. That address, coupled with the hints of “effective
readjustments” in the note to Russia, implies that America is ready to
pour out endless blood and treasure, not to the end of a negotiated
peace, but to the utter crushing of the Central Powers, to their
dismemberment and political annihilation. The war is pictured in that
address as a struggle to the death against the military empire of
Mittel-Europa. The American rôle changes from that of mediator in the
interest of international organization to that of formidable support
to the breaking of this menace to the peace and liberty of Europe. It
will be remembered that American liberals interpreted our entrance into
the war as primarily defensive, an enterprise to prevent Germany’s
threatened victory on the sea. We came in, not to secure an Allied
“peace with victory,” but to prevent a German “peace with victory,” and
so restore the situation favorable to a negotiated peace. The strategy
of the negotiated peace depended largely on the belief that a military
decision was either impossible or was not worth the colossal sacrifice
it demanded. But it is only as the result of a sweeping military
decision that any assured destruction of Mittel-Europa could come. In
basing his case on Mittel-Europa, therefore, the President has clearly
swung from a strategy of “peace without victory” to a strategy of “war
to exhaustion for the sake of a military decision.” He implies that a
country which came only after hesitation to the defense of the seas
and the Atlantic world will contentedly pour out its indefinite blood
and treasure for the sake of spoiling the coalition of Mittel-Europa
and of making readjustments in the map of Europe effective against
German influence on the Continent. Such an implication means the “end
of American isolation” with a vengeance. No one can be blamed who sees
in the Flag Day Address the almost unlimited countersigning of Allied
designs and territorial schemes.

The change of American strategy to a will for a military decision would
explain the creation of the vast American army which in the original
policy was required only “as a reserve and a precaution.” It explains
our close coöperation with the Allied governments following the visits
of the Missions. An American army of millions would undoubtedly
be a decisive factor in the remaking of the map of Europe and the
permanent garrisoning of strategic points bearing upon Germany. But
this change of strategy does not explain itself. The continental
military and political situation has not altered in any way which
justifies so fundamental an alteration in American strategy. American
liberals justified our entrance into the war as a response to a sudden
exigency. But the menace of Mittel-Europa has existed ever since the
entrance of Bulgaria in 1915. If it now challenges us and justifies
our change of strategy, it challenged us and justified our assault a
full two years ago. American shudders at its bogey are doubly curious
because it is probably less of a menace now than it has ever been.
President Wilson ignores the effect of a democratic Russia on the
success of such a military coalition. Such heterogeneous states could
be held together only through the pressure of a strong external fear.
But the passing of predatory Russia removes that fear. Furthermore,
Bulgaria, the most democratic of the Balkan States, would always be
an uncertain partner in such a coalition. Bagdad has long been in
British hands. There are strong democratic and federalistic forces at
work in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The materials seem less ready
than ever for the creation of any such predatory and subjugated Empire
as the Flag Day Address describes. Whatever the outcome of the war,
there is likely to result an economic union which could bring needed
civilization to neglected and primitive lands. But such a union would
be a blessing to Europe rather than a curse. It was such a union that
England was on the point of granting to Germany when the war broke out.
The Balkans and Asia Minor need German science, German organization,
German industrial development. We can hardly be fighting to prevent
such German influence in these lands. The irony of the President’s
words lies in the fact that the hopes of Mittel-Europa as a military
coalition seem to grow dimmer rather than brighter. He must know that
this “enslavement” of the peoples of which he speaks can only be
destroyed by the peoples themselves and not at the imposition of a
military conqueror. The will to resist this Prussian enslavement seems
to have been generated in Austro-Hungary. The President’s perspective
is belated. If our fighting to crush this amazing plot is justified
now, it was more than justified as soon as Rumania was defeated. The
President convicts himself of criminal negligence in not urging us into
the war at that time. If our rôle was to aid in conquest, we could not
have begun our work too soon.

The new strategy is announced by the President in no uncertain
terms--“The day has come when we must conquer or submit.” But the
strategy of conquest implies the necessity of means for consolidating
the conquest. If the world is to be made safe for democracy, democracy
must to a certain extent be imposed on the world. There is little
point in conquering unless you carry through the purposes for which
you have conquered. The earlier American strategy sought to bring
democracy to Germany by appealing directly to the democratic forces
in Germany itself. We relied on a self-motivated regeneration on the
part of our enemy. We believed that democracy could be imposed only
from within. If the German people cannot effect their own political
reorganization, nobody can do it for them. They would continue to
prefer the native Hohenzollerns to the most liberal government imposed
by their conquering enemies. A Germany forced to be democratic under
the tutelage of a watchful and victorious Entente would indeed be
a constant menace to the peace of Europe. Just so far then as our
changed American strategy contributes toward a conquest over Germany,
it will work against our desire to see that country spontaneously
democratized. There is reason for hope that democracy will not have to
be forced on Germany. From the present submission of the German people
to the war-régime nothing can be deduced as to their subserviency after
the war. Prodigious slaughter will effect profound social changes.
There may be going on a progressive selection in favor of democratic
elements. The Russian army was transformed into a democratic instrument
by the wiping-out in battle of the upper-class officers. Men of
democratic and revolutionary sympathies took their places. A similar
process may happen in the German army. The end of the war may leave
the German “army of the people” a genuine popular army intent upon
securing control of the civil government. Furthermore, the continuance
of Pan-German predatory imperialism depends on a younger generation
of Junkers to replace the veterans now in control. The most daring
of those aristocrats will almost certainly have been destroyed in
battle. The mortality in upper-class leadership will certainly have
proved far larger than the mortality in lower-class leadership. The
maturing of these tendencies is the hope of German democracy. A speedy
ending of the war, before the country is exhausted and the popular
morale destroyed, is likely best to mature these tendencies. In this
light it is almost immaterial what terms are made. Winning or losing,
Germany cannot replace her younger generation of the ruling class. And
without a ruling class to continue the imperial tradition, democracy
could scarcely be delayed. An enfeebled ruling class could neither hold
a vast world military Empire together nor resist the revolutionary
elements at home. The prolongation of the war delays democracy in
Germany by convincing the German people that they are fighting for
their very existence and thereby forcing them to cling even more
desperately to their military leaders. In announcing an American
strategy of “conquer or submit,” the President virtually urges the
German people to prolong the war. And not only are the German people,
at the apparent price of their existence, tacitly urged to continue the
fight to the uttermost, but the Allied governments are tacitly urged to
wield the “knockout blow.” All those reactionary elements in England,
France and Italy, whose spirits drooped at the President’s original
bid for a negotiated peace, now take heart again at this apparent
countersigning of their most extreme programmes.

American liberals who urged the nation to war are therefore suffering
the humiliation of seeing their liberal strategy for peace transformed
into a strategy for prolonged war. This government was to announce such
war-aims as should persuade the peoples of the Central Powers to make
an irresistible demand for a democratic peace. Our initiative with the
Allied governments was to make this peace the basis of an international
covenant, “the creation of a community of limited independencies,” of
which Norman Angell speaks. Those Americans who opposed our entrance
into the war believed that this object could best be worked for by
a strategy of continued neutrality and the constant pressure of
mediation. They believed that war would defeat the strategy for a
liberal peace. The liberal intellectuals who supported the President
felt that only by active participation on an independent basis could
their purposes be achieved. The event has signally betrayed them.
We have not ended the submarine menace. We have lost all power for
mediation. We have not even retained the democratic leadership among
the Allied nations. We have surrendered the initiative for peace. We
have involved ourselves in a moral obligation to send large armies to
Europe to secure a military decision for the Allies. We have prolonged
the war. We have encouraged the reactionary elements in every Allied
country to hold out for extreme demands. We have discouraged the German
democratic forces. Our strategy has gradually become indistinguishable
from that of the Allies. With the arrival of the British Mission our
“independent basis” became a polite fiction. The President’s Flag
Day Address merely registers the collapse of American strategy. All
this the realistic pacifists foresaw when they held out so bitterly
and unaccountably against our entering the war. The liberals felt a
naïve faith in the sagacity of the President to make their strategy
prevail. They looked to him single-handedly to liberalize the liberal
nations. They trusted him to use a war-technique which should consist
of an olive-branch in one hand and a sword in the other. They have
had to see their strategy collapse under the very weight of that
war-technique. Guarding neutrality, we might have counted toward a
speedy and democratic peace. In the war, we are a rudderless nation, to
be exploited as the Allies wish, politically and materially, and towed,
to their aggrandizement, in any direction which they may desire.




V

A WAR DIARY

(September, 1917)


I

Time brings a better adjustment to the war. There had been so many
times when, to those who had energetically resisted its coming, it
seemed the last intolerable outrage. In one’s wilder moments one
expected revolt against the impressment of unwilling men and the
suppression of unorthodox opinion. One conceived the war as breaking
down through a kind of intellectual sabotage diffused through the
country. But as one talks to people outside the cities and away from
ruling currents of opinion, one finds the prevailing apathy shot
everywhere with acquiescence. The war is a bad business, which somehow
got fastened on us. They don’t want to go, but they’ve got to go.
One decides that nothing generally obstructive is going to happen
and that it would make little difference if it did. The kind of war
which we are conducting is an enterprise which the American government
does not have to carry on with the hearty coöperation of the American
people but only with their acquiescence. And that acquiescence seems
sufficient to float an indefinitely protracted war for vague or even
largely uncomprehended and unaccepted purposes. Our resources in men
and materials are vast enough to organize the war-technique without
enlisting more than a fraction of the people’s conscious energy. Many
men will not like being sucked into the actual fighting organism, but
as the war goes on they will be sucked in as individuals and they
will yield. There is likely to be no element in the country with the
effective will to help them resist. They are not likely to resist of
themselves concertedly. They will be licked grudgingly into military
shape, and their lack of enthusiasm will in no way unfit them for use
in the hecatombs necessary for the military decision upon which Allied
political wisdom still apparently insists. It is unlikely that enough
men will be taken from the potentially revolting classes seriously
to embitter their spirit. Losses in the well-to-do classes will be
sustained by a sense of duty and of reputable sacrifice. From the point
of view of the worker, it will make little difference whether his
work contributes to annihilation overseas or to construction at home.
Temporarily, his condition is better if it contributes to the former.
We of the middle-classes will be progressively poorer than we should
otherwise have been. Our lives will be slowly drained by clumsily
levied taxes and the robberies of imperfectly controlled private
enterprises. But this will not cause us to revolt. There are not likely
to be enough hungry stomachs to make a revolution. The materials seem
generally absent from the country, and as long as a government wants to
use the war-technique in its realization of great ideas, it can count
serenely on the human resources of the country, regardless of popular
mandate or understanding.


II

If human resources are fairly malleable into the war-technique, our
material resources will prove to be even more so, quite regardless
of the individual patriotism of their owners or workers. It is almost
purely a problem of diversion. Factories and mines and farms will
continue to turn out the same products and at an intensified rate, but
the government will be working to use their activity and concentrate
it as contributory to the war. The process which the piping times of
benevolent neutrality began will be pursued to its extreme end. All
this will be successful, however, precisely as it is made a matter of
centralized governmental organization and not of individual offerings
of good-will and enterprise. It will be coercion from above that will
do the trick rather than patriotism from below. Democratic contentment
may be shed over the land for a time through the appeal to individual
thoughtfulness in saving and in relinquishing profits. But all that is
really needed is the coöperation with government of the men who direct
the large financial and industrial enterprises. If their interest is
enlisted in diverting the mechanism of production into war-channels,
it makes not the least difference whether you or I want our activity
to count in aid of the war. Whatever we do will contribute toward its
successful organization, and toward the riveting of a semi-military
State-socialism on the country. As long as the effective managers,
the “big men” in the staple industries remained loyal, nobody need
care what the millions of little human cogs who had to earn their
living felt or thought. This is why the technical organization for
this American war goes on so much more rapidly than any corresponding
popular sentiment for its aims and purposes. Our war is teaching us
that patriotism is really a superfluous quality in war. The government
of a modern organized plutocracy does not have to ask whether the
people want to fight or understand what they are fighting for, but
only whether they will tolerate fighting. America does not coöperate
with the President’s designs. She rather feebly acquiesces. But that
feeble acquiescence is the all-important factor. We are learning that
war doesn’t need enthusiasm, doesn’t need conviction, doesn’t need
hope, to sustain it. Once maneuvered, it takes care of itself, provided
only that our industrial rulers see that the end of the war will
leave American capital in a strategic position for world-enterprise.
The American people might be much more indifferent to the war even
than they are and yet the results would not be materially different.
A majority of them might even be feebly or at least unconcertedly
hostile to the war, and yet it would go gaily on. That is why a popular
referendum seems so supremely irrelevant to people who are willing
to use war as an instrument in the working-out of national policy.
And that is why this war, with apathy rampant, is probably going to
act just as if every person in the country were filled with patriotic
ardor, and furnished with a completely assimilated map of the League to
Enforce Peace. If it doesn’t, the cause will not be the lack of popular
ardor, but the clumsiness of the government officials in organizing the
technique of the war. Our country in war, given efficiency at the top,
can do very well without our patriotism. The non-patriotic man need
feel no pangs of conscience about not helping the war. Patriotism fades
into the merest trivial sentimentality when it becomes, as so obviously
in a situation like this, so pragmatically impotent. As long as one
has to earn one’s living or buy tax-ridden goods, one is making one’s
contribution to war in a thousand indirect ways. The war, since it does
not need it, cannot fairly demand also the sacrifice of one’s spiritual
integrity.


III

The “liberals” who claim a realistic and pragmatic attitude in politics
have disappointed us in setting up and then clinging wistfully to
the belief that our war could get itself justified for an idealistic
flavor, or at least for a world-renovating social purpose, that
they had more or less denied to the other belligerents. If these
realists had had time in the hurry and scuffle of events to turn their
philosophy on themselves, they might have seen how thinly disguised a
rationalization this was of their emotional undertow. They wanted a
League of Nations. They had an unanalyzable feeling that this was a war
in which we had to be, and be in it we would. What more natural than
to join the two ideas and conceive our war as the decisive factor in
the attainment of the desired end! This gave them a good conscience
for willing American participation, although as good men they must
have loathed war and everything connected with it. The realist cannot
deny facts. Moreover, he must not only acknowledge them but he must
use them. Good or bad, they must be turned by his intelligence to some
constructive end. Working along with the materials which events give
him, he must get where and what he can, and bring something brighter
and better out of the chaos.

Now war is such an indefeasible and unescapable Real that the good
realist must accept it rather comprehensively. To keep out of it is
pure quietism, an acute moral failure to adjust. At the same time,
there is an inexorability about war. It is a little unbridled for the
realist’s rather nice sense of purposive social control. And nothing
is so disagreeable to the pragmatic mind as any kind of an absolute.
The realistic pragmatist could not recognize war as inexorable--though
to the common mind it would seem as near an absolute, coercive social
situation as it is possible to fall into. For the inexorable abolishes
choices, and it is the essence of the realist’s creed to have, in
every situation, alternatives before him. He gets out of his scrape
in this way: Let the inexorable roll in upon me, since it must. But
then, keeping firm my sense of control, I will somehow tame it and
turn it to my own creative purposes. Thus realism is justified of her
children, and the “liberal” is saved from the limbo of the wailing and
irreconcilable pacifists who could not make so easy an adjustment.

Thus the “liberals” who made our war their own preserved their
pragmatism. But events have shown how fearfully they imperilled their
intuition and how untameable an inexorable really is. For those of
us who knew a real inexorable when we saw one, and had learned from
watching war what follows the loosing of a war-technique, foresaw how
quickly aims and purposes would be forgotten, and how flimsy would be
any liberal control of events. It is only we now who can appreciate
_The New Republic_--the organ of applied pragmatic realism--when
it complains that the League of Peace (which we entered the war to
guarantee) is more remote than it was eight months ago; or that our
State Department has no diplomatic policy (though it was to realize
the high aims of the President’s speeches that the intellectuals
willed American participation); or that we are subordinating the
political management of the war to real or supposed military
advantages, (though militarism in the liberal mind had no justification
except as a tool for advanced social ends). If after all the idealism
and creative intelligence that were shed upon America’s taking up of
arms, our State Department has no policy, we are like brave passengers
who have set out for the Isles of the Blest only to find that the first
mate has gone insane and jumped overboard, the rudder has come loose
and dropped to the bottom of the sea, and the captain and pilot are
lying dead drunk under the wheel. The stokers and engineers, however,
are still merrily forcing the speed up to twenty knots an hour and the
passengers are presumably getting the pleasure of the ride.


IV

The penalty the realist pays for accepting war is to see disappear
one by one the justifications for accepting it. He must either become
a genuine Realpolitiker and brazen it through, or else he must feel
sorry for his intuition and regretful that he willed the war. But
so easy is forgetting and so slow the change of events that he is
more likely to ignore the collapse of his case. If he finds that his
government is relinquishing the crucial moves of that strategy for
which he was willing to use the technique of war, he is likely to move
easily to the ground that it will all come out in the end the same
anyway. He soon becomes satisfied with tacitly ratifying whatever
happens, or at least straining to find the grain of unplausible hope
that may be latent in the situation.

But what then is there really to choose between the realist who
accepts evil in order to manipulate it to a great end, but who
somehow unaccountably finds events turn sour on him, and the Utopian
pacifist who cannot stomach the evil and will have none of it? Both
are helpless, both are coerced. The Utopian, however, knows that he
is ineffective and that he is coerced, while the realist, evading
disillusionment, moves in a twilight zone of half-hearted criticism,
and hopings for the best, where he does not become a tacit fatalist.
The latter would be the manlier position, but then where would be his
realistic philosophy of intelligence and choice? Professor Dewey has
become impatient at the merely good and merely conscientious objectors
to war who do not attach their conscience and intelligence to forces
moving in another direction. But in wartime there are literally no
valid forces moving in another direction. War determines its own
end--victory, and government crushes out automatically all forces that
deflect, or threaten to deflect, energy from the path of organization
to that end. All governments will act in this way, the most democratic
as well as the most autocratic. It is only “liberal” naïveté that
is shocked at arbitrary coercion and suppression. Willing war means
willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it. A good
many people still seem to believe in a peculiar kind of democratic and
antiseptic war. The pacifists opposed the war because they knew this
was an illusion, and because of the myriad hurts they knew war would do
the promise of democracy at home. For once the babes and sucklings seem
to have been wiser than the children of light.


V

If it is true that the war will go on anyway whether it is popular
or not or whether its purposes are clear, and if it is true that in
wartime constructive realism is an illusion, then the aloof man, the
man who will not obstruct the war but who cannot spiritually accept it,
has a clear case for himself. Our war presents no more extraordinary
phenomenon than the number of the more creative minds of the younger
generation who are still irreconcilable toward the great national
enterprise which the government has undertaken. The country is still
dotted with young men and women, in full possession of their minds,
faculties and virtue, who feel themselves profoundly alien to the work
which is going on around them. They must not be confused with the
disloyal or the pro-German. They have no grudge against the country,
but their patriotism has broken down in the emergency. They want
to see the carnage stopped and Europe decently constructed again.
They want a democratic peace. If the swift crushing of Germany will
bring that peace, they want to see Germany crushed. If the embargo
on neutrals will prove the decisive coup, they are willing to see
the neutrals taken ruthlessly by the throat. But they do not really
believe that peace will come by any of these means, or by any use of
our war-technique whatever. They are genuine pragmatists and they fear
any kind of an absolute, even when bearing gifts. They know that the
longer a war lasts the harder it is to make peace. They know that the
peace of exhaustion is a dastardly peace, leaving enfeebled the morale
of the defeated, and leaving invincible for years all the most greedy
and soulless elements in the conquerors. They feel that the greatest
obstacle to peace now is the lack of the powerful mediating neutral
which we might have been. They see that war has lost for us both the
mediation and the leadership, and is blackening us ever deeper with
the responsibility for having prolonged the dreadful tangle. They are
skeptical not only of the technique of war, but also of its professed
aims. The President’s idealism stops just short of the pitch that would
arouse their own. There is a middle-aged and belated taint about the
best ideals which publicist liberalism has been able to express. The
appeals to propagate political democracy leave these people cold in
a world which has become so disillusioned of democracy in the face of
universal economic servitude. Their ideals outshoot the government’s.
To them the real arena lies in the international class-struggle,
rather than in the competition of artificial national units. They
are watching to see what the Russian socialists are going to do for
the world, not what the timorous capitalistic American democracy may
be planning. They can feel no enthusiasm for a League of Nations,
which should solidify the old units and continue in disguise the old
theories of international relations. Indispensable, perhaps? But not
inspiring; not something to give one’s spiritual allegiance to. And yet
the best advice that American wisdom can offer to those who are out
of sympathy with the war is to turn one’s influence toward securing
that our war contribute toward this end. But why would not this League
turn out to be little more than a well-oiled machine for the use of
that enlightened imperialism toward which liberal American finance
is already whetting its tongue? And what is enlightened imperialism
as an international ideal as against the anarchistic communism of
the nations which the new Russia suggests in renouncing imperialist
intentions?


VI

Skeptical of the means and skeptical of the aims, this element of the
younger generation stands outside the war, and looks upon the conscript
army and all the other war-activities as troublesome interruptions on
its thought and idealism, interruptions which do not touch anywhere
a fiber of its soul. Some have been much more disturbed than others,
because of the determined challenge of both patriots and realists
to break in with the war-obsession which has filled for them their
sky. Patriots and realists can both be answered. They must not be
allowed to shake one’s inflexible determination not to be spiritually
implicated in the war. It is foolish to hope. Since the 30th of
July, 1914, nothing has happened in the arena of war-policy and
war-technique except for the complete and unmitigated worst. We are
tired of continued disillusionment, and of the betrayal of generous
anticipations. It is saner not to waste energy in hope within the
system of war-enterprise. One may accept dispassionately whatever
changes for good may happen from the war, but one will not allow one’s
imagination to connect them organically with war. It is better to
resist cheap consolations, and remain skeptical about any of the good
things so confidently promised us either through victory or the social
reorganization demanded by the war-technique. One keeps healthy in
wartime not by a series of religious and political consolations that
something good is coming out of it all, but by a vigorous assertion of
values in which war has no part. Our skepticism can be made a shelter
behind which is built up a wider consciousness of the personal and
social and artistic ideals which American civilization needs to lead
the good life. We can be skeptical constructively, if, thrown back
on our inner resources from the world of war which is taken as the
overmastering reality, we search much more actively to clarify our
attitudes and express a richer significance in the American scene. We
do not feel the war to be very real, and we sense a singular air of
falsity about the emotions of the upper-classes toward everything
connected with war. This ostentatious shame, this groveling before
illusory Allied heroisms and nobilities, has shocked us. Minor
novelists and minor poets and minor publicists are still coming back
from driving ambulances in France to write books that nag us into an
appreciation of the “real meaning.” No one can object to the generous
emotions of service in a great cause or to the horror and pity at
colossal devastation and agony. But too many of these prophets are men
who have lived rather briskly among the cruelties and thinnesses of
American civilization and have shown no obvious horror and pity at the
exploitations and the arid quality of the life lived here around us.
Their moral sense had been deeply stirred by what they saw in France
and Belgium, but it was a moral sense relatively unpracticed by deep
concern and reflection over the inadequacies of American democracy. Few
of them had used their vision to create literature impelling us toward
a more radiant American future. And that is why, in spite of their
vivid stirrings, they seem so unconvincing. Their idealism is too new
and bright to affect us, for it comes from men who never cared very
particularly about great creative American ideas. So these writers come
to us less like ardent youth, pouring its energy into the great causes,
than like youthful mouthpieces of their strident and belligerent
elders. They did not convert us, but rather drove us farther back into
the rightness of American isolation.


VII

There was something incredibly mean and plebeian about that abasement
into which the war-partisans tried to throw us all. When we were
urged to squander our emotion on a bedeviled Europe, our intuition
told us how much all rich and generous emotions were needed at home
to leaven American civilization. If we refused to export them it was
because we wanted to see them at work here. It is true that great
reaches of American prosperous life were not using generous emotions
for any purpose whatever. But the real antithesis was not between
being concerned about luxurious automobiles and being concerned about
the saving of France. America’s “benevolent neutrality” had been
saving the Allies for three years through the ordinary channels of
industry and trade. We could afford to export material goods and
credit far more than we could afford to export emotional capital.
The real antithesis was between interest in expensively exploiting
American material life and interest in creatively enhancing American
personal and artistic life. The fat and earthy American could be
blamed not for not palpitating more richly about France, but for not
palpitating more richly about America and her spiritual drouths. The
war will leave the country spiritually impoverished, because of the
draining away of sentiment into the channels of war. Creative and
constructive enterprises will suffer not only through the appalling
waste of financial capital in the work of annihilation, but also in the
loss of emotional capital in the conviction that war overshadows all
other realities. This is the poison of war that disturbs even creative
minds. Writers tell us that, after contact with the war, literature
seems an idle pastime, if not an offense, in a world of great deeds.
Perhaps literature that can be paled by war will not be missed. We
may feel vastly relieved at our salvation from so many feeble novels
and graceful verses that khaki-clad authors might have given us. But
this nobly-sounding sense of the futility of art in a world of war may
easily infect conscientious minds. And it is against this infection
that we must fight.


VIII

The conservation of American promise is the present task for this
generation of malcontents and aloof men and women. If America has
lost its political isolation, it is all the more obligated to retain
its spiritual integrity. This does not mean any smug retreat from
the world, with a belief that the truth is in us and can only be
contaminated by contact. It means that the promise of American life is
not yet achieved, perhaps not even seen, and that, until it is, there
is nothing for us but stern and intensive cultivation of our garden.
Our insulation will not be against any great creative ideas or forms
that Europe brings. It will be a turning within in order that we may
have something to give without. The old American ideas which are still
expected to bring life to the world seem stale and archaic. It is
grotesque to try to carry democracy to Russia. It is absurd to try to
contribute to the world’s store of great moving ideas until we have a
culture to give. It is absurd for us to think of ourselves as blessing
the world with anything unless we hold it much more self-consciously
and significantly than we hold anything now. Mere negative freedom will
not do as a twentieth-century principle. American ideas must be dynamic
or we are presumptuous in offering them to the world.


IX

The war--or American promise: one must choose. One cannot be interested
in both. For the effect of the war will be to impoverish American
promise. It cannot advance it, however liberals may choose to identify
American promise with a league of nations to enforce peace. Americans
who desire to cultivate the promises of American life need not lift
a finger to obstruct the war, but they cannot conscientiously accept
it. However intimately a part of their country they may feel in its
creative enterprises toward a better life, they cannot feel themselves
a part of it in its futile and self-mutilating enterprise of war.
We can be apathetic with a good conscience, for we have other values
and ideals for America. Our country will not suffer for our lack of
patriotism as long as it has that of our industrial masters. Meanwhile,
those who have turned their thinking into war-channels have abdicated
their leadership for this younger generation. They have put themselves
in a limbo of interests that are not the concerns which worry us about
American life and make us feverish and discontented.

Let us compel the war to break in on us, if it must, not go hospitably
to meet it. Let us force it perceptibly to batter in our spiritual
walls. This attitude need not be a fatuous hiding in the sand, denying
realities. When we are broken in on, we can yield to the inexorable.
Those who are conscripted will have been broken in on. If they do not
want to be martyrs, they will have to be victims. They are entitled
to whatever alleviations are possible in an inexorable world. But
the others can certainly resist the attitude that blackens the whole
conscious sky with war. They can resist the poison which makes art
and all the desires for more impassioned living seem idle and even
shameful. For many of us, resentment against the war has meant a
vivider consciousness of what we are seeking in American life.

This search has been threatened by two classes who have wanted to
deflect idealism to the war,--the patriots and the realists. The
patriots have challenged us by identifying apathy with disloyalty. The
reply is that war-technique in this situation is a matter of national
mechanics rather than national ardor. The realists have challenged
us by insisting that the war is an instrument in the working-out of
beneficent national policy. Our skepticism points out to them how soon
their “mastery” becomes “drift,” tangled in the fatal drive toward
victory as its own end, how soon they become mere agents and expositors
of forces as they are. Patriots and realists disposed of, we can pursue
creative skepticism with honesty, and at least a hope that in the
recoil from war we may find the treasures we are looking for.




VI

TWILIGHT OF IDOLS

(October, 1917)


I

Where are the seeds of American promise? Man cannot live by politics
alone, and it is small cheer that our best intellects are caught in
the political current and see only the hope that America will find
her soul in the remaking of the world. If William James were alive
would he be accepting the war-situation so easily and complacently?
Would he be chiding the over-stimulated intelligence of peace-loving
idealists, and excommunicating from the ranks of liberal progress
the pitiful remnant of those who struggle “above the battle”? I like
to think that his gallant spirit would have called for a war to be
gallantly played, with insistent care for democratic values at home,
and unequivocal alliance with democratic elements abroad for a peace
that should promise more than a mere union of benevolent imperialisms.
I think of James now because the recent articles of John Dewey’s on
the war suggest a slackening in his thought for our guidance and
stir, and the inadequacy of his pragmatism as a philosophy of life
in this emergency. Whether James would have given us just that note
of spiritual adventure which would make the national enterprise seem
creative for an American future,--this we can never know. But surely
that philosophy of Dewey’s which we had been following so uncritically
for so long, breaks down almost noisily when it is used to grind out
interpretation for the present crisis. These articles on “Conscience
and Compulsion,” “The Future of Pacifism,” “What America Will Fight
For,” “Conscription of Thought,” which _The New Republic_ has been
printing, seem to me to be a little off-color. A philosopher who senses
so little the sinister forces of war, who is so much more concerned
over the excesses of the pacifists than over the excesses of military
policy, who can feel only amusement at the idea that any one should
try to conscript thought, who assumes that the war-technique can be
used without trailing along with it the mob-fanaticisms, the injustices
and hatreds, that are organically bound up with it, is speaking to
another element of the younger intelligentsia than that to which I
belong. Evidently the attitudes which war calls out are fiercer and
more incalculable than Professor Dewey is accustomed to take into his
hopeful and intelligent imagination, and the pragmatist mind, in trying
to adjust itself to them, gives the air of grappling, like the pioneer
who challenges the arid plains, with a power too big for it. It is not
an arena of creative intelligence our country’s mind is now, but of
mob-psychology. The soldiers who tried to lynch Max Eastman showed that
current patriotism is not a product of the will to remake the world.
The luxuriant releases of explosive hatred for which peace apparently
gives far too little scope cannot be wooed by sweet reasonableness, nor
can they be the raw material for the creation of rare liberal political
structures. All that can be done is to try to keep your country out of
situations where such expressive releases occur. If you have willed
the situation, however, or accepted it as inevitable, it is fatuous
to protest against the gay debauch of hatred and fear and swagger
that must mount and mount, until the heady and virulent poison of war
shall have created its own anti-toxin of ruin and disillusionment. To
talk as if war were anything else than such a poison is to show that
your philosophy has never been confronted with the pathless and the
inexorable, and that, only dimly feeling the change, it goes ahead
acting as if it had not got out of its depth. Only a lack of practice
with a world of human nature so raw-nerved, irrational, uncreative,
as an America at war was bound to show itself to be, can account for
the singular unsatisfactoriness of these later utterances of Dewey.
He did have one moment of hesitation just before the war began, when
the war and its external purposes and unifying power seemed the small
thing beside that internal adventure which should find our American
promise. But that perspective has now disappeared, and one finds
Dewey now untainted by skepticism as to our being about a business to
which all our idealism should rally. That failure to get guaranties
that this country’s effort would obligate the Allies to a democratic
world-order Dewey blames on the defection of the pacifists, and then
somehow manages to get himself into a “we” who “romantically,” as
he says, forewent this crucial link of our strategy. Does this easy
identification of himself with undemocratically controlled foreign
policy mean that a country is democratic when it accepts what its
government does, or that war has a narcotic effect on the pragmatic
mind? For Dewey somehow retains his sense of being in the controlling
class, and ignores those anxious questions of democrats who have been
his disciples but are now resenters of the war.

What I come to is a sense of suddenly being left in the lurch, of
suddenly finding that a philosophy upon which I had relied to carry
us through no longer works. I find the contrast between the idea that
creative intelligence has free functioning in wartime, and the facts
of the inexorable situation, too glaring. The contrast between what
liberals ought to be doing and saying if democratic values are to be
conserved, and what the real forces are imposing upon them, strikes
too sternly on my intellectual senses. I should prefer some philosophy
of War as the grim and terrible cleanser to this optimism-haunted mood
that continues unweariedly to suggest that all can yet be made to work
for good in a mad and half-destroyed world. I wonder if James, in the
face of such disaster, would not have abandoned his “moral equivalent
of war” for an “immoral equivalent” which, in swift and periodic
saturnalia, would have acted as vaccination against the sure pestilence
of war.


II

Dewey’s philosophy is inspiring enough for a society at peace,
prosperous and with a fund of progressive good-will. It is a philosophy
of hope, of clear-sighted comprehension of materials and means. Where
institutions are at all malleable, it is the only clew for improvement.
It is scientific method applied to “uplift.” But this careful
adaptation of means to desired ends, this experimental working-out of
control over brute forces and dead matter in the interests of communal
life, depends on a store of rationality, and is effective only where
there is strong desire for progress. It is precisely the school, the
institution to which Dewey’s philosophy was first applied, that is of
all our institutions the most malleable. And it is the will to educate
that has seemed, in these days, among all our social attitudes the most
rationally motivated. It was education, and almost education alone,
that seemed susceptible to the steady pressure of an “instrumental”
philosophy. Intelligence really seemed about to come into conscious
control of an institution, and that one the most potent in molding the
attitudes needed for a civilized society and the aptitudes needed for
the happiness of the individual.

For both our revolutionary conceptions of what education means, and for
the intellectual strategy of its approach, this country is immeasurably
indebted to the influence of Professor Dewey’s philosophy. With these
ideas sincerely felt, a rational nation would have chosen education
as its national enterprise. Into this it would have thrown its energy
though the heavens fell and the earth rocked around it. But the nation
did not use its isolation from the conflict to educate itself. It
fretted for three years and then let war, not education, be chosen, at
the almost unanimous behest of our intellectual class, from motives
alien to our cultural needs, and for political ends alien to the
happiness of the individual. But nations, of course, are not rational
entities, and they act within their most irrational rights when they
accept war as the most important thing the nation can do in the face
of metaphysical menaces of imperial prestige. What concerns us here
is the relative ease with which the pragmatist intellectuals, with
Professor Dewey at the head, have moved out their philosophy, bag and
baggage, from education to war. So abrupt a change in the direction of
the national enterprise, one would have expected to cause more emotion,
to demand more apologetics. His optimism may have told Professor Dewey
that war would not materially demoralize our growth--would, perhaps,
after all, be but an incident in the nation’s life--but it is not easy
to see how, as we skate toward the bankruptcy of war-billions, there
will be resources available for educational enterprise that does not
contribute directly to the war-technique. Neither is any passion for
growth, for creative mastery, going to flourish among the host of
militaristic values and new tastes for power that are springing up like
poisonous mushrooms on every hand.

How could the pragmatist mind accept war without more violent protest,
without a greater wrench? Either Professor Dewey and his friends felt
that the forces were too strong for them, that the war had to be, and
it was better to take it up intelligently than to drift blindly in; or
else they really expected a gallant war, conducted with jealous regard
for democratic values at home and a captivating vision of international
democracy as the end of all the toil and pain. If their motive was the
first, they would seem to have reduced the scope of possible control
of events to the vanishing point. If the war is too strong for you
to prevent, how is it going to be weak enough for you to control and
mold to your liberal purposes? And if their motive was to shape the
war firmly for good, they seem to have seriously miscalculated the
fierce urgencies of it. Are they to be content, as the materialization
of their hopes, with a doubtful League of Nations and the suppression
of the I. W. W.? Yet the numbing power of the war-situation seems to
have kept them from realizing what has happened to their philosophy.
The betrayal of their first hopes has certainly not discouraged them.
But neither has it roused them to a more energetic expression of the
forces through which they intend to realize them. I search Professor
Dewey’s articles in vain for clews as to the specific working-out of
our democratic desires, either nationally or internationally, either
in the present or in the reconstruction after the war. No programme is
suggested, nor is there feeling for present vague popular movements
and revolts. Rather are the latter chided, for their own vagueness and
impracticalities. Similarly, with the other prophets of instrumentalism
who accompany Dewey into the war, democracy remains an unanalyzed term,
useful as a call to battle, but not an intellectual tool, turning up
fresh sod for the changing future. Is it the political democracy of
a plutocratic America that we are fighting for, or is it the social
democracy of the new Russia? Which do our rulers really fear more, the
menace of Imperial Germany, or the liberating influence of a socialist
Russia. In the application of their philosophy to politics, our
pragmatists are sliding over this crucial question of ends. Dewey says
our ends must be intelligently international rather than chauvinistic.
But this gets us little distance along our way.

In this difficult time the light that has been in liberals and radicals
has become darkness. If radicals spend their time holding conventions
to attest their loyalty and stamp out the “enemies within,” they do not
spend it in breaking intellectual paths, or giving us shining ideas
to which we can attach our faith and conscience. The spiritual apathy
from which the more naïve of us suffer, and which the others are so
busy fighting, arises largely from sheer default of a clear vision that
would melt it away. Let the motley crew of ex-socialists, and labor
radicals, and liberals and pragmatist philosophers, who have united
for the prosecution of the war, present a coherent and convincing
democratic programme, and they will no longer be confronted with the
skepticism of the conscientious and the impossibilist. But when the
emphasis is on technical organization, rather than organization
of ideas, on strategy rather than desires, one begins to suspect
that no programme is presented because they have none to present.
This burrowing into war-technique hides the void where a democratic
philosophy should be. Our intellectuals consort with war-boards in
order to keep their minds off the question what the slow masses of
the people are really desiring, or toward what the best hope of the
country really drives. Similarly the blaze of patriotism on the part of
the radicals serves the purpose of concealing the feebleness of their
intellectual light.

Is the answer that clear formulation of democratic ends must be
postponed until victory in the war is attained? But to make this
answer is to surrender the entire case. For the support of the war
by radicals, realists, pragmatists, is due--or so they say--to the
fact that the war is not only saving the cause of democracy, but is
immensely accelerating its progress. Well, what are those gains? How
are they to be conserved? What do they lead to? How can we further
them? Into what large idea of society do they group? To ignore these
questions, and think only of the war-technique and its accompanying
devotions, is to undermine the foundations of these people’s own faith.

A policy of “win the war first” must be, for the radical, a policy of
intellectual suicide. Their support of the war throws upon them the
responsibility of showing inch by inch the democratic gains, and of
laying out a charter of specific hopes. Otherwise they confess that
they are impotent and that the war is submerging their expectations, or
that they are not genuinely imaginative and offer little promise for
future leadership.


III

It may seem unfair to group Professor Dewey with Mr. Spargo and Mr.
Gompers, Mr. A. M. Simons, and the Vigilantes. I do so only because
in their acceptance of the war, they are all living out that popular
American “instrumental” philosophy which Professor Dewey has formulated
in such convincing and fascinating terms. On an infinitely more
intelligent plane, he is yet one with them in his confidence that
the war is motivated by democratic ends and is being made to serve
them. A high mood of confidence and self-righteousness moves them
all, a keen sense of control over events that makes them eligible to
discipleship under Professor Dewey’s philosophy. They are all hostile
to impossibilism, to apathy, to any attitude that is not a cheerful and
brisk setting to work to use the emergency to consolidate the gains
of democracy. Not, Is it being used? but, Let us make a flutter about
using it! This unanimity of mood puts the resenter of war out of the
arena. But he can still seek to explain why this philosophy which has
no place for the inexorable should have adjusted itself so easily to
the inexorable of war, and why, although a philosophy of the creative
intelligence in using means toward ends, it should show itself so
singularly impoverished in its present supply of democratic values.

What is the matter with the philosophy? One has a sense of having come
to a sudden, short stop at the end of an intellectual era. In the
crisis, this philosophy of intelligent control just does not measure
up to our needs. What is the root of this inadequacy that is felt
so keenly by our restless minds? Van Wyck Brooks has pointed out
searchingly the lack of poetic vision in our pragmatist “awakeners.”
Is there something in these realistic attitudes that works actually
against poetic vision, against concern for the quality of life as above
machinery of life? Apparently there is. The war has revealed a younger
intelligentsia, trained up in the pragmatic dispensation, immensely
ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared for
the intellectual interpretation or the idealistic focusing of ends.
The young men in Belgium, the officers’ training corps, the young men
being sucked into the councils at Washington and into war-organization
everywhere, have among them a definite element, upon whom Dewey, as
veteran philosopher, might well bestow a papal blessing. They have
absorbed the secret of scientific method as applied to political
administration. They are liberal, enlightened, aware. They are touched
with creative intelligence toward the solution of political and
industrial problems. They are a wholly new force in American life, the
product of the swing in the colleges from a training that emphasized
classical studies to one that emphasized political and economic values.
Practically all this element, one would say, is lined up in service of
the war-technique. There seems to have been a peculiar congeniality
between the war and these men. It is as if the war and they had been
waiting for each other. One wonders what scope they would have had
for their intelligence without it. Probably most of them would have
gone into industry and devoted themselves to sane reorganization
schemes. What is significant is that it is the technical side of the
war that appeals to them, not the interpretative or political side.
The formulation of values and ideals, the production of articulate
and suggestive thinking, had not, in their education, kept pace, to
any extent whatever, with their technical aptitude. The result is
that the field of intellectual formulation is very poorly manned by
this younger intelligentsia. While they organize the war, formulation
of opinion is left largely in the hands of professional patriots,
sensational editors, archaic radicals. The intellectual work of this
younger intelligentsia is done by the sedition-hunting Vigilantes, and
by the saving remnant of older liberals. It is true, Dewey calls for
a more attentive formulation of war-purposes and ideas, but he calls
largely to deaf ears. His disciples have learned all too literally the
instrumental attitude toward life, and, being immensely intelligent
and energetic, they are making themselves efficient instruments of the
war-technique, accepting with little question the ends as announced
from above. That those ends are largely negative does not concern them,
because they have never learned not to subordinate idea to technique.
Their education has not given them a coherent system of large ideas,
or a feeling for democratic goals. They have, in short, no clear
philosophy of life except that of intelligent service, the admirable
adaptation of means to ends. They are vague as to what kind of a
society they want, or what kind of society America needs, but they are
equipped with all the administrative attitudes and talents necessary to
attain it.

To those of us who have taken Dewey’s philosophy almost as our American
religion, it never occurred that values could be subordinated to
technique. We were instrumentalists, but we had our private utopias
so clearly before our minds that the means fell always into its place
as contributory. And Dewey, of course, always meant his philosophy,
when taken as a philosophy of life, to start with values. But there was
always that unhappy ambiguity in his doctrine as to just how values
were created, and it became easier and easier to assume that just
any growth was justified and almost any activity valuable so long as
it achieved ends. The American, in living out this philosophy, has
habitually confused results with product, and been content with getting
somewhere without asking too closely whether it was the desirable
place to get. It is now becoming plain that unless you start with the
vividest kind of poetic vision, your instrumentalism is likely to land
you just where it has landed this younger intelligentsia which is so
happily and busily engaged in the national enterprise of war. You
must have your vision and you must have your technique. The practical
effect of Dewey’s philosophy has evidently been to develop the sense
of the latter at the expense of the former. Though he himself would
develop them together, even in him there seems to be a flagging of
values, under the influence of war. _The New Republic_ honorably
clamors for the Allies to subordinate military strategy to political
ends, technique to democratic values. But war always undermines values.
It is the outstanding lesson of the whole war that statesmen cannot
be trusted to get this perspective right, that their only motto is,
first to win and then grab what they can. The struggle against this
statesmanlike animus must be a losing one as long as we have not very
clear and very determined and very revolutionary democratic ideas and
programmes to challenge them with. The trouble with our situation
is not only that values have been generally ignored in favor of
technique, but that those who have struggled to keep values foremost,
have been too bloodless and too near-sighted in their vision. The
defect of any philosophy of “adaptation” or “adjustment,” even when
it means adjustment to changing, living experience, is that there is
no provision for thought or experience getting beyond itself. If your
ideal is to be adjustment to your situation, in radiant coöperation
with reality, then your success is likely to be just that and no more.
You never transcend anything. You grow, but your spirit never jumps out
of your skin to go on wild adventures. If your policy as a publicist
reformer is to take what you can get, you are likely to find that you
get something less than you should be willing to take. Italy in the
settlement is said to be demanding one hundred in order to get twenty,
and this Machiavellian principle might well be adopted by the radical.
Vision must constantly outshoot technique, opportunist efforts usually
achieve less even than what seemed obviously possible. An impossibilist
élan that appeals to desire will often carry further. A philosophy of
adjustment will not even make for adjustment. If you try merely to
“meet” situations as they come, you will not even meet them. Instead
you will only pile up behind you deficits and arrears that will some
day bankrupt you.

We are in the war because an American Government practiced a philosophy
of adjustment, and an instrumentalism for minor ends, instead of
creating new values and setting at once a large standard to which the
nations might repair. An intellectual attitude of mere adjustment,
of mere use of the creative intelligence to make your progress, must
end in caution, regression, and a virtual failure to effect even that
change which you so clear-sightedly and desirously see. This is the
root of our dissatisfaction with much of the current political and
social realism that is preached to us. It has everything good and wise
except the obstreperous vision that would drive and draw all men into
it.


IV

The working-out of this American philosophy in our intellectual life
then has meant an exaggerated emphasis on the mechanics of life at the
expense of the quality of living. We suffer from a real shortage of
spiritual values. A philosophy that worked when we were trying to get
that material foundation for American life in which more impassioned
living could flourish no longer works when we are faced with inexorable
disaster and the hysterias of the mob. The note of complacency which
we detect in the current expressions of this philosophy has a bad
taste. The congruous note for the situation would seem to be, on the
contrary, that of robust desperation,--a desperation that shall rage
and struggle until new values come out of the travail, and we see
some glimmering of our democratic way. In the creation of these new
values, we may expect the old philosophy, the old radicalism, to be
helpless. It has found a perfectly definite level, and there is no
reason to think that it will not remain there. Its flowering appears
in the technical organization of the war by an earnest group of young
liberals, who direct their course by an opportunist programme of
State-socialism at home and a league of benevolently imperialistic
nations abroad. At their best they can give us a government by prudent,
enlightened college men instead of by politicians. At their best,
they can abolish war by making everybody a partner in the booty of
exploitation. That is all, and it is technically admirable. Only there
is nothing in the outlook that touches in any way the happiness of
the individual, the vivifying of the personality, the comprehension
of social forces, the flair of art,--in other words, the quality of
life. Our intellectuals have failed us as value-creators, even as
value-emphasizers. The allure of the martial in war has passed only
to be succeeded by the allure of the technical. The allure of fresh
and true ideas, of free speculation, of artistic vigor, of cultural
styles, of intelligence suffused by feeling, and feeling given fiber
and outline by intelligence, has not come, and can hardly come, we see
now, while our reigning philosophy is an instrumental one.

Whence can come this allure? Only from those who are thorough
malcontents. Irritation at things as they are, disgust at the continual
frustrations and aridities of American life, deep dissatisfaction with
self and with the groups that give themselves forth as hopeful,--out of
such moods there might be hammered new values. The malcontents would
be men and women who could not stomach the war, or the reactionary
idealism that has followed in its train. They are quite through with
the professional critics and classicists who have let cultural values
die through their own personal ineptitude. Yet these malcontents
have no intention of being cultural vandals, only to slay. They are
not barbarians, but seek the vital and the sincere everywhere. All
they want is a new orientation of the spirit that shall be modern,
an orientation to accompany that technical orientation which is fast
coming, and which the war accelerates. They will be harsh and often
bad-tempered, and they will feel that the break-up of things is no
time for mellowness. They will have a taste for spiritual adventure,
and for sinister imaginative excursions. It will not be Puritanism so
much as complacency that they will fight. A tang, a bitterness, an
intellectual fiber, a verve, they will look for in literature, and
their most virulent enemies will be those unaccountable radicals who
are still morally servile, and are now trying to suppress all free
speculation in the interests of nationalism. Something more mocking,
more irreverent, they will constantly want. They will take institutions
very lightly, indeed will never fail to be surprised at the seriousness
with which good radicals take the stated offices and systems. Their
own contempt will be scarcely veiled, and they will be glad if they
can tease, provoke, irritate thought on any subject. These malcontents
will be more or less of the American tribe of talent who used either
to go immediately to Europe, or starved submissively at home. But
these people will neither go to Europe, nor starve submissively. They
are too much entangled emotionally in the possibilities of American
life to leave it, and they have no desire whatever to starve. So they
are likely to go ahead beating their heads at the wall until they
are either bloody or light appears. They will give offense to their
elders who cannot see what all the concern is about, and they will
hurt the more middle-aged sense of adventure upon which the better
integrated minds of the younger generation will have compromised.
Optimism is often compensatory, and the optimistic mood in American
thought may mean merely that American life is too terrible to face. A
more skeptical, malicious, desperate, ironical mood may actually be the
sign of more vivid and more stirring life fermenting in America to-day.
It may be a sign of hope. That thirst for more of the intellectual
“war and laughter” that we find Nietzsche calling us to may bring us
satisfactions that optimism-haunted philosophies could never bring.
Malcontentedness may be the beginning of promise. That is why I evoked
the spirit of William James, with its gay passion for ideas, and its
freedom of speculation, when I felt the slightly pedestrian gait into
which the war had brought pragmatism. It is the creative desire more
than the creative intelligence that we shall need if we are ever to
fly.




VII

UNFINISHED FRAGMENT ON THE STATE

(Winter, 1918)


Government is synonymous with neither State nor Nation. It is the
machinery by which the nation, organized as a State, carries out its
State functions. Government is a framework of the administration of
laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is the idea
of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite,
concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace.
It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations
inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we
can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That
the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be
forgotten. Its glamor and its significance linger behind the framework
of Government and direct its activities.

Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and
reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace
the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized.
For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the
State is that within its territory its power and influence should be
universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation
of men, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political
salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members
of the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency
for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems
most unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd to act
offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized.
The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become
the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member
of the herd. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing
down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches.
All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible
to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military
defense, and the State becomes what in peace times it has vainly
struggled to become--the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s
businesses and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the
cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly,
but with ever accelerated speed and integration, towards the great end,
towards that “peacefulness of being at war,” of which L. P. Jacks has
so unforgettably spoken.

The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a
passive rôle in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation
of activity and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their old
routine, many of them are given new positions of responsibility, new
techniques must be learnt. Wearing home ties are broken and women
who would have remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated
for service overseas. A vast sense of rejuvenescence pervades the
significant classes, a sense of new importance in the world. Old
national ideals are taken out, re-adapted to the purpose and used as
universal touchstones, or molds into which all thought is poured. Every
individual citizen who in peace times had no function to perform by
which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the
State becomes an active amateur agent of the Government in reporting
spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating
such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority
opinion, which in times of peace, was only irritating and could not be
dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes,
with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the State,
objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the
beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties, far
exceeding in severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public
opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the pulpits and the
schools, becomes one solid block. “Loyalty,” or rather war orthodoxy,
becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations.
Particularly is this true in the sphere of the intellectual life. There
the smallest taint is held to spread over the whole soul, so that a
professor of physics is _ipso facto_ disqualified to teach physics or
to hold honorable place in a university--the republic of learning--if
he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere association with persons
thus tainted is considered to disqualify a teacher. Anything pertaining
to the enemy becomes taboo. His books are suppressed wherever possible,
his language is forbidden. His artistic products are considered to
convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints of vast poison to the soul
that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy music is suppressed, and
energetic measures of opprobrium taken against those whose artistic
consciences are not ready to perform such an act of self-sacrifice. The
rage for loyal conformity works impartially, and often in diametric
opposition to other orthodoxies and traditional conformities, or even
ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy of the State is shown at its apex
perhaps when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for taking more or
less literal terms the Sermon on the Mount, and Christian zealots are
sent to prison for twenty years for distributing tracts which argue
that war is unscriptural.

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion
throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for
passionate coöperation with the Government in coercing into obedience
the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.
The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties,
the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly
around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them
really to be converting them. Of course the ideal of perfect loyalty,
perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the
amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often
their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their
resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual
opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime
attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating
at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly
be produced through any other agency than war. Other values such as
artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life,
are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant
classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the
State, are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves
but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.

War--or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against
a powerful enemy--seems to achieve for a nation almost all that
the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no
longer indifferent to their Government, but each cell of the body
politic is brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the
way to full realization of that collective community in which each
individual somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation
at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels
immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire
of the collective community live in each person who throws himself
whole-heartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction
between society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the
individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a
superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas
and emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he is
invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the collective
community. The individual as social being in war seems to have achieved
almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the
American nation have been expected to show such devotion _en masse_,
such sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any secular good, such as
universal education or the subjugation of nature, would it have poured
forth its treasure and its life, or would it have permitted such stern
coercive measures to be taken against it, such as conscripting its
money and its men. But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defense,
undertaken to support a difficult cause to the slogan of “democracy,”
it would reach the highest level ever known of collective effort.

For these secular goods, connected with the enhancement of life, the
education of man and the use of the intelligence to realize reason and
beauty in the nation’s communal living, are alien to our traditional
ideal of the State. The State is intimately connected with war, for
it is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a
political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival
group has meant, throughout all history--war.

There is nothing invidious in the use of the term, “herd,” in
connection with the State. It is merely an attempt to reduce closer
to first principles the nature of this institution in the shadow of
which we all live, move and have our being. Ethnologists are generally
agreed that human society made its first appearance as the human pack
and not as a collection of individuals or of couples. The herd is in
fact the original unit, and only as it was differentiated did personal
individuality develop. All the most primitive surviving tribes of men
are shown to live in a very complex but very rigid social organization
where opportunity for individuation is scarcely given. These tribes
remain strictly organized herds, and the difference between them and
the modern State is one of degree of sophistication and variety of
organization, and not of kind.

Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest
primitive pulls which keeps together the herds of the different species
of higher animals. Mankind is no exception. Our pugnacious evolutionary
history has prevented the impulse from ever dying out. This gregarious
impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform, to coalesce together,
and is most powerful when the herd believes itself threatened with
attack. Animals crowd together for protection, and men become most
conscious of their collectivity at the threat of war. Consciousness
of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength,
which in turn arouses pugnacity and the battle is on. In civilized
man, the gregarious impulse acts not only to produce concerted action
for defense, but also to produce identity of opinion. Since thought is
a form of behavior, the gregarious impulse floods up into its realms
and demands that sense of uniform thought which wartime produces so
successfully. And it is in this flooding of the conscious life of
society that gregariousness works its havoc.

For just as in modern societies the sex-instinct is enormously
over-supplied for the requirements of human propagation, so the
gregarious impulse is enormously over-supplied for the work of
protection which it is called upon to perform. It would be quite
enough if we were gregarious enough to enjoy the companionship of
others, to be able to coöperate with them, and to feel a slight
malaise at solitude. Unfortunately, however, this impulse is not
content with these reasonable and healthful demands, but insists that
like-mindedness shall prevail everywhere, in all departments of life.
So that all human progress, all novelty, and non-conformity, must be
carried against the resistance of this tyrannical herd-instinct which
drives the individual into obedience and conformity with the majority.
Even in the most modern and enlightened societies this impulse shows
little sign of abating. As it is driven by inexorable economic demand
out of the sphere of utility, it seems to fasten itself ever more
fiercely in the realm of feeling and opinion, so that conformity comes
to be a thing aggressively desired and demanded.

The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the more virulently because
when the group is in motion or is taking any positive action, this
feeling of being with and supported by the collective herd very greatly
feeds that will to power, the nourishment of which the individual
organism so constantly demands. You feel powerful by conforming, and
you feel forlorn and helpless if you are out of the crowd. While even
if you do not get any access of power by thinking and feeling just as
everybody else in your group does, you get at least the warm feeling of
obedience, the soothing irresponsibility of protection.

Joining as it does to these very vigorous tendencies of the
individual--the pleasure in power and the pleasure in obedience--this
gregarious impulse becomes irresistible in society. War stimulates
it to the highest possible degree, sending the influences of its
mysterious herd-current with its inflations of power and obedience to
the farthest reaches of the society, to every individual and little
group that can possibly be affected. And it is these impulses which the
State--the organization of the entire herd, the entire collectivity--is
founded on and makes use of.

There is, of course, in the feeling towards the State a large element
of pure filial mysticism. The sense of insecurity, the desire for
protection, sends one’s desire back to the father and mother, with
whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for
nothing that one’s State is still thought of as Father or Motherland,
that one’s relation towards it is conceived in terms of family
affection. The war has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger
have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves
again, as much in this country as anywhere. If we have not the intense
Father-sense of the German who worships his Vaterland, at least in
Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in
the many Mother-posters of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the
more tender functions of war-service, the ruling organization is
conceived in family terms. A people at war have become in the most
literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full
of that naïve faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who
takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them
and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this
recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort, and a certain
influx of power. On most people the strain of being an independent
adult weighs heavily, and upon none more than those members of the
significant classes who have had bequeathed to them or have assumed the
responsibilities of governing. The State provides the convenientest of
symbols under which these classes can retain all the actual pragmatic
satisfaction of governing, but can rid themselves of the psychic burden
of adulthood. They continue to direct industry and government and
all the institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their
own conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public, they are
turned from their selfish and predatory ways, and have become loyal
servants of society, or something greater than they--the State. The
man who moves from the direction of a large business in New York to a
post in the war management industrial service in Washington does not
apparently alter very much his power or his administrative technique.
But psychically, what a transfiguration has occurred! His is now not
only the power but the glory! And his sense of satisfaction is directly
proportional not to the genuine amount of personal sacrifice that may
be involved in the change but to the extent to which he retains his
industrial prerogatives and sense of command.

From members of this class a certain insuperable indignation arises
if the change from private enterprise to State service involves any
real loss of power and personal privilege. If there is to be pragmatic
sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the field of honor, in the
traditionally acclaimed deaths by battle, in that detour to suicide,
as Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime supplies satisfaction
for this very real craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it
gives for this regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction to
an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you
draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed,
and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak and
act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a
truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal
symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of
your definite action and ideas.

The members of the working-classes, that portion at least which does
not identify itself with the significant classes and seek to imitate
it and rise to it, are notoriously less affected by the symbolism of
the State, or, in other words, are less patriotic than the significant
classes. For theirs is neither the power nor the glory. The State in
wartime does not offer them the opportunity to regress, for, never
having acquired social adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have
been drilled and regimented, as by the industrial régime of the last
century, they go out docilely enough to do battle for their State, but
they are almost entirely without that filial sense and even without
that herd-intellect sense which operates so powerfully among their
“betters.” They live habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which
though nominally free, they are in practice as a class bound to a
system of machine-production the implements of which they do not own,
and in the distribution of whose product they have not the slightest
voice, except what they can occasionally exert by a veiled intimidation
which draws slightly more of the product in their direction. From such
serfdom, military conscription is not so great a change. But into the
military enterprise they go, not with those hurrahs of the significant
classes whose instincts war so powerfully feeds, but with the same
apathy with which they enter and continue in the industrial enterprise.

From this point of view, war can be called almost an upper-class
sport. The novel interests and excitements it provides, the inflations
of power, the satisfaction it gives to those very tenacious human
impulses--gregariousness and parent-regression--endow it with all
the qualities of a luxurious collective game which is felt intensely
just in proportion to the sense of significant rule the person has
in the class-division of his society. A country at war--particularly
our own country at war--does not act as a purely homogeneous
herd. The significant classes have all the herd-feeling in all its
primitive intensity, but there are barriers, or at least differentials
of intensity, so that this feeling does not flow freely without
impediment throughout the entire nation. A modern country represents
a long historical and social process of disaggregation of the herd.
The nation at peace is not a group, it is a network of myriads of
groups representing the coöperation and similar feeling of men on all
sorts of planes and in all sorts of human interests and enterprises.
In every modern industrial country, there are parallel planes of
economic classes with divergent attitudes and institutions and
interests--bourgeois and proletariat, with their many subdivisions
according to power and function, and even their interweaving, such as
those more highly skilled workers who habitually identify themselves
with the owning and the significant classes and strive to raise
themselves to the bourgeois level, imitating their cultural standards
and manners. Then there are religious groups with a certain definite,
though weakening sense of kinship, and there are the powerful ethnic
groups which behave almost as cultural colonies in the New World,
clinging tenaciously to language and historical tradition, though their
herdishness is usually founded on cultural rather than State symbols.
There are even certain vague sectional groupings. All these small
sects, political parties, classes, levels, interests, may act as foci
for herd-feelings. They intersect and interweave, and the same person
may be a member of several different groups lying at different planes.
Different occasions will set off his herd-feeling in one direction
or another. In a religious crisis he will be intensely conscious of
the necessity that his sect (or sub-herd) may prevail; in a political
campaign, that his party shall triumph.

To the spread of herd-feeling, therefore, all these smaller herds offer
resistance. To the spread of that herd-feeling which arises from the
threat of war, and which would normally involve the entire nation,
the only groups which make serious resistance are those, of course,
which continue to identify themselves with the other nation from which
they or their parents have come. In times of peace they are for all
practical purposes citizens of their new country. They keep alive
their ethnic traditions more as a luxury than anything. Indeed these
traditions tend rapidly to die out except where they connect with
some still unresolved nationalistic cause abroad, with some struggle
for freedom, or some irredentism. If they are consciously opposed by
a too invidious policy of Americanism, they tend to be strengthened.
And in time of war, these ethnic elements which have any traditional
connection with the enemy, even though most of the individuals may have
little real sympathy with the enemy’s cause, are naturally lukewarm to
the herd-feeling of the nation which goes back to State traditions in
which they have no share. But to the natives imbued with State-feeling,
any such resistance or apathy is intolerable. This herd-feeling, this
newly awakened consciousness of the State, demands universality. The
leaders of the significant classes, who feel most intensely this
State-compulsion, demand a one hundred per cent. Americanism, among
one hundred per cent. of the population. The State is a jealous God
and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade every one,
and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic
patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the State
herd-feeling.

Thus arises conflict within the State. War becomes almost a sport
between the hunters and the hunted. The pursuit of enemies within
outweighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the enemy without.
The whole terrific force of the State is brought to bear against
the heretics. The nation boils with a slow insistent fever. A
white terrorism is carried on by the Government against pacifists,
Socialists, enemy aliens, and a milder unofficial persecution against
all persons or movements that can be imagined as connected with the
enemy. War, which should be the health of the State, unifies all the
bourgeois elements and the common people, and outlaws the rest. The
revolutionary proletariat shows more resistance to this unification,
is, as we have seen, psychically out of the current. Its vanguard, as
the I. W. W., is remorselessly pursued, in spite of the proof that
it is a symptom, not a cause, and its prosecution increases the
disaffection of labor and intensifies the friction instead of lessening
it.

But the emotions that play around the defense of the State do not
take into consideration the pragmatic results. A nation at war, led
by its significant classes, is engaged in liberating certain of its
impulses which have had all too little exercise in the past. It is
getting certain satisfactions and the actual conduct of the war or the
condition of the country are really incidental to the enjoyment of new
forms of virtue and power and aggressiveness. If it could be shown
conclusively that the persecution of slightly disaffected elements
actually increased enormously the difficulties of production and the
organization of the war-technique, it would be found that public policy
would scarcely change. The significant classes must have their pleasure
in hunting down and chastizing everything that they feel instinctively
to be not imbued with the current State-enthusiasm, though the State
itself be actually impeded in its efforts to carry out those objects
for which they are passionately contending. The best proof of this is
that with a pursuit of plotters that has continued with ceaseless
vigilance ever since the beginning of the war in Europe, the concrete
crimes unearthed and punished have been fewer than those prosecutions
for the mere crime of opinion or the expression of sentiments critical
of the State or the national policy. The punishment for opinion has
been far more ferocious and unintermittent than the punishment of
pragmatic crime. Unimpeachable Anglo-Saxon Americans who were freer of
pacifist or socialist utterance than the State-obsessed ruling public
opinion, received heavier penalties and even greater opprobrium, in
many instances, than the definitely hostile German plotter. A public
opinion which, almost without protest, accepts as just, adequate,
beautiful, deserved and in fitting harmony with ideals of liberty
and freedom of speech, a sentence of twenty years in prison for mere
utterances, no matter what they may be, shows itself to be suffering
from a kind of social derangement of values, a sort of social neurosis,
that deserves analysis and comprehension.

On our entrance into the war, there were many persons who predicted
exactly this derangement of values, who feared lest democracy suffer
more at home from an America at war than could be gained for democracy
abroad. That fear has been amply justified. The question whether
the American nation would act like an enlightened democracy going
to war for the sake of high ideals, or like a State-obsessed herd,
has been decisively answered. The record is written and cannot be
erased. History will decide whether the terrorization of opinion, and
the regimentation of life was justified under the most idealistic of
democratic administrations. It will see that when the American nation
had ostensibly a chance to conduct a gallant war, with scrupulous
regard to the safety of democratic values at home, it chose rather
to adopt all the most obnoxious and coercive techniques of the enemy
and of the other countries at war, and to rival in intimidation and
ferocity of punishment the worst governmental systems of the age. For
its former unconsciousness and disrespect of the State ideal, the
nation apparently paid the penalty in a violent swing to the other
extreme. It acted so exactly like a herd in its irrational coercion of
minorities that there is no artificiality in interpreting the progress
of the war in terms of the herd psychology. It unwittingly brought out
into the strongest relief the true characteristics of the State and
its intimate alliance with war. It provided for the enemies of war and
the critics of the State the most telling arguments possible. The new
passion for the State ideal unwittingly set in motion and encouraged
forces that threaten very materially to reform the State. It has shown
those who are really determined to end war that the problem is not the
mere simple one of finishing a war that will end war.

For war is a complicated way in which a nation acts, and it acts so
out of a spiritual compulsion which pushes it on, perhaps against
all its interests, all its real desires, and all its real sense of
values. It is States that make wars and not nations, and the very
thought and almost necessity of war is bound up with the ideal of
the State. Not for centuries have nations made war; in fact the only
historical example of nations making war is the great barbarian
invasions into southern Europe, the invasions of Russia from the East,
and perhaps the sweep of Islam through Northern Africa into Europe
after Mohammed’s death. And the motivations for such wars were either
the restless expansion of migratory tribes or the flame of religious
fanaticism. Perhaps these great movements could scarcely be called
wars at all, for war implies an organized people drilled and led; in
fact, it necessitates the State. Ever since Europe has had any such
organization, such huge conflicts between nations--nations, that is, as
cultural groups--have been unthinkable. It is preposterous to assume
that for centuries in Europe there would have been any possibility of a
people _en masse_, (with their own leaders, and not with the leaders of
their duly constituted State), rising up and overflowing their borders
in a war raid upon a neighboring people. The wars of the Revolutionary
armies of France were clearly in defense of an imperiled freedom, and,
moreover, they were clearly directed not against other peoples, but
against the autocratic governments that were combining to crush the
Revolution. There is no instance in history of a genuinely national
war. There are instances of national defenses, among primitive
civilizations such as the Balkan peoples, against intolerable invasion
by neighboring despots or oppression. But war, as such, cannot occur
except in a system of competing States, which have relations with each
other through the channels of diplomacy.

War is a function of this system of States, and could not occur except
in such a system. Nations organized for internal administration,
nations organized as a federation of free communities, nations
organized in any way except that of a political centralization of a
dynasty, or the reformed descendant of a dynasty, could not possibly
make war upon each other. They would not only have no motive for
conflict, but they would be unable to muster the concentrated force
to make war effective. There might be all sorts of amateur marauding,
there might be guerilla expeditions of group against group, but there
could not be that terrible war _en masse_ of the national State, that
exploitation of the nation in the interests of the State, that abuse of
the national life and resource in the frenzied mutual suicide, which is
modern war.

It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and
not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War
is a very artificial thing. It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst
of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion.
War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military
establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an
immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long
tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally
joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly
against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure,
that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take
measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not the
nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present
form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of
the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the
nation will be liberated. If the State’s chief function is war, then
the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for
its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression. It devotes to
waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the
nation. No one will deny that war is a vast complex of life-destroying
and life-crippling forces. If the State’s chief function is war, then
it is chiefly concerned with coördinating and developing the powers
and techniques which make for destruction. And this means not only the
actual and potential destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at
home as well. For the very existence of a State in a system of States
means that the nation lies always under a risk of war and invasion, and
the calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling of
the productive and life-enhancing processes of the national life.

All this organizing of death-dealing energy and technique is not a
natural but a very sophisticated process. Particularly in modern
nations, but also all through the course of modern European history,
it could never exist without the State. For it meets the demands of no
other institution, it follows the desires of no religious, industrial,
political group. If the demand for military organization and a
military establishment seems to come not from the officers of the State
but from the public, it is only that it comes from the State-obsessed
portion of the public, those groups which feel most keenly the State
ideal. And in this country we have had evidence all too indubitable how
powerless the pacifically minded officers of State may be in the face
of a State-obsession of the significant classes. If a powerful section
of the significant classes feels more intensely the attitudes of the
State, then they will most infallibly mold the Government in time to
their wishes, bring it back to act as the embodiment of the State which
it pretends to be. In every country we have seen groups that were more
loyal than the king--more patriotic than the Government--the Ulsterites
in Great Britain, the Junkers in Prussia, l’Action Française in France,
our patrioteers in America. These groups exist to keep the steering
wheel of the State straight, and they prevent the nation from ever
veering very far from the State ideal.

Militarism expresses the desires and satisfies the major impulse
only of this class. The other classes, left to themselves, have too
many necessities and interests and ambitions, to concern themselves
with so expensive and destructive a game. But the State-obsessed
group is either able to get control of the machinery of the State or
to intimidate those in control, so that it is able through use of
the collective force to regiment the other grudging and reluctant
classes into a military programme. State idealism percolates down
through the strata of society; capturing groups and individuals just
in proportion to the prestige of this dominant class. So that we have
the herd actually strung along between two extremes, the militaristic
patriots at one end, who are scarcely distinguishable in attitude and
animus from the most reactionary Bourbons of an Empire, and unskilled
labor groups, which entirely lack the State sense. But the State
acts as a whole, and the class that controls governmental machinery
can swing the effective action of the herd as a whole. The herd is
not actually a whole, emotionally. But by an ingenious mixture of
cajolery, agitation, intimidation, the herd is licked into shape, into
an effective mechanical unity, if not into a spiritual whole. Men are
told simultaneously that they will enter the military establishment of
their own volition, as their splendid sacrifice for their country’s
welfare, and that if they do not enter they will be hunted down and
punished with the most horrid penalties; and under a most indescribable
confusion of democratic pride and personal fear they submit to the
destruction of their livelihood if not their lives, in a way that would
formerly have seemed to them so obnoxious as to be incredible.

In this great herd-machinery, dissent is like sand in the bearings. The
State ideal is primarily a sort of blind animal push towards military
unity. Any interference with that unity turns the whole vast impulse
towards crushing it. Dissent is speedily outlawed, and the Government,
backed by the significant classes and those who in every locality,
however small, identify themselves with them, proceeds against the
outlaws, regardless of their value to the other institutions of the
nation, or to the effect their persecution may have on public opinion.
The herd becomes divided into the hunters and the hunted, and
war-enterprise becomes not only a technical game but a sport as well.

It must never be forgotten that nations do not declare war on each
other, nor in the strictest sense is it nations that fight each other.
Much has been said to the effect that modern wars are wars of whole
peoples and not of dynasties. Because the entire nation is regimented
and the whole resources of the country are levied on for war, this does
not mean that it is the country _qua_ country which is fighting. It is
the country organized as a State that is fighting, and only as a State
would it possibly fight. So, literally, it is States which make war on
each other and not peoples. Governments are the agents of States, and
it is Governments which declare war on each other, acting truest to
form in the interests of the great State ideal they represent. There
is no case known in modern times of the people being consulted in the
initiation of a war. The present demand for democratic control of
foreign policy indicates how completely, even in the most democratic of
modern nations, foreign policy has been the secret private possession
of the executive branch of the Government.

However representative of the people Parliaments and Congresses may
be in all that concerns the internal administration of a country’s
political affairs, in international relations it has never been
possible to maintain that the popular body acted except as a wholly
mechanical ratifier of the Executive’s will. The formality by which
Parliaments and Congresses declare war is the merest technicality.
Before such a declaration can take place, the country will have
been brought to the very brink of war by the foreign policy of the
Executive. A long series of steps on the downward path, each one
more fatally committing the unsuspecting country to a warlike course
of action will have been taken without either the people or its
representatives being consulted or expressing its feeling. When the
declaration of war is finally demanded by the Executive, the Parliament
or Congress could not refuse it without reversing the course of
history, without repudiating what has been representing itself in
the eyes of the other States as the symbol and interpreter of the
nation’s will and animus. To repudiate an Executive at that time would
be to publish to the entire world the evidence that the country had
been grossly deceived by its own Government, that the country with
an almost criminal carelessness had allowed its Government to commit
it to gigantic national enterprises in which it had no heart. In
such a crisis, even a Parliament which in the most democratic States
represents the common man and not the significant classes who most
strongly cherish the State ideal, will cheerfully sustain the foreign
policy which it understands even less than it would care for if it
understood, and will vote almost unanimously for an incalculable war,
in which the nation may be brought well nigh to ruin. That is why the
referendum which was advocated by some people as a test of American
sentiment in entering the war was considered even by thoughtful
democrats to be something subtly improper. The die had been cast.
Popular whim could only derange and bungle monstrously the majestic
march of State policy in its new crusade for the peace of the world.
The irresistible State ideal got hold of the bowels of men. Whereas
up to this time, it had been irreproachable to be neutral in word and
deed, for the foreign policy of the State had so decided it, henceforth
it became the most arrant crime to remain neutral. The Middle West,
which had been soddenly pacifistic in our days of neutrality, became
in a few months just as soddenly bellicose, and in its zeal for
witch-burnings and its scent for enemies within gave precedence to
no section of the country. The herd-mind followed faithfully the
State-mind and, the agitation for a referendum being soon forgotten,
the country fell into the universal conclusion that, since its Congress
had formally declared the war, the nation itself had in the most
solemn and universal way devised and brought on the entire affair.
Oppression of minorities became justified on the plea that the latter
were perversely resisting the rationally constructed and solemnly
declared will of a majority of the nation. The herd-coalescence of
opinion which became inevitable the moment the State had set flowing
the war-attitudes became interpreted as a pre-war popular decision,
and disinclination to bow to the herd was treated as a monstrously
anti-social act. So that the State, which had vigorously resisted the
idea of a referendum and clung tenaciously and, of course, with entire
success to its autocratic and absolute control of foreign policy, had
the pleasure of seeing the country, within a few months, given over to
the retrospective impression that a genuine referendum had taken place.
When once a country has lapped up these State attitudes, its memory
fades; it conceives itself not as merely accepting, but of having
itself willed the whole policy and technique of war. The significant
classes with their trailing satellites, identify themselves with the
State, so that what the State, through the agency of the Government,
has willed, this majority conceives itself to have willed.

All of which goes to show that the State represents all the autocratic,
arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a social group, it
is a sort of complexus of everything most distasteful to the modern
free creative spirit, the feeling for life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. War is the health of the State. Only when the State is
at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment,
simple uncritical patriotic devotion, coöperation of services, which
have always been the ideal of the State lover. With the ravages of
democratic ideas, however, the modern republic cannot go to war under
the old conceptions of autocracy and death-dealing belligerency. If a
successful animus for war requires a renaissance of State ideals, they
can only come back under democratic forms, under this retrospective
conviction of democratic control of foreign policy, democratic desire
for war, and particularly of this identification of the democracy
with the State. How unregenerate the ancient State may be, however,
is indicated by the laws against sedition, and by the Government’s
unreformed attitude on foreign policy. One of the first demands of the
more far-seeing democrats in the democracies of the Alliance was that
secret diplomacy must go. The war was seen to have been made possible
by a web of secret agreements between States, alliances that were made
by Governments without the shadow of popular support or even popular
knowledge, and vague, half-understood commitments that scarcely reached
the stage of a treaty or agreement, but which proved binding in the
event. Certainly, said these democratic thinkers, war can scarcely be
avoided unless this poisonous underground system of secret diplomacy is
destroyed, this system by which a nation’s power, wealth and manhood
may be signed away like a blank check to an allied nation to be cashed
in at some future crisis. Agreements which are to affect the lives of
whole peoples must be made between peoples and not by Governments, or
at least by their representatives in the full glare of publicity and
criticism.

Such a demand for “democratic control of foreign policy” seemed
axiomatic. Even if the country had been swung into war by steps
taken secretly and announced to the public only after they had been
consummated, it was felt that that attitude of the American State
towards foreign policy was only a relic of the bad old days and must
be superseded in the new order. The American President himself, the
liberal hope of the world, had demanded, in the eyes of the world, open
diplomacy, agreements freely and openly arrived at. Did this mean a
genuine transference of power in this most crucial of State functions
from Government to people? Not at all. When the question recently came
to a challenge in Congress, and the implications of open discussion
were somewhat specifically discussed, and the desirabilities frankly
commended, the President let his disapproval be known in no uncertain
way. No one ever accused Mr. Wilson of not being a State idealist, and
whenever democratic aspirations swung ideals too far out of the State
orbit, he could be counted on to react vigorously. Here was a clear
case of conflict between democratic idealism and the very crux of the
concept of the State. However unthinkingly he might have been led on
to encourage open diplomacy in his liberalizing programme, when its
implication was made vivid to him, he betrayed how mere a tool the idea
had been in his mind to accentuate America’s redeeming rôle. Not in any
sense as a serious pragmatic technique had he thought of a genuinely
open diplomacy. And how could he? For the last stronghold of State
power is foreign policy. It is in foreign policy that the State acts
most concentratedly as the organized herd, acts with fullest sense of
aggressive power, acts with freest arbitrariness. In foreign policy,
the State is most itself. States, with reference to each other, may
be said to be in a continual state of latent war. The “armed truce,”
a phrase so familiar before 1914, was an accurate description of the
normal relation of States when they are not at war. Indeed, it is not
too much to say that the normal relation of States is war. Diplomacy is
a disguised war, in which States seek to gain by barter and intrigue,
by the cleverness of wits, the objectives which they would have to gain
more clumsily by means of war. Diplomacy is used while the States are
recuperating from conflicts in which they have exhausted themselves.
It is the wheedling and the bargaining of the worn-out bullies as
they rise from the ground and slowly restore their strength to begin
fighting again. If diplomacy had been a moral equivalent for war, a
higher stage in human progress, an inestimable means of making words
prevail instead of blows, militarism would have broken down and given
place to it. But since it is a mere temporary substitute, a mere
appearance of war’s energy under another form, a surrogate effect
is almost exactly proportioned to the armed force behind it. When
it fails, the recourse is immediate to the military technique whose
thinly veiled arm it has been. A diplomacy that was the agency of
popular democratic forces in their non-State manifestations would be no
diplomacy at all. It would be no better than the Railway or Education
Commissions that are sent from one country to another with rational
constructive purpose. The State, acting as a diplomatic-military
ideal, is eternally at war. Just as it must act arbitrarily and
autocratically in time of war, it must act in time of peace in this
particular rôle where it acts as a unit. Unified control is necessarily
autocratic control. Democratic control of foreign policy is therefore
a contradiction in terms. Open discussion destroys swiftness and
certainty of action. The giant State is paralyzed. Mr. Wilson retains
his full ideal of the State at the same time that he desires to
eliminate war. He wishes to make the world safe for democracy as
well as safe for diplomacy. When the two are in conflict, his clear
political insight, his idealism of the State, tells him that it is
the naïver democratic values that must be sacrificed. The world must
primarily be made safe for diplomacy. The State must not be diminished.

What is the State essentially? The more closely we examine it, the more
mystical and personal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our hand
as a definite social group, with attitudes and qualities exact enough
to mean something. On the Government we can put our hand as a certain
organization of ruling functions, the machinery of law-making and
law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of political
functionaries, temporarily in charge of the government. But the State
stands as an idea behind them all, eternal, sanctified, and from it
Government and Administration conceive themselves to have the breath
of life. Even the nation, especially in times of war--or at least,
its significant classes--considers that it derives its authority, and
its purpose from the idea of the State. Nation and State are scarcely
differentiated, and the concrete, practical, apparent facts are sunk in
the symbol. We reverence not our country but the flag. We may criticize
ever so severely our country, but we are disrespectful to the flag at
our peril. It is the flag and the uniform that make men’s heart beat
high and fill them with noble emotions, not the thought of and pious
hopes for America as a free and enlightened nation.

It cannot be said that the object of emotion is the same, because the
flag is the symbol of the nation, so that in reverencing the American
flag we are reverencing the nation. For the flag is not a symbol of
the country as a cultural group, following certain ideals of life, but
solely a symbol of the political State, inseparable from its prestige
and expansion. The flag is most intimately connected with military
achievement, military memory. It represents the country not in its
intensive life, but in its far-flung challenge to the world. The flag
is primarily the banner of war; it is allied with patriotic anthem and
holiday. It recalls old martial memories. A nation’s patriotic history
is solely the history of its wars, that is, of the State in its health
and glorious functioning. So in responding to the appeal of the flag,
we are responding to the appeal of the State, to the symbol of the herd
organized as an offensive and defensive body, conscious of its prowess
and its mystical herd-strength.

Even those authorities in the present Administration, to whom has
been granted autocratic control over opinion, feel, though they are
scarcely able to philosophize over, this distinction. It has been
authoritatively declared that the horrid penalties against seditious
opinion must not be construed as inhibiting legitimate, that is,
partisan criticism of the Administration. A distinction is made
between the Administration and the Government. It is quite accurately
suggested by this attitude that the Administration is a temporary band
of partisan politicians in charge of the machinery of Government,
carrying out the mystical policies of State. The manner in which
they operate this machinery may be freely discussed and objected to
by their political opponents. The Governmental machinery may also be
legitimately altered, in case of necessity. What may not be discussed
or criticized is the mystical policy itself or the motives of the
State in inaugurating such a policy. The President, it is true, has
made certain partisan distinctions between candidates for office
on the ground of support or non-support of the Administration, but
what he meant was really support or non-support of the State policy
as faithfully carried out by the Administration. Certain of the
Administration measures were devised directly to increase the health
of the State, such as the Conscription and the Espionage laws. Others
were concerned merely with the machinery. To oppose the first was to
oppose the State and was therefore not tolerable. To oppose the second
was to oppose fallible human judgment, and was therefore, though to be
deprecated, not to be wholly interpreted as political suicide.

The distinction between Government and State, however, has not been so
carefully observed. In time of war it is natural that Government as
the seat of authority should be confused with the State or the mystic
source of authority. You cannot very well injure a mystical idea which
is the State, but you can very well interfere with the processes of
Government. So that the two become identified in the public mind, and
any contempt for or opposition to the workings of the machinery of
Government is considered equivalent to contempt for the sacred State.
The State, it is felt, is being injured in its faithful surrogate, and
public emotion rallies passionately to defend it. It even makes any
criticism of the form of Government a crime.

The inextricable union of militarism and the State is beautifully
shown by those laws which emphasize interference with the Army and
Navy as the most culpable of seditious crimes. Pragmatically, a case
of capitalistic sabotage, or a strike in war industry would seem to
be far more dangerous to the successful prosecution of the war than
the isolated and ineffectual efforts of an individual to prevent
recruiting. But in the tradition of the State ideal, such industrial
interference with national policy is not identified as a crime against
the State. It may be grumbled against; it may be seen quite rationally
as an impediment of the utmost gravity. But it is not _felt_ in those
obscure seats of the herd-mind which dictate the identity of crime and
fix their proportional punishments. Army and Navy, however, are the
very arms of the State; in them flows its most precious life-blood.
To paralyze them is to touch the very State itself. And the majesty
of the State is so sacred that even to attempt such a paralysis is a
crime equal to a successful stroke. The will is deemed sufficient. Even
though the individual in his effort to impede recruiting should utterly
and lamentably fail, he shall be in no wise spared. Let the wrath of
the State descend upon him for his impiety! Even if he does not try
any overt action, but merely utters sentiments that may incidentally
in the most indirect way cause some one to refrain from enlisting, he
is guilty. The guardians of the State do not ask whether any pragmatic
effect flowed out of this evil will or desire. It is enough that the
will is present. Fifteen or twenty years in prison is not deemed too
much for such sacrilege.

Such attitudes and such laws, which affront every principle of human
reason, are no accident, nor are they the result of hysteria caused by
the war. They are considered just, proper, beautiful by all the classes
which have the State ideal, and they express only an extreme of health
and vigor in the reaction of the State to its non-friends.

Such attitudes are inevitable as arising from the devotees of the
State. For the State is a personal as well as a mystical symbol,
and it can only be understood by tracing its historical origin. The
modern State is not the national and intelligent product of modern
men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life,
property and opinion. It is not an organization which has been devised
as pragmatic means to a desired social end. All the idealism with
which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of
our retrospective imaginations. What it does for us in the way of
security and benefit of life, it does incidentally as a by-product
and development of its original functions, and not because at any
time men or classes in the full possession of their insight and
intelligence have desired that it be so. It is very important that we
should occasionally lift the incorrigible veil of that _ex post facto_
idealism by which we throw a glamor of rationalization over what is,
and pretend in the ecstasies of social conceit that we have personally
invented and set up for the glory of God and man the hoary institutions
which we see around us. Things are what they are, and come down to us
with all their thick encrustations of error and malevolence. Political
philosophy can delight us with fantasy and convince us who need
illusion to live that the actual is a fair and approximate copy--full
of failings, of course, but approximately sound and sincere--of that
ideal society which we can imagine ourselves as creating. From this it
is a step to the tacit assumption that we have somehow had a hand in
its creation and are responsible for its maintenance and sanctity.

Nothing is more obvious, however, than that every one of us comes into
society as into something in whose creation we had not the slightest
hand. We have not even the advantage of consciousness before we take up
our careers on earth. By the time we find ourselves here we are caught
in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our
desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time
we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when
we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social
institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society and
class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between
ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment.
We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what our
society approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the group
our own passional inertia against change, against the effort of reason,
and the adventure of beauty.

Every one of us, without exception, is born into a society that is
given, just as the fauna and flora of our environment are given.
Society and its institutions are, to the individual who enters it,
as much naturalistic phenomena as is the weather itself. There is
therefore, no natural sanctity in the State any more than there is
in the weather. We may bow down before it, just as our ancestors
bowed before the sun and moon, but it is only because something in us
unregenerate finds satisfaction in such an attitude, not because there
is anything inherently reverential in the institution worshipped. Once
the State has begun to function, and a large class finds its interest
and its expression of power in maintaining the State, this ruling class
may compel obedience from any uninterested minority. The State thus
becomes an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is wielded
for the benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to capitalize the
reverence which the State produces in the majority, and turn it into
a general resistance towards a lessening of their privileges. The
sanctity of the State becomes identified with the sanctity of the
ruling class and the latter are permitted to remain in power under the
impression that in obeying and serving them, we are obeying and serving
society, the nation, the great collectivity of all of us.

An analysis of the State would take us back to the beginnings of
society, to the complex of religious and personal and herd-impulses
which has found expression in so many forms. What we are interested in
is the American State as it behaves and as Americans behave towards
it in this twentieth century, and to understand that, we have to go
no further back than the early English monarchy of which our American
republic is the direct descendant. How straight and true is that
line of descent almost nobody realizes. Those persons who believe
in the sharpest distinction between democracy and monarchy can
scarcely appreciate how a political institution may go through so many
transformations and yet remain the same. Yet a swift glance must show
us that in all the evolution of the English monarchy, with all its
broadenings and its revolutions, and even with its jump across the sea
into a colony which became an independent nation and then a powerful
State, the same State functions and attitudes have been preserved
essentially unchanged. The changes have been changes of form and not
of inner spirit, and the boasted extension of democracy has been not
a process by which the State was essentially altered to meet the
shifting of classes, the extension of knowledge, the needs of social
organization, but a mere elastic expansion by which the old spirit of
the State easily absorbed the new and adjusted itself successfully to
its exigencies. Never once has it been seriously shaken. Only once or
twice has it been seriously challenged, and each time it has speedily
recovered its equilibrium and proceeded with all its attitudes and
faiths reënforced by the disturbance.

The modern democratic State, in this light, is therefore no bright and
rational creation of a new day, the political form under which great
peoples are to live healthfully and freely in a modern world, but the
last decrepit scion of an ancient and hoary stock, which has become so
exhausted that it scarcely recognizes its own ancestor, does, in fact
repudiate him while it clings tenaciously to the archaic and irrelevant
spirit that made that ancestor powerful, and resists the new bottles
for the new wine that its health as a modern society so desperately
needs. So sweeping a conclusion might have been doubted concerning the
American State had it not been for the war, which has provided a long
and beautiful series of examples of the tenacity of the State ideal and
its hold on the significant classes of the American nation. War is the
health of the State, and it is during war that one best understands
the nature of that institution. If the American democracy during
wartime has acted with an almost incredible trueness to form, if it has
resurrected with an almost joyful fury the somnolent State, we can only
conclude that that tradition from the past has been unbroken, and that
the American republic is the direct descendant of the early English
State.

And what was the nature of this early English State? It was first of
all a mediæval absolute monarchy, arising out of the feudal chaos,
which had represented the first effort at order after the turbulent
assimilation of the invading barbarians by the Christianizing Roman
civilization. The feudal lord evolved out of the invading warrior
who had seized or been granted land and held it, souls and usufruct
thereof, as fief to some higher lord whom he aided in war. His own
serfs and vassals were exchanging faithful service for the protection
which the warrior with his organized band could give them. Where one
invading chieftain retained his power over his lesser lieutenants, a
petty kingdom would arise, as in England, and a restless and ambitious
king might extend his power over his neighbors and consolidate the
petty kingdoms only to fall before the armed power of an invader like
William the Conqueror, who would bring the whole realm under his
heel. The modern State begins when a prince secures almost undisputed
sway over fairly homogeneous territory and people and strives to
fortify his power and maintain the order that will conduce to the
safety and influence of his heirs. The State in its inception is
pure and undiluted monarchy; it is armed power, culminating in a
single head, bent on one primary object, the reducing to subjection,
to unconditional and unqualified loyalty of all the people of a
certain territory. This is the primary striving of the State, and
it is a striving that the State never loses, through all its myriad
transformations.

When this subjugation was once acquired, the modern State had begun.
In the King, the subjects found their protection and their sense of
unity. From his side, he was a redoubtable, ambitious, and stiff-necked
warrior, getting the supreme mastery which he craved. But from theirs,
he was a symbol of the herd, the visible emblem of that security which
they needed and for which they drew gregariously together. Serfs
and villains, whose safety under their petty lords had been rudely
shattered in the constant conflicts for supremacy, now drew a new
breath under the supremacy, that wiped out all this local anarchy.
King and people agreed in the thirst for order, and order became
the first healing function of the State. But in the maintenance of
order, the King needed officers of justice; the old crude group-rules
for dispensing justice had to be codified, a system of formal law
worked out. The King needed ministers, who would carry out his will,
extensions of his own power, as a machine extends the power of a man’s
hand. So the State grew as a gradual differentiation of the King’s
absolute power, founded on the devotion of his subjects and his control
of a military band, swift and sure to smite. Gratitude for protection
and fear of the strong arm sufficed to produce the loyalty of the
country to the State.

The history of the State, then, is the effort to maintain these
personal prerogatives of power, the effort to convert more and more
into stable law the rules of order, the conditions of public vengeance,
the distinction between classes, the possession of privilege. It was an
effort to convert what was at first arbitrary usurpation, a perfectly
apparent use of unjustified force, into the taken for granted and the
divinely established. The State moves inevitably along the line from
military dictatorship to the divine right of Kings. What had to be at
first rawly imposed becomes through social habit to seem the necessary,
the inevitable. The modern unquestioning acceptance of the State comes
out of long and turbulent centuries when the State was challenged and
had to fight its way to prevail. The King’s establishment of personal
power--which was the early State--had to contend with the impudence
of hostile barons, who saw too clearly the adventitious origin of the
monarchy and felt no reason why they should not themselves reign. Feuds
between the King and his relatives, quarrels over inheritance, quarrels
over the devolution of property, threatened constantly the existence
of the new monarchical State. The King’s will to power necessitated
for its absolute satisfaction universality of political control in his
dominions, just as the Roman Church claimed universality of spiritual
control over the whole world. And just as rival popes were the
inevitable product of such a pretension of sovereignty, rival kings and
princes contended for that dazzling jewel of undisputed power.

Not until the Tudor régime was there in England an irresponsible
absolute personal monarchy on the lines of the early State ideal,
governing a fairly well-organized and prosperous nation. The Stuarts
were not only too weak-minded to inherit this fruition of William
the Conqueror’s labors, but they made the fatal mistake of bringing
out to public view and philosophy the idea of Divine Right implicit
in the State, and this at a time when a new class of country gentry
and burghers were attaining wealth and self-consciousness backed by
the zeal of a theocratic and individualistic religion. Cromwell might
certainly, if he had continued in power, revised the ideal of the
State, perhaps utterly transformed it, destroying the concepts of
personal power, and universal sovereignty, and substituting a sort of
Government of Presbyterian Soviets under the tutelage of a celestial
Czar. But the Restoration brought back the old State under a peculiarly
frivolous form. The Revolution was the merest change of monarchs at
the behest of a Protestant majority which insisted on guarantees
against religious relapse. The intrinsic nature of the monarchy as the
symbol of the State was not in the least altered. In place of the
inept monarch who could not lead the State in person or concentrate
in himself the royal prerogatives, a coterie of courtiers managed
the State. But their direction was consistently in the interest of
the monarch and of the traditional ideal, so that the current of the
English State was not broken.

The boasted English Parliament of lords and commoners possessed at no
time any vitality which weakened or threatened to weaken the State
ideal. Its original purpose was merely to facilitate the raising of the
King’s revenues. The nobles responded better when they seemed to be
giving their consent. Their share in actual government was subjective,
but the existence of Parliament served to appease any restiveness at
the autocracy of the King. The significant classes could scarcely rebel
when they had the privilege of giving consent to the King’s measures.
There was always outlet for the rebellious spirit of a powerful lord
in private revolt against the King. The only Parliament that seriously
tried to govern outside of and against the King’s will precipitated a
civil war that ended with the effectual submission of Parliament in
a more careless and corrupt autocracy than had yet been known. By the
time of George III Parliament was moribund, utterly unrepresentative
either of the new bourgeois classes or of peasants and laborers, a
mere frivolous parody of a legislature, despised both by King and
people. The King was most effectively the State and his ministers the
Government, which was run in terms of his personal whim, by men whose
only interest was personal intrigue. Government had been for long what
it has never ceased to be--a series of berths and emoluments in Army,
Navy and the different departments of State, for the representatives of
the privileged classes.

The State of George III was an example of the most archaic ideal
of the English State, the pure, personal monarchy. The great mass
of the people had fallen into the age-long tradition of loyalty to
the crown. The classes that might have been restive for political
power were placated by a show of representative government and the
lucrative supply of offices. Discontent showed itself only in those
few enlightened elements which could not refrain from irony at the
sheer irrationality of a State managed on the old heroic lines
for so grotesque a sovereign and by so grotesque a succession of
courtier-ministers. Such discontent could by no means muster sufficient
force for a revolution, but the Revolution which was due came in
America where even the very obviously shadowy pigment of Parliamentary
representation was denied the colonists. All that was vital in the
political thought of England supported the American colonists in their
resistance to the obnoxious government of George III.

The American Revolution began with certain latent hopes that it might
turn into a genuine break with the State ideal. The Declaration of
Independence announced doctrines that were utterly incompatible not
only with the century-old conception of the Divine Right of Kings, but
also with the Divine Right of the State. If all governments derive
their authority from the consent of the governed, and if a people is
entitled, at any time that it becomes oppressive, to overthrow it and
institute one more nearly conformable to their interests and ideals,
the old idea of the sovereignty of the State is destroyed. The State is
reduced to the homely work of an instrument for carrying out popular
policies. If revolution is justifiable a State may be even criminal
sometimes in resisting its own extinction. The sovereignty of the
people is no mere phrase. It is a direct challenge to the historic
tradition of the State. For it implies that the ultimate sanctity
resides not in the State at all or in its agent, the government, but in
the nation, that is, in the country viewed as a cultural group and not
specifically as a king-dominated herd. The State then becomes a mere
instrument, the servant of this popular will, or of the constructive
needs of the cultural group. The Revolution had in it, therefore,
the makings of a very daring modern experiment--the founding of a
free nation which should use the State to effect its vast purposes of
subduing a continent just as the colonists’ armies had used arms to
detach their society from the irresponsible rule of an overseas king
and his frivolous ministers. The history of the State might have ended
in 1776 as far as the American colonies were concerned, and the modern
nation which is still striving to materialize itself have been born.

For awhile it seemed almost as if the State was dead. But men who
are freed rarely know what to do with their liberty. In each colony
the fatal seed of the State had been sown; it could not disappear.
Rival prestiges and interests began to make themselves felt. Fear
of foreign States, economic distress, discord between classes, the
inevitable physical exhaustion and prostration of idealism which
follows a protracted war--all combined to put the responsible classes
of the new States into the mood for a regression to the State ideal.
Ostensibly there is no reason why the mere lack of a centralized State
should have destroyed the possibility of progress in the new liberated
America, provided the inter-state jealousy and rivalry could have been
destroyed. But there were no leaders for this anti-State nationalism.
The sentiments of the Declaration remained mere sentiments. No
constructive political scheme was built on them. The State ideal, on
the other hand, had ambitious leaders of the financial classes, who
saw in the excessive decentralization of the Confederation too much
opportunity for the control of society by the democratic lower-class
elements. They were menaced by imperialistic powers without and by
democracy within. Through their fear of the former they tended to
exaggerate the impossibility of the latter. There was no inclination
to make the new State a school where democratic experiments could
be worked out as they should be. They were unwilling to give
reconstruction the term that might have been necessary to build up this
truly democratic nationalism. Six years is a short time to reconstruct
an agricultural country devastated by a six years’ war. The popular
elements in the new States had time only to show their turbulence; they
were given no time to grow. The ambitious leaders of the financial
classes got a convention called to discuss the controversies and
maladjustments of the States, which were making them clamor for a
revision of the Articles of Confederation, and then, by one of the most
successful _coups d’état_ in history, turned their assembly into the
manufacture of a new government on the strongest lines of the old State
ideal.

This new constitution, manufactured in secret session by the leaders
of the propertied and ruling classes, was then submitted to an
approval of the electors which only by the most expert manipulation
was obtained, but which was sufficient to override the indignant
undercurrent of protest from those popular elements who saw the fruits
of the Revolution slipping away from them. Universal suffrage would
have killed it forever. Had the liberated colonies had the advantage of
the French experience before them, the promulgation of the Constitution
would undoubtedly have been followed by a new revolution, as very
nearly happened later against Washington and the Federalists. But the
ironical ineptitude of Fate put the machinery of the new Federalist
constitutional government in operation just at the moment that the
French Revolution began, and by the time those great waves of Jacobin
feeling reached North America, the new Federalist State was firmly
enough on its course to weather the gale and the turmoil.

The new State was therefore not the happy political symbol of a united
people, who in order to form a more perfect union, etc., but the
imposition of a State on a loose and growing nationalism, which was
in a condition of unstable equilibrium and needed perhaps only to be
fertilized from abroad to develop a genuine political experiment in
democracy. The preamble to the Constitution, as was soon shown in the
hostile popular vote and later in the revolt against the Federalists,
was a pious hope rather than actuality, a blessedness to be realized
when by the force of government pressure, the creation of idealism,
and mere social habit, the population should be welded and kneaded
into a State. That this is what has actually happened, is seen in the
fact that the somewhat shockingly undemocratic origins of the American
State have been almost completely glossed over and the unveiling is
bitterly resented, by none so bitterly as the significant classes who
have been most industrious in cultivating patriotic myth and legend.
American history, as far as it has entered into the general popular
emotion, runs along this line: The Colonies are freed by the Revolution
from a tyrannous King and become free and independent States; there
follow six years of impotent peace, during which the Colonies quarrel
among themselves and reveal the hopeless weakness of the principle
under which they are working together; in desperation the people then
create a new instrument, and launch a free and democratic republic,
which was and remains--especially since it withstood the shock of
civil war--the most perfect form of democratic government known
to man, perfectly adequate to be promulgated as an example in the
twentieth century to all people, and to be spread by propaganda, and,
if necessary, the sword, in all unregenerately Imperial regions. Modern
historians reveal the avowedly undemocratic personnel and opinions of
the Convention. They show that the members not only had an unconscious
economic interest but a frank political interest in founding a State
which should protect the propertied classes against the hostility of
the people. They show how, from one point of view, the new government
became almost a mechanism for overcoming the repudiation of debts, for
putting back into their place a farmer and small trader class whom
the unsettled times of reconstruction had threatened to liberate, for
reëstablishing on the securest basis of the sanctity of property and
the State, their class-supremacy menaced by a democracy that had
drunk too deeply at the fount of Revolution. But all this makes little
impression on the other legend of the popular mind, because it disturbs
the sense of the sanctity of the State and it is this rock to which the
herd-wish must cling.

Every little school boy is trained to recite the weaknesses and
inefficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. It is taken as
axiomatic that under them the new nation was falling into anarchy
and was only saved by the wisdom and energy of the Convention. These
hapless articles have had to bear the infamy cast upon the untried
by the radiantly successful. The nation had to be strong to repel
invasion, strong to pay to the last loved copper penny the debts of
the propertied and the provident ones, strong to keep the unpropertied
and improvident from ever using the government to ensure their own
prosperity at the expense of moneyed capital. Under the Articles
the new States were obviously trying to reconstruct themselves in
an alarming tenderness for the common man impoverished by the war.
No one suggests that the anxiety of the leaders of the heretofore
unquestioned ruling classes desired the revision of the Articles and
labored so weightily over a new instrument not because the nation was
failing under the Articles but because it was succeeding only too
well. Without intervention from the leaders, reconstruction threatened
in time to turn the new nation into an agrarian and proletarian
democracy. It is impossible to predict what would have been worked out
in time, whether the democratic idealism implicit in the Declaration
of Independence would have materialized into a form of society very
much modified from the ancient State. All we know is that at a time
when the current of political progress was in the direction of agrarian
and proletarian democracy, a force hostile to it gripped the nation
and imposed upon it a powerful form against which it was never to
succeed in doing more than blindly struggle. The liberating virus of
the Revolution was definitely expunged, and henceforth if it worked at
all it had to work against the State, in opposition to the armed and
respectable power of the nation.

The propertied classes, seated firmly in the saddle by their
Constitutional _coup d’état_, have, of course, never lost their
ascendancy. The particular group of Federalists who had engineered
the new machinery and enjoyed the privilege of setting it in motion,
were turned out in a dozen years by the “Jeffersonian democracy” whom
their manner had so deeply offended. But the Jeffersonian democracy
never meant in practice any more than the substitution of the rule
of the country gentleman for the rule of the town capitalist. The
true hostility between their interests was small as compared with the
hostility of both towards the common man. When both were swept away
by the irruption of the Western democracy under Andrew Jackson and
the rule of the common man appeared for awhile in its least desirable
forms, it was comparatively easy for the two propertied classes to form
a tacit coalition against them. The new West achieved an extension of
suffrage and a jovial sense of having come politically into its own,
but the rule of the ancient classes was not seriously challenged. Their
squabbles over the tariff were family affairs, for the tariff could not
materially affect the common man of either East or West. The Eastern
and Northern capitalists soon saw the advantage of supporting Southern
country gentleman slave-power as against the free-soil pioneer. Bad
generalship on the part of this coalition allowed a Western free-soil
minority President to slip into office and brought on the Civil War,
which smashed the slave-power and left Northern capital in undisputed
possession of a field against which the pioneer could make only
sporadic and ineffective revolts.

From the Civil War to the death of Mark Hanna, the propertied
capitalist industrial classes ran a triumphal career in possession of
the State. At various times, as in 1896, the country had to be saved
for them from disillusioned, rebellious hordes of small farmers and
traders and democratic idealists, who had in the overflow of prosperity
been squeezed down into the small end of the horn. But except for
these occasional menaces, business, that is to say, aggressive
expansionist capitalism, had nearly forty years in which to direct the
American republic as a private preserve, or laboratory, experimenting,
developing, wasting, subjugating, to its heart’s content, in the midst
of a vast somnolence of complacency such as has never been seen
and contrasts strangely with the spiritual dissent and constructive
revolutionary thought which went on at the same time in England and the
Continent.

That era ended in 1904 like the crack of doom, which woke a whole
people into a modern day which they had far overslept, and for which
they had no guiding principles or philosophy to conduct them about.
They suddenly became acutely and painfully aware of the evils of
the society in which they had slumbered and they snatched at one
after the other idea, programme, movement, ideal, to uplift them out
of the slough in which they had slept. The glory of those shining
figures--captains of industry--went out in a sulphuric gloom. The head
of the State, who made up in dogmatism what he lacked in philosophy,
increased the confusion by reviving the Ten Commandments for
political purposes, and belaboring the wicked with them. The American
world tossed in a state of doubt, of reawakened social conscience,
of pragmatic effort for the salvation of society. The ruling
classes--annoyed, bewildered, harassed--pretended with much bemoaning
that they were losing their grip on the State. Their inspired prophets
uttered solemn warnings against political novelty and the abandonment
of the tried and tested fruits of experience.

These classes actually had little to fear. A political system which
had been founded in the interests of property by their own spiritual
and economic ancestors, which had become ingrained in the country’s
life through a function of 120 years, which was buttressed by a legal
system which went back without a break to the early English monarchy
was not likely to crumble before the anger of a few muck-rakers, the
disillusionment of a few radical sociologists, or the assaults of
proletarian minorities. Those who bided their time through the Taft
interregnum, which merely continued the Presidency until there could
be found a statesman to fill it, were rewarded by the appearance of
the exigency of a war, in which business organization was imperatively
needed. They were thus able to make a neat and almost noiseless
coalition with the Government. The mass of the worried middle-classes,
riddled by the campaign against American failings, which at times
extended almost to a skepticism of the American State itself, were
only too glad to sink back to a glorification of the State ideal, to
feel about them in war, the old protecting arms, to return to the old
primitive robust sense of the omnipotence of the State, its matchless
virtue, honor and beauty, driving away all the foul old doubts and
dismays.

That the same class which imposed its constitution on the nascent
proletarian and agrarian democracy has maintained itself to this day
indicates how slight was the real effect of the Revolution. When that
political change was consolidated in the new government, it was found
that there had been a mere transfer of ruling-class power across the
seas, or rather that a ruling commercial class in the colonies had
been able to remove through a war fought largely by the masses a
vexatious over-lordship of the irresponsible coterie of ministers that
surrounded George III. The colonies merely exchanged a system run in
the interest of the overseas trade of English wealth for a system run
in the interest of New England and Philadelphia merchanthood, and later
of Southern slavocracy. The daring innovation of getting rid of a king
and setting up a kingless State did not apparently impress the hard
headed farmers and small traders with as much force as it has their
patriotic defenders. The animus of the Convention was so obviously
monarchical that any executive they devised could be only a very thinly
disguised king. The compromise by which the presidency was created
proved but to be the means by which very nearly the whole mass of
traditional royal prerogatives was brought over and lodged in the new
State.

The President is an elected king, but the fact that he is elected
has proved to be of far less significance in the course of political
evolution than the fact that he is pragmatically a king. It was the
intention of the founders of the Constitution that he be elected by a
small body of notables, representing the ruling propertied classes,
who could check him up every four years in a new election. This was
no innovation. Kings have often been selected in this way in European
history, and the Roman Emperor was regularly chosen by election. That
the American President’s term was limited merely shows the confidence
which the founders felt in the buttressing force of their instrument.
His election would never pass out of the hands of the notables, and so
the office would be guaranteed to be held by a faithful representative
of upper-class demands. What he was most obviously to represent was
the interests of that body which elected him, and not the mass of the
people who were still disfranchised. For the new State started with
no Quixotic belief in universal suffrage. The property qualifications
which were in effect in every colony were continued. Government was
frankly a function of those who held a concrete interest in the public
weal, in the shape of visible property. The responsibility for the
security of property rights could safely lie only with those who had
something to secure. The “stake” in the commonwealth which those who
held office must possess was obviously larger.

One of the larger errors of political insight which the sage founders
of the Constitution committed was to assume that the enfranchised
watch-dogs of property and the public order would remain a homogeneous
class. Washington, acting strictly as the mouthpiece of the unified
State ideal, deprecated the growth of parties and of factions which
horridly keep the State in turbulence or threaten to rend it asunder.
But the monarchical and repressive policies of Washington’s own friends
promptly generated an opposition democratic party representing the
landed interests of the ruling classes, and the party system was
fastened on the country. By the time the electorate had succeeded in
reducing the electoral college to a mere recorder of the popular vote,
or in other words, had broadened the class of notables to the whole
property-holding electorate, the parties were firmly established to
carry on the selective and refining and securing work of the electoral
college. The party leadership then became, and has remained ever since,
the nucleus of notables who determine the presidency. The electorate
having won an apparently democratic victory in the destruction of the
notables, finds itself reduced to the rôle of mere ratification or
selection between two or three candidates, in whose choice they have
only a nominal share. The electoral college which stood between even
the propertied electorate and the executive with the prerogatives
of a king, gave place to a body which was just as genuinely a bar
to democratic expression, and far less responsible for its acts.
The nucleus of party councils which became, after the reduction of
the Electoral College, the real choosers of the Presidents, were
unofficial, quasi-anonymous, utterly unchecked by the populace whose
rulers they chose. More or less self-chosen, or chosen by local groups
whom they dominated, they provided a far more secure guarantee that
the State should remain in the hands of the ruling classes than the
old electoral college. The party councils could be loosely organized
entirely outside of the governmental organization, without oversight
by the State or check from the electorate. They could be composed of
the leaders of the propertied classes themselves or their lieutenants,
who could retain their power indefinitely, or at least until they were
unseated by rivals within the same charmed domain. They were at least
entirely safe from attack by the officially constituted electorate,
who, as the party system became more and more firmly established, found
they could vote only on the slates set up for them by unknown councils
behind an imposing and all-powerful “Party.”

As soon as this system was organized into a hierarchy extending from
national down to state and county politics, it became perfectly safe
to broaden the electorate. The clamors of the unpropertied or the less
propertied to share in the selection of their democratic republican
government could be graciously acceded to without endangering in the
least the supremacy of those classes which the founders had meant to
be supreme. The minority were now even more effectually protected from
the majority than under the old system, however indirect the election
might be. The electorate was now reduced to a ratifier of slates, and
as a ratifier of slates, or a chooser between two slates, both of
which were pledged to upper-class domination, the electorate could
have the freest, most universal suffrage, for any mass-desire for
political change, any determined will to shift the class-balance, would
be obliged to register itself through the party machinery. It could
make no frontal attack on the Government. And the party machinery was
directly devised to absorb and neutralize this popular shock, handing
out to the disgruntled electorate a disguised stone when it asked for
political bread, and effectually smashing any third party which ever
avariciously tried to reach government except through the regular
two-party system.

The party system succeeded, of course, beyond the wildest dreams of
its creators. It relegated the founders of the Constitution to the
rôle of doctrinaire theorists, political amateurs. Just because it
grew up slowly to meet the needs of ambitious politicians and was not
imposed by ruling-class fiat, as was the Constitution, did it have a
chance to become assimilated, worked into the political intelligence
and instinct of the people, and be adopted gladly and universally
as a genuine political form, expressive both of popular need and
ruling-class demand. It satisfied the popular demand for democracy.
The enormous sense of victory which followed the sweeping away of
property qualifications of suffrage, the tangible evidence that now
every citizen was participating in public affairs, and that the entire
manhood democracy was now self-governing, created a mood of political
complacency that lasted uninterruptedly into the twentieth century. The
party system was thus the means of removing political grievance from
the greater part of the populace, and of giving to the ruling classes
the hidden but genuine permanence of control which the Constitution had
tried openly to give them. It supplemented and repaired the ineptitudes
of the Constitution. It became the unofficial but real government, the
instrument which used the Constitution as its instrument.

Only in two cases did the party system seem to lose its grip, was it
thrown off its base by the inception of a new party from without--in
the elections of Jackson and of Lincoln. Jackson came in as the
representative of a new democratic West which had no tradition of
suffrage qualifications, and Lincoln as a minority candidate in a
time of factional and sectional strife. But the discomfiture of the
party politicians was short. The party system proved perfectly capable
of assimilating both of these new movements. Jackson’s insurrection
was soon captured by the old machinery and fed the slavocracy, and
Lincoln’s party became the property of the new bonanza capitalism.
Neither Jackson or Lincoln made the slightest deflection in the
triumphal march of the party system. In practically no other contests
has the electorate had for all practical purposes a choice except
between two candidates, identical as far as their political rôle
would be as representatives of the significant classes in the State.
Campaigns such as Bryan’s, where one of the parties is captured by an
element which seeks a real transference of power from the significant
to the less significant classes, split the party, and sporadic third
party attacks merely throw the scale one way or the other between the
big parties, or, if threatening enough, produce a virtual coalition
against them.

To most of the Americans of the classes which consider themselves
significant the war brought a sense of the sanctity of the State,
which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a
sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought. In times
of peace, we usually ignore the State in favor of partisan political
controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of
party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which
the politically-minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy
emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of patriotic
holiday.

Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is
thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own
party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough;
but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have
fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way.
What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a
very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for
granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that
they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the
institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government
of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who hold office are
indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them possess the slightest
personal dignity with which they could endow their political rôle;
even if they ever thought of such a thing. And they have no class
distinction to give them glamor. In a Republic the Government is obeyed
grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it.
If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you
glory in the plainness of a system where every citizen has become a
king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the passing of dignity
and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not
in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king,
nor does the sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when
he finds it. The republican state has almost no trappings to appeal to
the common man’s emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in
an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War,
even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the
sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again.
The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation
of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling,
the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision
with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the
country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it
is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been
hurled towards us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal
and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our
going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes,
it can gently whisper of a bigger rôle in the destiny of the world.
The result is that, even in those countries where the business of
declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the
people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an
Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and
irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats
are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the
popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an
absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern
pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of
republics as well as in the most tyrannical of Empires, all foreign
policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are
equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government,
and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or
the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through
some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and
executed the deed themselves. They then with the exception of a few
malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced,
deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a
solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may
have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the
Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and
indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes,
revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more
walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism
becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense
and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears
and should bear towards the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation
and government. In our quieter moments, the Nation or Country forms the
basic idea of society. We think vaguely of a loose population spreading
over a certain geographical portion of the earth’s surface, speaking
a common language, and living in a homogeneous civilization. Our idea
of Country concerns itself with the non-political aspects of a people,
its ways of living, its personal traits, its literature and art, its
characteristic attitudes towards life. We are Americans because we live
in a certain bounded territory, because our ancestors have carried on
a great enterprise of pioneering and colonization, because we live in
certain kinds of communities which have a certain look and express
their aspirations in certain ways. We can see that our civilization is
different from contiguous civilizations like the Indian and Mexican.
The institutions of our country form a certain network which affects
us vitally and intrigues our thoughts in a way that these other
civilizations do not. We are a part of country, for better or for
worse. We have arrived in it through the operation of physiological
laws, and not in any way through our own choice. By the time we have
reached what are called years of discretion, its influences have molded
our habits, our values, our ways of thinking, so that however aware
we may become, we never really lose the stamp of our civilization, or
could be mistaken for the child of any other country. Our feeling for
our fellow-countrymen is one of similarity or of mere acquaintance. We
may be intensely proud of and congenial to our particular network of
civilization, or we may detest most of its qualities and rage at its
defects. This does not alter the fact that we are inextricably bound up
in it. The Country, as an inescapable group into which we are born, and
which makes us its particular kind of a citizen of the world, seems to
be a fundamental fact of our consciousness, an irreducible minimum of
social feeling.

Now this feeling for country is essentially non-competitive; we think
of our own people merely as living on the earth’s surface along
with other groups, pleasant or objectionable as they may be, but
fundamentally as sharing the earth with them. In our simple conception
of country there is no more feeling of rivalry with other peoples than
there is in our feeling for our family. Our interest turns within
rather than without, is intensive and not belligerent. We grow up and
our imaginations gradually stake out the world we live in, they need no
greater conscious satisfaction for their gregarious impulses than this
sense of a great mass of people to whom we are more or less attuned,
and in whose institutions we are functioning. The feeling for country
would be an uninflatable maximum were it not for the ideas of State and
Government which are associated with it. Country is a concept of peace,
of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially
a concept of power, of competition; it signifies a group in its
aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of being born not only
into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle
the two feelings into a hopeless confusion.

The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group
acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of justice.
International politics is a “power politics” because it is a relation
of States and that is what States infallibly and calamitously are,
huge aggregations of human and industrial force that may be hurled
against each other in war. When a country acts as a whole in relation
to another country, or in imposing laws on its own inhabitants, or in
coercing or punishing individuals or minorities, it is acting as a
State. The history of America as a country is quite different from that
of America as a State. In one case it is the drama of the pioneering
conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and the ways in which
it was used, of the enterprise of education, and the carrying out
of spiritual ideals, of the struggle of economic classes. But as a
State, its history is that of playing a part in the world, making war,
obstructing international trade, preventing itself from being split to
pieces, punishing those citizens whom society agrees are offensive, and
collecting money to pay for all....


THE END




FOOTNOTE:

[1] June, 1917.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

  The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber using
    the original cover as the background and is entered into the public
    domain.