Chapter 11 of 13 · 4908 words · ~25 min read

CHAPTER XI

IS AMERICA YOUNG?

In 1719 an anonymous New England author who signed himself, rather oddly, “your friend among the Oakes and Pines,” gave voice to the doctrine that America was young. Speaking for his day, he said, “The Plow-Man that raiseth Grain is more serviceable to Mankind than the Painter who draws only to please the Eye.... The Carpenter who builds a good house to defend us from Wind and Weather is more serviceable than the curious Carver, who employs his Art to please the Fancy.” Only, he continues, after further praise of labor, “when a People grow numerous, and part are sufficient to raise necessaries for the whole, then ’tis allowable and laudable, that some should be imployed in innocent Arts more for ornament than Necessity; any innocent business that gets an honest penny, is better than Idleness.”

When this anonymous social critic made his comments on the needs of America there was but little more than a fringe of settlement along the Atlantic coast. Boston, with a population of eleven thousand, was about twice as populous as either of its two rivals, Philadelphia and New York. The entire white population of North America was considerably under half a million people. There were scarcely any roads and no public means of transportation. Beyond the scattered coastal settlements, the wilderness stretched three thousand miles to the Pacific. Inhabited by savages and almost interminable in extent, the work of subduing it to the needs of civilized man seemed to call, not for centuries, but for millennia of physical effort.

Owing partly to the indomitable courage and partly to the insatiable greed of the American people, but even more to the inventions of science, what seemed a task for the ages has been accomplished in six generations. On the Pacific coast to-day there are cities as populous as were the greatest in Europe when our New Englander promulgated his doctrine that America was young. Yet that doctrine is as firmly embedded in the popular mind as ever. This is so obvious as hardly to need emphasizing by example, but I may mention what I have noted within a few three days.

When speaking to an American boy of seventeen in regard to certain aspects of American life, he countered immediately with: “But America is young. We are really only about a _hundred and fifty_ years old.” In the course of conversation only yesterday with an Englishman, the son of one of the great friends America had in England during our Civil War, he said: “Of course you are _young_. We must wait.” In a letter just received from a friend at home I find the same idea reiterated. “We are _three hundred_ years old,” he writes, “England a thousand years old. Will you venture the prophecy that in seven hundred more years, when people have a competency, we shall not educate our sons and daughters for service that does not have immediate economic returns?”

It is worth while to analyze such a persistent and almost universal conception. Just what do we mean when we say that America is young? Has the idea any validity, and what is the effect on the minds of those who so easily use it?

By America, of course, we must mean the American people or the American nation. It is obvious, however, that we cannot use the word nation in this connection in a purely political sense. So rapidly does the loom of history weave that we can now be ranked as among the older nations of western civilization. As an independent and unified nation we long antedate, for example, Italy, which was created only in 1860, or Germany, which was first welded into a nation in 1870, to say nothing of many of even later growth.

It is possible that in some minds the idea stems from that popular analogy which would identify a nation or a society with an organism. This analogy, however, like most analogies, is extremely dangerous. It may illuminate certain likenesses between society and a physical organism, but it is not a safe instrument with which to try to discover new likenesses. Because we may fancy that certain functions of society resemble those of an organism, it by no means follows that we can interpret one in terms of the other. In spite of many sociologists and writers on history, like Spengler, there is nothing to prove that a society has its birth, growth, and death in the same way as has a physical organism. Such a metaphor is merely suggestive, and is not only unscientific but may be disastrously misleading. The individual appears in his personal development to repeat the broad stages of our racial development, but I fail to find any law supported by the facts of history indicating that nations infallibly do the same. To force the attempt to make any such law is to glide blindly over such innumerable exceptions as would certainly invalidate any law in scientific thinking. Not only do certain manifestations of cultural life—æsthetic, intellectual, and other—appear in some nations and not in others, but there seems to be no definite sequence in which they appear when they appear at all. We may speak of a human being as young, middle-aged, or old, but such terms lose all meaning when applied to a nation as an organism.

Let us take Greece for example. Was Athens old or young in 450 B.C.? It is not fair to say that she had just reached full maturity because within a half century her architecture flowered in the completion of the Parthenon, her sculpture in the works of Phidias, her poetry in Æschylus, or her philosophy in Socrates and Plato. That is a mere begging of the question. It is estimating the age by the achievement, whereas, when we say that America is young, we are deferring the possibility of achievement upon the score of age.

How old was England in the age of Elizabeth? How are we to estimate the answer? Are we to date her birth in the period of the savage Britons, the Roman conquest, the Saxon or Norman conquests, or when? Are we to calculate her age by some stage of culture attained, by some infusion of new racial blood, by the formation of a unified language, government, or sense of nationality? How old England was in 1558 when Elizabeth came to the throne is as insoluble as “How old is Ann?” Yet if certain manifestations of culture go with certain national ages, it ought to be easy to date a nation in such a marked phase as the days of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Byrd, and the whole galaxy of stars of the first magnitude. Nor was the spiritual heaven of that time dotted only with such. One writer tells us that “the young gentleman of Sidney’s day was as deft at turning a sonnet as his present-day successor at stopping an approach to the green.” Another says that music and song “were not the affair solely of intellectual circles but the creation and inheritance of the whole people.” Poetry, music, drama, philosophy, architecture—all the arts, as well as the energy of practical life—were at full flood.

The very first foundation stones were being laid in the building of the British Empire which was to continue to rise and grow until it covers a quarter of the globe. We often hear the period spoken of as gloriously _young_. Was England young or old? If she was young then, was she a baby when the work of building cathedrals was in full swing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? If she was old and mature in 1600 was she doddering in old age when another great outburst of art and thought came in the years of Victoria? In one sense we may date the birth of England in the age of Elizabeth. It was then that the seed was planted of the great empire that was to be. Of practical activity there was enough, it would seem to absorb the whole energies of any people: wars by sea and land; business being pushed into new quarters of the world in every direction; new commodities being found, new methods of doing business being developed, new trade routes being opened up; attempts at colonizing North and South America; a rebuilding of a large part of the domestic architecture of the whole nation to meet altered conditions of life—all these and other aspects of feverish business activity were evident on every hand. Was it youth, maturity, or old age?

How old, again, is Italy? From one point of view she is to-day a new nation, throbbing with new life, occupied with the problems of a “new” country, developing a national consciousness and her national material resources, as “young” as America. From another, she was old when Cæsar lay in his blood. I have recently been in Czechoslovakia. As a political nation she is only ten years old. As I passed through her villages on the way from Dresden, they looked newer than Kansas, the whole countryside having been rebuilt while the peasants were afraid to put their money into anything but building on account of the steady fall in the currency. In Prague I was told that the nation was new, that the task of building it would absorb all the energies of its people, that the work of developing its resources was overwhelming, that for the present it “did not want learned men, artists, or writers, but business men, engineers, practical men. Later,” my informant continued, “the rest may come, but not now.” It was the New England voice “from the Oakes and Pines” of 1719. Yet here and there one saw on hilltops castles ten centuries old. In the fields one saw men in the furrows following yoked white oxen as in the days of Virgil. Is Czechoslovakia young or, from the standpoint of America, very, very old?

Does age mean the accumulation of resources from the past—old buildings, cathedrals, picture galleries, and all the valuable opportunities to see and to study? All these doubtless help, but how much of all such did the common people of Athens have when they crowded as multitudinously to hear the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as the modern _hoi polloi_ of America crowd to see the latest sex film on the screen? In 1787 we were nearly a century and a half “younger” than we are now, but if we held a constitutional convention in 1930 should we be able to send any better thinkers or more broadly cultured men than those who drew up our first constitution? Would the discussion and propaganda regarding a political problem to-day show any advance in maturity and power of thought on the part of both writers and readers over the papers of the _Federalist_? It may well be that not only an outburst of art and literature, such as has happened now and again in the world’s history, but the degree of a cultured civilization to which a nation as, say the French, comes to attain, have no ascertainable cause, that they come from combinations deep in human nature too inscrutable to be observed or predicted. That is probably the case, but if so why claim that they are the products or accompaniments of a given age, and that we cannot expect them before a certain period any more than in the human body we can look for puberty or the growth of a beard or the coming of the wisdom teeth?

This question of national age becomes more puzzling the more we think about it, but in trying to solve it let us turn to America, the land that everyone says is young. We may, as we have seen, dismiss at once, I think, certain interpretations of age. We may discard the thought of any analogy with an organism. We can date a human being as five, fourteen, twenty-one, or three score and ten years of age, and have it mean something. We cannot date a nation as one century, five, or twenty, and have it mean anything with scientific accuracy. Again, we may discard the thought of independence or political nationhood. My young friend, probably taught by his elders, evidently had that point in mind. Arguing that way, we should be a century older than Italy or Germany, but those who argue that America is young would not accept that conclusion.

We have got, again, to dismiss as a criterion the stage of culture which a people has arrived at—the arts, inventions, knowledge which they have inherited from the past. Every settler who came to America had behind him all the past just as much as did his family or neighbors who remained behind. The seventeenth century English, Scotch, Germans, Swedes, Dutch, and others who came here in our first century were not barbarians. They had the entire inheritance from the past. They were heirs of Greece and Rome, of the Reformation and the Renaissance, as much as those who continued in the old countries; and every man who has come here since has been of the same national age as those he has left behind.

III

In analyzing this idea of our being a young nation, I cannot see that there is any valid way in which to date ourselves as compared with others, and I believe that the constant insisting upon this misleading way of putting the truth (for there _is_ a truth about our case which I shall elaborate in a moment) is beginning to do us deep hurt. I believe that it would be far better for the development of our best selves, individually and nationally, if instead of consistently thinking and speaking of the American people as “young,” we should think and say the clear truth, which is that we are an old people, the same age as our European cousins, who _moved into an unsettled world_. Not only is the content of these two ideas very different, but so also are the inferences often very loosely and carelessly drawn from them.

The moving into a new country was bound to have important consequences. Even the moving of a family into a new house usually marks a change. The mere move itself is apt to bring about a feeling of excitement and exhilaration if the move is for the better, or depression and sorrow if it is for the worse. For a while after the move, also, there is much to be done of a purely physical sort. One has to rearrange one’s furniture, get “shaken down,” as we say; perhaps do all sorts of things to house and garden; get used to a new neighborhood; find new shops; learn new ways of doing old things; in a word, the whole routine of daily life is altered for the time being, and our habits and the enjoyment of our tastes are apt to be broken in upon until we get over the pressing work of settling into the new place.

In moving into America there was much more involved, mentally and physically, than in such a move as we have just described. Not only was the break with the old home and the old associations more complete, but everything, literally, from the ground up had to be done in the new. The savages had to be fought; the land had to be cleared; the houses had to be constructed; a new life, socially and institutionally, had to be built up. I have pointed out elsewhere the effect of this on the minds of the settlers. It is also, of course, a fact of great significance for American cultural life that, speaking comparatively, almost without exception all the immigrants who have ever come here have been men of the lower middle and laboring classes. There was nothing in America to attract any of the wealthy or professional ones. With the exception of a few religious refugees, virtually all who have come here have been “practical” men, who have come to better their economic positions. They did not include in their numbers aristocrats, scholars, poets, dramatists, artists, any of the classes who were carrying on and developing the European cultural tradition. But in some respects the arts were more diffused in their practice and enjoyment among the lower classes in the Europe from which our earlier settlers came than they are to-day. Many brought books and many a love and taste for music and the various handicrafts, such as weaving, woodcarving of houses and furniture, and other things, no less truly arts because they were folk-arts.

The effort, however, to establish a European standard of living in the wilderness was too great. The intellectual and æsthetic enjoyments of life had to be laid aside until the practical duties of subduing the wilderness had been fulfilled. All this is well enough understood. But let us suppose for a moment that the North American continent had consisted of that strip of land between the ocean and the Appalachian range of mountains, beyond which we will place the Pacific. By 1776 practically all of this territory was settled as peacefully as was England itself. In fact, much of it looked like England. Boston was to all intents and purposes identical with an English provincial town. Travelers reported that much of the New England countryside was indistinguishable from that of old England. Wealth had accumulated; colleges had been erected; the arts were beginning to flourish. In the 1750’s the theater in New York offered a better repertoire than could be found in any English provincial city of the time, and I am not sure but as good as that of London itself, certainly better than can be heard some years in New York now. Mr. and Mrs. Hallam, actors of note in London, arrived in the colonies with their company and remained twenty years. They acted in plays of Shakespeare, Addison, Rowe, Congreve, Farquhar, Steele, and others; and in 1754 New York had a season in which twenty-one different plays, the cream of English dramatic literature up to that time, were heard by the public. Such plays were also given in such a surprising list of places as Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Annapolis, Hobb’s Hole, Port Tobacco, Upper Marlborough, Petersburg, and Fredericksburg. The theatrical and musical life of Charleston could hardly have been excelled, if it was, in any provincial town in England.

In 1757 the first exhibition of paintings by colonial artists was held in New York. Before long, Copley, Peale, Benjamin West, who later became president of the Royal Academy, and Stuart were painting and, with lesser figures, were in the way of establishing an American school of art. Colonial architecture, domestic and public, was so good that we do our best to reproduce it to-day, as was likewise the furniture. Merchants in the North, country gentlemen in the South, lived much the same lives as did their contemporaries of similar standing in the old country. The ablest men of the colonies in innumerable instances held legislative and judicial offices. There was no titled aristocracy, there were no cathedrals or ruined castles from the past, life was a little freer, less formal, considerably more open to economic opportunity than in England; but so far from excusing themselves on the ground of being a new people the colonials rather prided themselves on living the same life and indulging the same tastes as their cousins overseas. America was indeed provincial, but then, so also was all England outside the one center of London. Much not only of the talent but the genius of England had always been recruited from the provinces, and America had made a good beginning two centuries ago in contributing, among other types, men whose paintings hang to-day on the walls of London galleries. Franklin’s fame was European. When Berkeley, the English philosopher, was temporarily living in Rhode Island he found no lack of agreeable society and intelligent conversation in the circle in which he moved. The lower grades had permanently lost their folk-arts and had taken on some frontier characteristics, but there was every indication that a new civilization, following the main cultural interests, values, and trends of the old, was arising rapidly after the break due to the task of subduing the wilderness. Had the continent been limited, as I suggested, to the seaboard strip, or had the people chosen to expand gradually, there is no reason to suppose that the cultural tendencies noted above as on the upward trend through the eighteenth century would not have continued.

The continent, however, was not so limited. It stretched nearly three thousand miles further. It was incredibly rich. Following the Revolution, piece after piece of it, at intervals, came into the hands of the descendants of those eighteenth century colonials, men quite as much as women, who had begun to interest themselves in painting, literature, drama, and music. The wealth to be made out of the West, a constantly retreating West for more than a century, began to act as a magnet on men’s minds and ambitions. Following the poorer classes who went as hunters and settlers, there appear the agents of merchants, bankers, and speculators. Astor made a fortune in furs. Others in lands. Others in yet more ways. The craze for getting fabulously rich quickly spread. The perpetual boom, broken only by sharp crises, in which America has since lived, began. The nascent civilization on the seaboard became violently deflected from its course. Scientific inventions succeeded one another, and with every new method of transportation—canal, good roads, steamboat, railroad—every new method of mining, every new product to be utilized, every new foreign market opened, the rush to win riches by raping a continent became madder and madder.

It was not a question of preparing a continent for habitation. It was one of money-maddened men furiously wrenching wealth from it in every way their ingenuity and greed could devise—from the land, from the forests above it, from the mines below it. Like hogs at a trough, each man guzzled as hard as he could, regardless of all else, lest some other hog should get ahead of him. In Germany they have been rafting logs for a thousand years. The carefully tended and replanted forests may well last for a thousand more. Rafting on the Mississippi began, flourished, and was finished in seventy years. About 1840 the American people as a nation owned forty billion feet of standing lumber contiguous to the river and its tributaries. In seventy years private individuals and companies had stripped the land of this magnificent heritage without replacing a single tree. This was not “the task of subduing a wilderness to make it habitable.” It was the madness of lust—the meanest of all lusts, the lust for money.

To-day America is fairly glutted with wealth. It is useless to enumerate the statistics—an advertising expenditure of a billion dollars a year, savings deposits of twenty-eight billions, two hundred and twenty-eight individuals reporting incomes of over a million a year each, a national income of ninety billions.

Is America still young? Is it not rather, perhaps, if we _must_ use such figures of speech, that she was born at Jamestown in 1607, grew to promising maturity by the second half of the eighteenth century, and then, abandoning herself to the desire for expansion and sudden wealth, deliberately turned her back on the way in which she had been going? Those who say that America is young, still point to the future as the time when we may be expected to begin to devote ourselves to other things than “subduing a continent and accumulating the necessary material resources on which to build a civilization.” In the name of every high ideal that man has ever cherished, _when_ are we going to be rich enough to begin as a nation, if we are not now, now that we have gutted our heritage, piled up the greatest accumulation of wealth in the world, accumulated the most stupendous material basis for living that man has ever known?

I think it is at this point that the dangerous evil of our being forever told by friendly or hostile critics that we are young comes in. A boy who is really young realizes that there are some things he cannot do until he is a man. He waits, but at the same time he prepares himself. If we tell a child he is too young to do this or that, the child is justified in believing it and in refraining from trying to do it. Is there not danger in telling our people, young and old, that America is young? Will it not merely serve to make them contented to go on piling up wealth, to do what they have been doing for a hundred years, and to keep them from playing the part of men as they should? Many critics have pointed to the immaturity of the American mind. There is a time to stop telling a boy he is young. There comes a time when we must tell him to be a man, to do a man’s work and try to think a man’s thoughts. If we keep on coddling him and telling him he is a child of whom nothing is expected, we are not likely ever to make a man of him.

Why should we be content to wait a hundred, two hundred, or seven hundred years more before we think we shall be old enough to do something besides provide the material foundation for a civilization which we are told will somehow come of itself when we are grown up? If we are told and come to believe that no matter what we do we cannot lead a more spiritual life or have the culture of an “old” country in less than so many centuries, any more than a boy of fourteen can make himself twenty by trying, are we not giving ourselves an excuse to go on piling up riches and exploiting the world without making an effort to attain to a spiritual instead of a material plane of civilization?

On the other hand, if we think of ourselves as an old race, heirs of all the ages, which was temporarily set back by having to move into a new home, and that now we have not only got that home in order but have added to it and become incredibly rich, and that therefore it is high time we turned to something else, I believe it would be far better for our self-respect and for our spiritual growth. To say that we are too young is to put off the time of manhood beyond our power to attain, and to stultify any hopes of our own day and generation. To say, on the other hand, that we have made our move, got settled, and become rich is to stir us to something better than spending our days devising more means to get richer yet.

I do not believe we _are_ young. We are a century and a half older than when a political gathering could include such minds as John Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, John Marshall, and others. We are nearly a century older than when in one corner of our land alone we could have a group like Holmes, Whittier, Hawthorne, Lowell, and Emerson. I believe in many ways we have already added much to the spiritual wealth of the world. In our library systems, in our scientific foundations for research, in a number of other ways, we have led the modern nations. Why, then, still preach this debilitating doctrine that we are young and nothing must be expected of us? Is it not time that we stopped using that as an excuse to cover all our shortcomings, the desire not to stop hunting after material gain, the refusal to stir our minds and play a man’s part in the new world? Is it not time to proclaim that we are not children but men who must put away childish things; that we have overlooked that fact too long; that we have busied ourselves overmuch with fixing up the new place we moved into three hundred years ago, with making money in the new neighborhood; and that we should begin to live a sane, maturely civilized life? To keep on telling our children that they cannot expect this and that of America because she is too young is to make self-indulgent, self-excusing mollycoddles of them and of her. To say that we cannot yet turn to the spiritual things of life because we still have material work to do, when we contrast our own gorged state of material well-being with that of any other nation, is sheer hypocrisy. If we merely want to continue to grow richer and richer, and softer and softer, let us say so straight out and not hide the truth under the plea of having to “develop the continent,” that continent which Jefferson fondly hoped would leave us room for expansion for a thousand years. Everything may be hoped from the child who tries to be a man. Nothing can be hoped from the man who cloaks his shortcomings or material selfishness or spiritual indolence under the pretense of being a child.