Curiously enough, the United States is fast becoming a Mother Country, and those who were originally colonists are becoming "home people" having colonial kith and kin of their own.
The Stars and Stripes at the Panama Canal has become the flag of Empire. It is the flag flying at the outposts of English-speaking America. It is more rousing and significant there than anywhere else at this time. It may droop at Washington; it may look ridiculous in the hands of Mr. Babbitt; but at Panama it is the flag of America's inevitable destiny, the flag of her sway and of the triumph of her language, her character, and her business.
Even the mere commercial mind has grasped something of the significance of the Panama Canal. It is the greatest advertisement of America in the world. Its construction was a super-human task, and its achievement shed a light of glory on those who carried it through. It is true that the French started the work and failed, and that Ferdinand de Lesseps and the French nation have grandiose monuments erected to them in Panama City. Frenchmen say Lesseps failed for lack of capital, but every one who has studied the work of the French there has understood that the French could never have succeeded in cutting through the Isthmus. It was not only capital the French lacked, but character and imagination. America began her great national task in a spirit of human kindness by a magnificent effort to save the health of the workers. She made the Canal, but she overcame the forces of death first. She overcame the idea of the white man's grave. She rolled away the stone from the sepulchre.
What was one of the most pestilential swamps in the world is now something like a health resort. Not only is the mosquito a rarity but also the domestic fly. After a myriad flies and two Tanglefoots a day, it was strange to arrive in an even hotter latitude and find no flies. I was told, "If you find a mosquito in your room at the hotel, telephone the office."
Not only are there no flies, but no smells, no decaying fruit. You may be arrested if you drop a banana skin in the street. The Chinamen and the "Spigs" and the Jamaicans who live in rows of double-story frame buildings, the sort of ramshackle places always associated with filthy living, have been terrorized into cleanly living. Hygiene has been forced on them at the point of the bayonet. Even the red-light streets are clean, and all those places of low pleasure designed to empty the pockets of seamen are at least sterilized. The women are also under control. The consequence is that the Panama Canal Zone is now a remarkably safe and healthy place. In fact, a memorandum was sent recently from Washington, part of an economy campaign, asking that the expenses on sanitary work in the zone be cut down somewhat until the death-rate reached that of the general average of the States.
American sanitary science has shown the world that any pest-hole can be cleaned up. The sad fact is that few nations have the energy to prosecute such a work of sanitation—Greeks at Salonika, Russians on the Black Sea littoral, Negroes on the Gold Coast, Cubans at Habana. America has a passion for "cleaning up." She is the self-constituted universal cleanser, Babbitt in excelsis.
It cannot be denied, however, that the United States is the home of graft. America has a long-time reputation for graft. Votes are bought in blocks. Police, jurymen, judges know the meaning "In God we trust; others pay cash." But, paradoxically enough, the standard of American character is high. Compared with the personal character of Mexicans, Panamanians, Cubans, it is lifted into an exalted sphere. The Latin-Americans stand around waiting for cash—that is their curse, and they are ready to sell rights, liberties, lands, children—everything for cash down.
Truth to say, if America were so eaten up with graft as her reputation says, the Panama Canal would never have been constructed. It was too big a job to be carried through by people of debauched wills. It is a monument of America's executive power, of her technical knowledge, and of her readiness to use that knowledge and stake millions upon it.
Every foreign ship passing through the Canal bows to the Stars and Stripes, and, though paying a money due, yet acknowledges a debt of civilization to the American people. Engineers, captains, tourists, crews, all obtain a new impression of America.
America ceases to be a land merely of canned goods, Yankee dialect, and oil kings. Its flag comes nearer to the Union Jack as one of world-civilizing power. The ships pass deliberately through with processional slowness. Ever more ships, ever more diverse in nationality. There is a great dignity about the traffic of the Canal, like the stately manners of a bygone age. The ships represent their nations, and come as guests through American waters. America is the hostess of the world.
After all, that which is most respected in the world is visible achievement. And whilst bad manners generally accompany sham strength or actual weakness, good manners are enjoined by the sense of power. A prophecy of more than two hundred years' standing made by the founder of the Bank of England, hails the possessor of "these doors of the seas" as the coming law givers of both oceans and the arbitrators of the commercial world. The Panama Canal delivers Central and South America to Wall Street, to the American commercial commonwealth, to the American people.
Every month just now sees the traffic record broken. More and more ships pass through. More and more business is being done. What will be the normal average traffic—no one yet can tell. The Canal was opened in the gloom of the war. There were slides of silt which closed it again, and a war menace which overcast its importance at the time. Its real significance has been overclouded, and all praise has been underpraise. It must necessarily now shine forth more and more as one of the maritime gates of the world, looked to from England, China, Australia, from the Pacific coasts of North and South America, and from all the islands of the South Seas. It automatically doubles the trade of the Southern and Central American republics of the Pacific coast with the United States. The latter can make up all European losses and most deficiencies in raw materials by way of the Canal. Whilst the American flag certainly waves less on European waters, it waves more on the Pacific Ocean. Pan-Americanism, the dream of Stephen Douglas and many others, is carried nearer to realization—the dream that America should rule all the way from the Canadian Line to the Isthmus, without question and without regret.
That the United States will ever rule South of the Equator seems questionable. Such a rule belongs possibly to the next century but one. But, for the time being, she has an economic hold even upon South America. As regards Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and the rest, she begins to have a very strong control. Despite the noise of protest, there is not much real patriotic stamina in the people of these countries. They have less sense of nationhood than Austrians or Eskimos. Almost everything can be bought from them for cash down. So they necessarily go under the influence of American capital.
The Old World is greatly jealous of America's imperial march forward, and will naturally follow the progress with much malignity. And the Radicals and Liberal idealists within America have already raised a cry which must yet sound much louder. Empire was never foreseen by the fathers of the Republic. It is opposed to the historical conception of American liberty. It makes the Declaration of Independence more out of place than ever. But what is to be done? America, by her big business and the system, is betrayed to an imperial destiny, and cannot help herself. Her vast surplus of capital, her gold accumulations, must in the human way of necessity find an outlet for use. The West has been exploited. The Old World is distrusted. There remains inevitably and obviously the South.
"Go South, young man!" is being substituted in the consciousness of the American for the old cry of "Go West!"
The inwardness of the idea that Jamaica, Barbadoes, Bermuda, and the rest of the British island-possessions of the Indies should be assigned to the United States in part payment of the war-debt, much talked of before the Baldwin settlement of the debt question, is part of the new American march to the South. The control of Cuba, Haiti, and Santo Domingo is part of it. The sapping of Mexico and Nicaragua is part of it. Without the Canal as an inalienable possession these things might be overlooked, might indeed be gone back upon by America itself. But a mere visit to the Canal is said to have power to change an American Radical into a patriotic Expansionist. In fact, with regard to the direction of policy and the achievement of national destiny, the Radicals in America seem more negligible than the German Socialists proved to be in 1914. They do not deserve the persecution they have had. They live by the system and are carried along by the system, and the system leads to imperial power.
It is urged, however, that Empire means War. It means bloodshed and sorrow and despair for thousands in every decade of its history. That is generally true. And yet America is remarkably free from enemies. The Latin-Americans have a practice of hating Americans, calling them "Gringoes," "Mejos," and the rest, but it is a weak hate easily transmutable to respect and warm regard. There is nothing to fear from it. Great Britain is of course a mercantile rival on the high seas, but America and England are too much intermarried and too much intertwined in business interests to fight a war. Moreover, we speak the same language. Mutual abuse is merely partisanship, the slang of the fanatics; and we are no more likely to fire on one another than the Giants of New York and the Red Sox of Chicago. As regards the Canal—that is a sort of strategic position Britain has historically seized when she had a chance. But one thing is sure; Britain rejoices in the fact that that water-way is in the hands of people who speak English and have the standard Anglo-Saxon point of view. In the case of a war, even with Japan, Great Britain would probably lend her aid to the United States to keep the Canal open and to safeguard it from destruction.
Japan remains as the only serious potential enemy on America's horizon. And despite ill feeling and hot words one cannot but remember that that horizon is several thousand miles away. There is a great stretch of cooling water between the nominees for the next great fight. The only real danger lies in the brains of some heady politician who at some future date may decide on an aggressive war against Japan in her own waters. Such a war might conceivably be fraught with disaster and humiliation for the United States—for the vast Pacific will always aid the side which is in defense.
In short, as far as America is concerned, Nature is on the side of Peace. I foresee five hundred years of prosperity and peace, after which, no doubt, America will weaken. The growth of the American Empire is the greatest fact in the world to-day—more significant than the decay of Europe. Russia, one must remember, is smashed, with her whole nation down on a gypsy level of culture. Germany prostrate under the heel of France nears the condition of Russia. France is self-centered and contented with a Mediterranean empire. Britain marks time. Alone America goes on. She stands now with her hundred million educated population, with her vast wealth and serried ranks of millionaires, with her unsurpassed technical equipment and industrial organization, and she has an enormous appetite for power and zest for life. The imagination ought to be given free play in thinking of the coming time.
Bearing in mind that America has finally and absolutely rejected Bolshevism, Communism, and all other disjectory theories of government, has, in fact, affirmed in absolute fashion the rights of property and her loyalty to the capitalistic system, one can almost forecast by mathematics the state of her wealth at any given date. What a stupendous aggregation of material splendor! If in the last sixty years America has risen from the Civil War level to what she is to-day, to what will she rise in sixty years from now? To what will she rise in six hundred years? The mind refuses to give the answer to the sum, but instead whispers the lines—
It is so easy to forget.
How the soul of America will fare in all this I have not sought to know. The soul abhorreth a golden treasure house, preferring greatly a humble and a loving heart. America is one thing not answerable to God. Americans will find themselves in America, as Romans found themselves in Rome. Individually, now as ever, and like the rest of us, they will have to find their personal way of Salvation.
One thing which the great World War seems to have revealed is that we are physically subject to forces over which we have little or no control. These forces are generally called economic, and are thought to be academic and theoretic. That is a mistake. They are elemental and primitive; Lloyd Georges and Wilsons do not divert them. On the contrary, they themselves sweep statesmen away when the time comes—and sweep other statesmen into power.
Such a force drives the American flag southward, and the cry is heard "Go South!"
BOOK V
CIBOLA AND QUIVIRA
CHAPTER XV PANAMA TO NEW YORK
I sailed to New York from Colon on one of those transports designed for the use of Canal employees. When the berths are not all taken by officials and their wives the remainder are sold to the general traveling public. The distance of the voyage in nautical miles is 1974, in dollars it is a hundred, and in time it is six days. The accommodation is one class only, with no steerage passengers.
It meant six more lazy days similar to those spent sailing from New Orleans. The passengers seemed merrier going to New York than the others did coming home. Most of them had the money for a good time in their pockets, but the others had spent theirs and were sobered.
There is little that need be said of the voyage. Though late in September it was sultry and breezeless. We kept expecting a coolness and a change, but it was not until the fifth day that the North touched us, and that was a day of packing, of coming out in "shore clothes," of putting on unsuspected overcoats and bowler hats. The ship's company changed itself from white-clad Central Americans into somber New Yorkers. The sky itself grew overcast. More serious expressions crept into people's faces as late next afternoon we steamed up the Hudson into the presence of Manhattan, grand and gray.
I had promised to meet Wilfrid Ewart in New York and return South with him to Santa Fe; he would buy a horse and ride with us, study the Mexican Border, and write; I would spend some time there before going on to Mexico. During the last few years he and I had been something like inseparables—at least in London. I knew, as I waited in the harbor, that he was there somewhere in the great city. I knew also that my friend Vachel Lindsay was there, and it was a special pleasure to think of meeting both friends. The three of us had sat at a table in a café in Regent Street late one night two years before, and the project of Ewart's going to America had been mooted. Lindsay drew a map of the United States upon the table and marked Santa Fe on it and then drew radii from it. "A mud house and a pony are all you want, and you will see America," said the poet. Paradoxically enough, he asserted that America could be studied to better advantage in her deserts than in her cities.
I believe that in the ordinary course of life Ewart and Lindsay could hardly have met for mutual benefit. I was the human link; assuring Ewart of Lindsay's genius, assuring Lindsay of Ewart's promise. The reserved, almost inarticulate, young Guards' officer brought forth in due time his Way of Revelation and Lindsay hailed it with delight and advised his New Mexican friends that the author of it was coming.
The idea of America, and especially of the South, certainly fired Wilfrid Ewart's imagination. He longed to go to New Orleans—that city for which in a way he had been bound when later he was so tragically killed. The idea of my journey to the Spanish Main also caused him to crave to share in its adventures. I remember our last dinner together in 1921—it was one night between Christmas and New Years. Wilfrid Ewart raised his glass solemnly and pronounced a toast: "To 1922, and may we both stand together on that Peak where in one view Pacific and Atlantic meet!" I had been talking to him of Darien and then of Mt. Zempoaltepec in Mexico whence at one moment you may see both oceans.
I smiled, we talked, and in my heart I doubted he would come, but he did. Alas now for the train of circumstances! He came, and he is lost.
I was waiting in the harbor and he was in the city. It is so perhaps still. I was answering once more those endless questions: "Are you in favor of subverting existing government by force?" "Only in such a case as that of Colombia in 1902," I reply. That will not be taken as an answer. "Am I a polygamist?" "Ever been deported?"—
The questioning is interrupted by the discovery of an abduction case—hours pass. It was nearly eight when I got free.
As I walked out of the dock gate in white coat, riding breeches, and knapsack on my shoulders an impatient cabman cried out—"Now the caballeros are coming." But I hastened to a street car and then to Forty-second Street and the Hotel Commodore, that Temple of the Calf, in which my poet had chosen to stay. And he knew where Ewart was staying. So we were joined again, the three of us, as we had been in London two years before.
Vachel, at that time engrossed by classic Art and modern American politics, was an enigma to Ewart. The American's enthusiasms were bewildering to the Englishman just fresh from our "no-enthusiasm-for-anything-that-matters" atmosphere of England. One thing, however, both admired, and that was Broadway at night all lit up from the color reflections on the road-crowds to the stars in the sky. But they admired it in different ways. Ewart admitted the grandness of America but never felt its greatness. For New York he obtained an admiration which had not learned its bounds. He knew it as the greatest piece of human magnificence he had seen. Central Park was his favorite haunt, and many an afternoon he walked there and watched, in the evening, the fade-out in the dusk, and then the lighting, the starring, the flaming, the rising of the brightness, and then at last the fast-pouring floods of electric illumination.
Life for me in a giddy New York week changed incredibly from the languor of the tropics to the ardor of the North. It was meetings at luncheon, meetings at dinner, theater every night, business letters, telephone messages in consecutive half dozens, rolling about in "overheads" and "undergrounds" and cabs. I knew I should be glad to get away.
Halfway through my time I had to leave the Commodore Hotel, that Temple of the Calf, as I have called it. It had been requisitioned for the Bankers' Conference. The poet had been installed longer than I had—they could not turn him out. But me they could. I went across to the quieter, old-fashioned "Murray Hill" to be still near to my two friends. It was a great sight at the Hotel Commodore next day, when the bankers had arrived—from every State in the Union, and every banker wearing a crimson silken tag which told the name of his bank and his little town. Thousands of little bankers, scores of big ones, swarmed in and out of the vast hall of the hotel. And they all walked with becoming gravity and aplomb. It was the greatest conference of the century. On the table was the question of Europe's unpaid debts; the bankers felt, and indeed they had been told by their leaders, that upon them depended the solvency of the Old World.
One afternoon whilst we paced the stone hall and talked, the orchestra began to play the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" and this set the thirty or forty canaries who perch in their gilded cages above the foyer palms all a-singing. Such a joyous hubbub then ensued in that great hall, of golden birds and bankers' tongues and tinkling brass. Somewhere afar a bank president was orating ponderously. But added to that a man with a megaphone upon the mezzanine balustrade described a baseball game in the "World Series." The architecture of the place, with its color and lighting effects, the frame of our gilded society, was superb; the human attendance behind marble bars were busy, bowed, attentive, all that man could wish. Every banker in America seemed to be pulling his weight, every facial expression was at par. There was a sense of the coffers behind them and the business and power they represented. So the afternoon band kept playing its elaborately orchestrated tune, child's tune, from the Chauve Souris—not exactly the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers," sometimes grander and yet delightful, titillating, perhaps the Parade of the Little Golden Bankers instead.
It was well to go to New York, if only to refresh one's memory as to where the power all comes from. The cranes swing round the great crates from the ships to the docks at Porto Rico. Or it may be, at Colon, or Puerto Plata, or Habana, or Vera Cruz. American agents tick them off. They go to the warehouses, thence to the shops, to the houses. The gold that buys them goes to the banks and the banks send it on to New York—golden New York, golden America, one may say.
To New York, the gold, and above the gold, the power. Some one may whisper—What of Washington? Washington is New York's stenographer. Or what of Chicago? Chicago is New York's young brother. Or San Francisco? San Francisco is the reflection of New York's skyscrapers in the Pacific.
With this the poet both agrees and disagrees. New York is the crown of the America of this age. It is Babbitt's work. The bankers are the big men now. But they have not all the power they think. A turn in political history, and the bankers' influence might be gone. Lindsay will demonstrate this to me if I will spend a summer harvesting westward from Texas to Alaska. Ewart is ready to accept the idea. In the deserts of the Southwest we shall see more of America than in New York. That I doubt, but Ewart and I will go. My wife is at Santa Fe and awaits us. To Santa Fe then, spiritual lodestone of artists and poets! To the capital of the new state of New Mexico, merely a conquered territory until 1912, now capable of being thought the spiritual hope of the United States.
CHAPTER XVI AMERICA OF TO-DAY VIEWED FROM NEW YORK
1
"We don't know where we are going, but we're on the way," runs a light-hearted, popular saying. "Heaven or Hell—which?" the evangelists ask in one breath. No national answer will be given to the query, but if some one replies "Hell," no one will be greatly shocked, whereas, if some one replies "Heaven," his neighbor will turn upon him with a smile and a rude handshake and a "I'm with you, so glad that you're on our side."
If you say, "Roses spring up in the footsteps of America," Americans will believe you. But if you say, "Curses follow the Gringo in his march of destiny," the American interest in your opinion will rapidly grow less. America's faith in that America is doing right, that she has a divinely appointed mission, is short of nothing save the faith of the Catholic Church. Naturally such a faith is the main vital current of her existence. The saying, "I believe, therefore I am," may be changed for America into "I believe, therefore I do."
This faith, however, reacts badly upon critical literature. Many books on America are written for an American public which demands praise. The rest of the world is profoundly affected by what America does, and will be even more so by what she will do. For as she plunges forward along her way of destiny, be it blindly or with open eyes, she not only achieves for herself but makes way and changes the way of other peoples and other nations.
Some study in a scientific spirit seems necessary at this hour, not one tinged with the spleen of France, or the self-conscious spirit of comparison of England; not a pro-Latin study, nor a study conceived in parti pris from a socialistic or capitalistic end—but a dead level dispassionate facing of things as they are and as to honest eyes they tend to be.
2
In England and Scotland the working-class population far exceeds in number the middle and upper classes. Enfranchised as it is, men and women both, it has the political power to seize the reins of government and take control into its hands. In America the situation is considerably different. Numerous as is the working class in America, it is outnumbered by the middle class. And the middle class is more comfortable, more self-assured, than that class in England. In England many middle-class people are so cramped and pinched economically that they are embittered against the rest of society and are ready to throw in their lot politically with Socialists and Radicals.
In British journalism there is much talk of the "Have-nots"—but such an expression would mean little in America: the Haves are so numerous that other people are not heard. What I mean is: the sense of property is capable of being more widely and more strongly developed even than in Britain.
With other nations one might make an even more striking comparison. Russia is a nation of "Have-nots"; Germany is a nation of a few rich and of broad poverty-stricken masses. Or to come nearer to the countries now under view, one may say of Mexico that poverty is national there. In America possession is national. The dollar is in America almost a national emblem.
There we have a very marked fundamental condition for future development. Britain is in danger because her masses do not obtain a fair share of the prosperity of the country as a whole. America is not in that sort of danger.
It may be urged that America has a violent Labor element, and that she has been harassed by such prolonged strikes as that of the coal operatives, the steel workers, the railway men. It is true that there is a violent element, but that element is foreign and illiterate. The real under-dog in America is the foreigner and the colored man. He is not regarded as a fellow citizen but as a hired mercenary, one in a gang of Chinese, a member of a slave caste. Even if he has his papers as a United States citizen he finds, like Eugene O'Neill's stoker—the "Hairy Ape"—that he does not really "belong."
Skilled men, craftsmen, artisans, shopmen, what in England we call the "respectable" working class, have in America no consciousness of inferiority. They have their Ford cars and their "Victrolas," they dance, the men wear ironed trousers, the women "bob" their hair. They are affiliated to religious organizations, they are also masons of some rite, probably not Rotarians or Kiwanis, but Red Men perhaps. In politics, they almost infallibly vote Democrat or Republican. Labor politics make no progress, because in the many millions they have only many thousand votes.
The American government machine is guaranteed against Radical interference for a long time. For Republicanism is founded on the Banks of America, and Democratism on the industries. Both parties are based solidly on the rights of possession, the rights of property, the rights of capital.
3
American commerce, therefore, enjoys a remarkable sense of security. No draught blows from Russia or elsewhere into the comfortable interior where the game is being played. Production on an ever grander scale is achieved; the wealth of the nation is enhanced, the buying power of every individual is increased, the triumphs of salesmanship are eclipsed, the glory of the great firms is brighter and fuller, their advertisements more extensive.
The enormous production is a fact, and not to be gainsaid. But in their commerce as a whole there are certain very important artificial elements which show it in part not as a reality but as a great game. A number of fortunes are made; that again is not to be gainsaid, and material luxuries are widely distributed—but the picture of American comfort is not quite so good as it looks. "There's a catch somewhere."
The catch is in the tariff. The tariff makes sure that Americans shall buy American-made goods at the American price. Salesman and buyer are tied together in a three-legged race, and the tariff is the binding matter. For if the tariff were removed there would be a bad falling apart of producer and consumer. All prices in the United States seem to me higher than world prices. Therefore, if the tariff were removed, cheap foreign goods would naturally rush in. America can make a good article at a good price; it is yet to be proved that, like pre-war Germany, she might make the best article at the lowest price.
This not only affects manufactured goods, but food. The tariff plus commercial organization has raised the cost of food to fifty per cent above world price. The mere food budget of the American housewife is nearly double that of her European sister, though the food be of the same quantity. I say not quality, because in my opinion European food is generally more fresh than American food: "Storage" is the enemy of good quality.
American salesmen outside of the New World fail to obtain the quantity of business which their enormous commercial background would suggest. It may be said, if with pardonable exaggeration, America is not as aggressive in world-markets as she is at home. In finance she has become a world power, but the bulk of her trade is in North and South America.
Within America, within the American Empire, in Latin America generally, the American salesman has matters more and more his own way. It may well be asked—If he possess the New World what need has he of the Old?
The Old World has not, however, necessarily finished with America, and European business only awaits its chance to descend upon American lands. A great economic competition between East and West is not one of the least likely developments of the future—let but Europe find peace once more.
4
Meanwhile American prosperity increases on a grand scale, and the chief sign of it is increased leisure. The leisure class grows. It far outnumbers the leisure class of England or of any other nation. There are more Americans than English at Monte Carlo, more Americans in Switzerland, in Egypt, on the Norwegian fjords, in Athens, in Rome, in Northern Africa. There are many thousands of leisure Americans in London and at the shrines of England and ensconced in English country houses or enjoying the hospitality of country gentry—very greatly more than there are leisure Englishmen or Frenchmen or any other nationality at the shrines or country houses of America.
In America the leisured appear everywhere. The East is larded with leisure; the West runs on it as on oil. Care-free children in tens of thousands get educated, graduate, and have leisure. Something has to be done for the children of leisure—to make life more interesting.
A life of cars and country clubs will not suffice—especially for the women, who are almost always more ambitious than the men. There is a demand for careers by those who do not necessarily demand pay, a demand for greater interest. The Astors have found admirable scope in British politics. Such success as Lady Astor has attained is doubtless open to a few more. Americans range in surprising numbers behind successful British politicians, delighting in entertaining them when they can. Various very good looking and capable Americans hold, as it were, advanced posts in English society life. The competition to be presented at Court is greater each year, though greater numbers are actually received. The American Embassy is broadened out to an extensive social platform crowded with people whose estate and position in American life is such that they can hardly be ignored.
The diplomatic service generally in Europe is greatly used by the leisured Americans, and there come people with academic missions, advisory people of various kinds, who for one reason or another obtain interviews with distinguished men and then arrange dinner parties and talk, obtain impressions, get inside, have a finger in the pie.
That same force drives in American politics at home, by intrigue and by lobbying, trying to find a way of life, a larger interest, for the leisured. The American Republic, the old United States, affords little scope for the new ever-increasing class. But America as an Empire, America with a great Army and a great Fleet, America with a deep foreign policy which kept foreign powers all speculating on her next move, America as a world power, would give scope.
Most abhorrent to the leisured class is the primitive State; most desired is the State in its highest development. For a leisured class is not compatible with pure democracy. The present commercial system, however, is producing a leisured class in ever greater numbers. Does it not, therefore, follow that the commercial system itself is incompatible with pure democracy?
5
But of course it is not the four hundred of New York who are New York, but, as O. Henry briefly and brilliantly suggested in his book of stories, it is the four million—and no upper four thousand or upper forty thousand can be America.
Indeed, in many vital matters, the forty thousand have been thwarted by the hundred million. The forty thousand did not want Prohibition and they were not eager for the enfranchisement of women. The forty thousand at least professed themselves in favor of the Versailles Treaty and ready to help Europe to peace. The "representative" American in Europe nearly always treats Prohibition as a joke, or blames it on the women's vote, and as regards our European tangle is all optimism and happy encouragement.
English celebrities visiting America are usually entertained by one of the forty thousand who make a display of liquor, warming the vitals of our said celebrities who come back to England with an idea of a new drunken America.
You would not think that America was a pious, God-fearing country with some millions of people leading sober and righteous lives and yearning for the establishment of the Kingdom. The moral passion of the American masses is kept out of sight as if it were something pitiful or disgraceful. The forty thousand would not care to see America defined as—the nation which voted itself dry. It would rather define America as—the nation which built the Panama Canal. There is in a way a conflict between the claims of moral achievement and material achievement. Thus again in some minds America is the nation which won the war, but in many more she is the nation which fed starving Europe. To many she is the nation of Roosevelt, but to many more she is the nation of Abraham Lincoln.
Still to-day, the moral passion of America identifies America, and it is a pity that the world outside, and even part of America herself, should be deceived by the noisy Jazz band exterior by which America seems to choose to signalize herself to the world.
To what extent America has been "cleaned up" has never been divulged to the outside world. The forty thousand are ashamed of it. The others do not travel much and have little means of comparison. It is not only that drunkenness has been eliminated, but vices of other kinds.
"What an extraordinary moral city, compared with Paris or London!" was Wilfrid Ewart's surprised remark to me. And he had been walking Broadway at midnight without remarking a single fille de joie. And in order to make a test of the alleged "wetness" of America, Vachel Lindsay and I made a tour of the old barrooms of New York. The poet was for several years a Y. M. C. A. worker, and he had a round of barrooms, visiting them all regularly, and distributing literature relating to activities other than the consumption of beer. We made a remarkable pilgrimage together.
By every reckoning New York and Chicago are the richest fields for the "boot-legger" that America holds. If you can prove that these are relatively free of liquor you can be sure that the rest of America is very free. What did we find?
In one old bar, one bartender, four or five loungers with pots, and in the back a solitary foreign woman resting her bare arms on a sodden table, waiting for a customer. Every one regarded us suspiciously and nervously. Another bar had been converted into a restaurant; there was a lookout man at the door, and he worked a STOP-GO indicator in the restaurant. When the indicator turned to STOP the customers put their drinks under the table; when it returned to GO they brought it out again. That seemed to us a pretty flagrant case of "wetness." But as Vachel remarked to me—even there all the objectionable aspects of the saloon have been removed. No one objects on moral grounds to people having wine with their meals. It is the filth, the vice, the point of view of the barroom, that America fought and these can never come back.
Five or six large saloons had been converted into shops; sometimes one saloon into three shops, leased for considerable spaces of time and quite lost to drinking. Those bars which remained, shut or selling root beer, seemed to be holding on to valuable sites in the hope that after all there might be a reversal of the Prohibition Law.
But, as Lindsay pointed out, Prohibition is now part of the Constitution; it was adopted by many States prior to 1917, it has been enacted separately by all the States as well as by the Federal Government, and to go back on it it would have to be voted out by a majority of the States of the Union once more—which is unthinkable.
Wilfrid Ewart made many jests at the expense of the Statue of Liberty. All new-come Englishmen do. How can it be a "sweet land of liberty when one's liberty to have a drink is taken away?" is a favorite query.
The true answer to that question is that America, like England, is governed by majority opinions. The majority of American citizens wanted the abolition of the saloon, and they got it.
As regards the advantage of it, I saw New York in 1913 and can compare its huge gin-palaces of that time, the swarms of unfortunate girls going in and out, the police exploitation of them, the night court for women on Sixth Avenue, with cleaned-up New York in 1922. The advantage seems inestimable.
As regards the reality of Prohibition, I will say this—Even near the Mexican Border, after a forty-mile ride in the snow, when one would give a good deal for a stiff drink, not a rancher but was a teetotaler.
The little cities of America are now totally devoid of public vice. The prisons of Kansas are empty. In the large cities the police are notably impoverished. It is no use the foreign tourist going to the police and saying, "Show me the vice of your city." There is nothing to show. Go a round of the ice cream parlors. Yonder in a small den loving couples are eating hot tamales. On a corner a youth is surreptitiously lighting a cigarette. The nation is on a high level of morality, and this is reflected in the physique of its children. With all this, I ought perhaps to make a warning—there is almost no religion. Moral fervor stands instead of religion. The note of wonder, of awe, of divine praise, is almost entirely absent.
The upper forty thousand, as I have said, take little heed of this. They believe that they control the springs of action and can make the hundred million do what they want them to do. The party system in politics with no other choice but that of Republican or Democrat seems to facilitate their influence. "Cleaning up" is a passion of the hundred million; very well, it can be harnessed to the designs of the forty thousand. Let them "clean up" Cuba, "clean up" the Central American Republics, "clean up" Mexico.
6
One thing the hundred million will not tolerate in their midst and that is, a foreign point of view in morals. The "dago" will do things no "white man" will stand. So also will the Hun and the "Hunky," the Slav, the "Greaser," the "nigger." An associating of foreigners with unnatural vice is all too common. The fairskinned Anglo-Saxon, despite all admixtures, remains the dominant type. He rejects the melting pot. He alone is the hundred-per-cent American and will not be adulterated. He is opposed to color, to all dark skins, be they Italian or Ethiopian, and he is opposed to European religions which seem to permit low morals. Out of this has arisen on the one hand the spirit of Hearst's newspapers, on the other the new development of the Ku Klux Klan.
It is this movement largely which has shut the door to further immigration from Europe. The idea was obtained during the War that American ideals and standards had become endangered by a too great influx of foreigners into America. The Germans, the Russians, the Irish, all forgot that they were Americans first—all the "hyphenates" waved their flags of origin. This naturally caused the lurid limelight of the Press to be turned upon the foreign elements in the midst, and it was seen how differently the foreigners lived and how much lower were their moral standards.
Even while America seemed to be fighting for Europe, her opinion of Europeans, never high, was suffering a severe depression. It is a national fact to-day that America trusts no foreigners.
7
Provincialism is widely spread. People are not only ill-informed regarding foreign countries, but credulous, and the press reflects their state of mind. A country like Russia might almost be in the moon, to judge by current opinions concerning her. Doubtless it would be absurd to go to America to obtain information about Europe.
On the other hand, education goes further in America than in any other country. You often hear exaggerated statements of what the Russian Bolsheviks are doing for the education of the Russian masses—they have "voted" and "assigned" and "planned"—and they have no teachers. But America has teachers and schools, the best equipped in the world. She is ready to spend money; she has faith in education, she has the will to get it. The High Schools of America are very remarkable, both in the number of them and in their size. Americans who have not traveled in the old home countries of Europe can hardly measure what magnificent institutions they have in their public schools, and what an advantage the average American child holds over the average child of any other nation.
Again, the number of colleges and universities is phenomenal. It reflects no doubt the wealth of America and also the turning of the back upon America's raw, primitive, uncouth past. England, by virtue of her history, is too phlegmatic to do much for the higher education of the masses.