Chapter XI: Part 11

The life! That was the magic that Europe held for our visitors. They might return to the big enterprises, the big problems here, and feel that America was home because they had a share in its growth, but their nostalgia for the old countries continued to grow in the measure that they came to appreciate the wisdom with which life was ordered there--as they realized how the stable institutions, the old religions, festivals, traditions, all the things that flower into art, had resisted the terrific change that the industrial revolution had brought into the 19th century. Behind all questions of the coming of objects of art into this country or the appearance of new artists or new schools here, lies this most pivotal matter of the elements of art in American life. They need not be, they cannot be the same as those in European life, but it is futile to think of having an art here if we deny ourselves the ideas and feelings of which art has been made--the joy and awe of life that the Greek responded to in his marbles, the Italian in his frescoes, the Spaniard, the Fleming, the Dutchman, and the Frenchman in his canvases. Copying the externals of their work without again living their lives can result only in academism--bad sculpture and bad pictures.

It was not as a protest against bad art, local or foreign, that the International Exhibition of 1913 was organized, and it is very solidly to the credit of our public that it did not regard the event in that negative fashion--but as a positive thing, a revelation of the later schools of European painting of which it had been kept in ignorance by the will of the academies here and abroad. The “Armory Show,” as it was called, drew forth a storm of ridicule, but it also attracted such hundreds of thousands of visitors as no current exhibition had ever gathered in this country before. The first contact of our public with the arts that have succeeded Impressionism--with the painting of Cézanne, Redon, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, the Cubists, and others--was made at this epoch-marking show. With the jeers that it received there were not a few hosannas, and even the vast majority of visitors--doubtful as to the exact value of the various exhibits, knew that qualities existed in the new schools that had never been seen here and that were needed. Some three hundred works went from the walls of the Armory to form a vanguard for the far more important purchases of modern art that have since been building up our collections; so that at the moment of this writing an exhibition can be opened at the Metropolitan Museum which, while representing a mere fraction of the wealth of such pictures in American possession, gives a superb idea of the great schools of the later 19th century and the 20th century in France. It is worthy of note that in its response to the great show of 1913 and to the smaller ones that followed, America was only giving, in a stronger form, the measure of a power of appreciation it had shown before. Earlier examples of this are to be found in the great collections of Barbizon and Impressionist pictures here. A thing that should weigh against many a discouraging feature of our art-conditions is the fact that an American museum was the first in the world, and the only one during the lifetime of Manet, to hang works by that master.

Returning now to our own painting, one man in this country resisted with complete success the test of an exhibition with the greatest of recent painters from abroad. It was Mr. Maurice B. Prendergast, who for thirty years had been joyously labouring at an art which showed its derivation from the best French painting of his day, its admirable acceptances of the teaching of Cézanne (scarcely a name even in Europe when Mr. Prendergast first studied him), and its humorous and affectionate appreciation of the American scenes that the artist had known from his youth. In original and logical design, in brilliant colour that yet had the mellowness of a splendid wine, he expresses the modern faith in the world we see and makes it lovable. At last we welcome an art in accord with the finest of the ancient-modern tradition, as European critics have since declared; yet it remains American in provenance and in the air of unconscious honesty that has always been a characteristic of the good work of this country.

The latest wave of influence to come over American art has almost been the most far-reaching and invigorating. To go further than this assertion, at least in the matter of individuals, would be to forego the support of too large a part of that body of opinion that I know to be behind my statements throughout this essay. Art-matters must, in the final analysis, be stated dogmatically, but I am unwilling to speak of the schools now developing save in a general way, especially as the most interesting men in them have still to reach a definitive point in their evolution. They are abreast or nearly abreast of the ideas of Europe, and there is an admirable vigour in the work that some individuals are producing with those ideas. But the changes brought about by the International are still too recent for us to expect the most important results from them for a number of years. The general condition here has probably never been as good before.

I have, till now, spoken only of the more traditional aspects of art--the kind one finds in museums--and that last word calls for at least a mention of the great wealth of art-objects that are heaping up in our public collections, and in the private galleries which so often come to the aid of the museums.

There is, however, another phase of our subject that demands comment, if only as a point of departure for the study that will one day be given to the American art that is not yet recognized by its public or its makers as one of our main expressions. The steel bridges, the steel buildings, the newly designed machines, and utensils of all kinds we are bringing forth show an adaptation to function that is recognized as one of the great elements of art. Perhaps the process has not yet gone far enough for us to look on these things as fully developed works of art, perhaps we shall still need some influence from Europe to make us see the possibilities we have here, or again, it may be in America that the impetus to creation along such lines will be the stronger. At all events we may feel sure that the study of the classics, ancient and modern, which is spreading throughout the country has, in some men, reached a point of saturation which permits the going on to new discovery, and we may be confident of the ability of our artists to make good use of their advantage.

WALTER PACH

THE THEATRE

Of the perceptible gradual improvement in the American popular taste so far as the arts are concerned, the theatre as we currently engage it offers, comparatively, the least evidence. The best-selling E. Phillips Oppenheims, Robert W. Chamberses, and Eleanor H. Porters of yesterday have given considerable ground to Wharton and Bennett, to Hergesheimer and Wells. The audiences in support of Stokowski, the Flonzaley Quartette, the Philharmonic, the great piano and violin virtuosos, and the recognized singers, are yearly augmented. Fine painting and fine sculpture find an increasing sober appreciation. The circulation of _Munsey’s Magazine_ falls, and that of the _Atlantic Monthly_ rises. But the best play of an American theatrical season, say a “Beyond the Horizon,” has still to struggle for full breath, while across the street the receipts of some “Ladies’ Night,” “Gold Diggers,” or “Bat,” running on without end, mount to the half-million mark.

If one speaks of the New York theatre as the American theatre, one speaks with an exaggerated degree of critical charity, for the New York theatre--so far as there is any taste in the American theatre--is the native theatre at its fullest flower. Persons insufficiently acquainted with the theatre have a fondness for controverting this, but the bookkeeping departments offer concrete testimony that, if good drama is supported at all, it is supported in the metropolitan theatre, not in the so-called “road” theatre. The New York theatre supports an American playwright like Booth Tarkington when he does his best in “Clarence,” where the road theatre supports him only when he does his worst, as in “Mister Antonio.” The New York theatre, these same financial records prove, supports Shaw, O’Neill, Galsworthy, Bahr, and others of their kind, at least in sufficient degree to permit them to pay their way, where the theatre of Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh spells failure for them. Save it be played by an actor or actress of great popular favour, a first-rate piece of dramatic writing has to-day hardly a chance for success outside of New York. These other cities of America, though they are gradually reading better books and patronizing better music and finer musicians, are almost drama-deaf. “There is, in New York,” the experienced Mr. William A. Brady has said to me, “an audience of at least fifteen thousand for any really good play. That isn’t a large audience; it won’t turn the play into a profitable theatrical venture; but it is a damned sight larger audience than you’ll be able to find in any other American city.” Let the native sons of the cities thus cruelly maligned, before they emit their habitual bellows of protest, consider, once they fared forth from New York, the fate of nine-tenths of the first-rate plays produced in the American theatre without the hocus-pocus of fancy box-office “stars” during the last ten years.

The theatrical taste of America at the present time, outside of the metropolis, is demonstrated by the box-office returns to be one that venerates the wall-motto _opera_ of Mr. William Hodge and the spectacular imbecilities of Mr. Richard Walton Tully above the finest work of the best of its native dramatists like O’Neill, and above the finest work of the best of the modern Europeans. In the metropolis, an O’Neill’s “Beyond the Horizon,” a Galsworthy’s “Justice,” a Shaw’s “Androcles,” at least can live; sometimes, indeed, live and prosper. But for one respectable piece of dramatic writing that succeeds outside of New York, there are twenty that fail miserably. The theatrical culture of the American countryside is in the main of a piece with that of the French countryside, and to the nature of the latter the statistics of the French provincial theatres offer a brilliant and dismaying attestation. Save a good play first obtain the endorsement of New York, it is to-day impossible to get a paying audience for it in any American city of size after the first curiosity-provoking performance. These audiences buy, not good drama, but notoriety. Were all communication with the city of New York suddenly to be cut off for six months, the only theatrical ventures that could earn their way outside would be the Ziegfeld “Follies,” the Winter Garden shows, “Ben Hur,” and the hack dramatizations of the trashier best-sellers like “Pollyanna” and “Daddy Longlegs.” This is not postured for sensational effect. It is literally true. So true, in fact, that there is to-day not a single producer in the American theatre who can afford to, or who will, risk the loss of a mere four weeks’ preliminary “road” trial of a first-class play. If he cannot get a New York theatre for his production, he places it in the storehouse temporarily until he can obtain a metropolitan booking rather than hazard the financial loss that, nine times in ten, is certain to come to him.

More and more, the better producing managers--men like Hopkins, William Harris, Jr., Ames, _et al._--are coming to open their plays in New York “cold,” that is, without the former experimental performances in thitherward cities. And more and more, they are coming to realize to their sorrow that, unless New York supports these plays of the better sort, they can look for no support elsewhere. Chicago, boasting of its hospitality to sound artistic endeavour, spent thirty-five hundred dollars on a drama by Eugene O’Neill in the same week that it spent forty-five thousand dollars on Al Jolson’s Winter Garden show. Boston, one of the first cities to rush frantically forward with proofs of its old New England culture, has turned into a prompt and disastrous failure every first-rate play presented in its theatres without a widely advertised star actor during the last five years, and at the same time has made a fortune for the astute Mr. A. H. Woods, who, gauging its culture accurately, has sent it “Up in Mabel’s Room,” “Getting Gertie’s Garter,” and similar spicy boudoir and hay-mow farces, together with Miss Theda Bara in “The Blue Flame.” (It is no secret among the theatrical managers that the only way to bring the culture of Boston to the box-office window is through a campaign of raw advertising: the rawer the better. Thus the Boston Sunday newspaper advertisements of “Up in Mabel’s Room” were made to display a girl lying on a bed, with the suggestive catch-lines, “10,000 Visitors Weekly” and “Such a Funny Feeling.” Thus, the advertisements of another exhibit presented a rear view of a nude female with the title of the show, “Oh, Mommer,” printed across the ample buttocks. Thus, the advertisements of a Winter Garden music show, alluding to the runway used in these exhibitions, christened it “The Bridge of Thighs.”) No play presented in Philadelphia since “The Girl with the Whooping Cough” (subsequently suppressed by the New York police authorities on the ground of indecency) has been patronized to the extent where it has been found necessary to call out the police reserves to maintain order, as was the case when the play in point was produced. Washington is a cultural wilderness; I have personally attended the premières of ten highly meritorious dramas in the national capital in the last six years and can report accurately on the quality of the receptions accorded to them. Washington would seem still to be what it was some fifteen years or so ago when, upon the initial revelation of Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” it essayed to boo it into permanent discard. Baltimore, Detroit (save during the height of the war prosperity when the poor bohicks, wops, and Greeks in the automobile works found themselves suddenly able to buy theatre seats regularly), Cleveland, St. Louis, San Francisco--the story is the same. Honourable drama spells ruin; legs, lewdness and sentimentality spell riches.

In comparison with the taste of the great American cultural prairie whereon these cities are situated, the city of New York, as I have written, looms up an æsthetic Athens. In New York, too, there is prosperity for bare knees, bed humours, and “Peg o’ My Heart” bathos, but not alone for these. Side by side with the audiences that crowd into the leg shows, the couch farces, and the uplift sermons are audiences of considerable bulk that make profitable the production of such more estimable things as Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,” the plays of St. John Ervine and Dunsany, of Tolstoy and Hauptmann, of Bahr and Benavente and Guitry. True enough, in order to get to the theatres in which certain of these plays are revealed, one is compelled to travel in a taxicab several miles from Broadway--and at times has to sit with the chauffeur in order to pilot him to far streets and alleyways that are not within his sophisticated ken--but, once one gets to the theatres, one finds them full, and their audiences enthusiastic and responsive. The culture of the American theatre--in so far as it exists--may be said, in fact, to be an alleyway culture. Almost without exception in the last dozen years and more have the best dramatists of Europe and of our own country been driven up alleyways and side-streets for their first American hearing. Up these dark alleys and in these remote malls alone have they been able to find a sufficient intelligence for their wares. Hervieu, Shaw, Echegaray, Strindberg, Björnson, Dunsany, Masefield, Ervine, Bergström, Chekhov, Andreyev, Benavente, O’Neill--these and many others of eminence owe their New York introduction to the side-street American who, in the majority of cases, is found upon analysis to be of fifty per cent. foreign blood. And what thus holds true of New York holds equally true in most of the other cities. In most of such cities, that is, as have arrived at a degree of theatrical polish sufficient to boast a little playhouse up an ulterior mews.

The more general American theatrical taste, reflected perhaps most fairly in such things as the idiotic endorsements of the Drama League and the various “white lists” of the different religious organizations, is--for all the undeniable fact that it seems gradually to be improving--still in the playing-blocks and tin choo-choo-car stage. Satire, unless it be of the most obvious sort and approach easily assimilable burlesque, spells failure for a producer. A point of view that does not effect a compromise with sentimentality spells failure for a dramatist. Sex, save it be presented in terms of a seltzer-siphon, “Abendstern,” or the _Police Gazette_, spells failure for both. The leaders in the propagation of this low taste are not the American managers and producers, as is commonly maintained, but the American playwrights. During the seventeen years of my active critical interest in the theatre, I have not encountered a single honest piece of dramatic writing from an American hand that could not get a hearing--and an intelligent hearing--from one or another of these regularly abused managers and producers. And during these years I have, by virtue of my joint professional duties as critic and co-editor of a sympathetic literary periodical, read perhaps nine-tenths of the dramatic manuscripts which aspiring young America has confected. This young America, loud in its inveighing against the managers and producers, has in the space of time indicated produced very, very little that was worth producing, and that little has promptly found a market. A bad workman is always indignant. But I know of no good American play that either has not already been produced, or has not been bought for future production. Any good play by an American will find its producer readily enough. The first manager who read “Beyond the Horizon” bought it immediately he laid the manuscript down, and this, recall, was its professionally unknown author’s first three-act play. The American theatre has altered in this department; the last fifteen years have wrought a tonic change.

No, the fault is not with the managers and producers, but with the playwrights. The latter, where they are not mere parrots, are cowards. Young and old, new and experienced, talented and talentless alike, they are in the mass so many _Saturday Evening Post_ souls, alone dreaming of and intent upon achieving a sufficient financial gain to transmute the Ford into a Rolls-Royce and the Hudson Bay seal collar into Russian sable. A baby cannot be nourished and developed physically upon water; a theatrical public, for all its potential willingness, cannot be developed aesthetically upon a diet of snide writing. In the American theatre of the present time there are not more than two, or at most three, playwrights out of all the hundreds, who retain in their hearts a determined and uncorrupted purpose. Take away young O’Neill, and give a bit of ground to Miss Rita Wellman (whose accomplishment is still too vague for fixed appraisal), and there is next to nothing left. Flashes of talent, yes, but only flashes. Craven’s “Too Many Cooks” and “The First Year” are observant, highly skilful depictions of the American scene, but they are dramatic literature only in the degree that “Main Street” and “This Side of Paradise” are literature. With the extraordinary “Papa,” Miss Zoë Akins gave up and surrendered--at least temporarily--to the box-office skull and cross-bones. Until Tarkington proves that “Clarence” was not a happy accident in the long and unbroken line of “Up from Nowhere,” “Mister Antonio,” “The Country Cousin,” “The Alan from Home,” “Cameo Kirby,” “Your Humble Servant,” “Springtime,” “Getting a Polish,” “The Gibson Upright,” and “Poldekin,” we shall have to hold up our decision on him. George Ade, the great promise of authentic American drama, is no more; he pulled in his oars, alas, in mid-stream. Joseph Medill Patterson, an honest dramatist, fell through the bridge while not yet half way across. The rest? Well, the rest are the Augustus Thomases, left-overs from the last generation, proficient technicians with empty heads, or youngsters still dramatically wet behind the ears. The rest of the rest? Ticket salesmen.

In no civilized country in the world to-day is there among playwrights so little fervour for sound drama as in the United States. In England, they at least try, in a measure, to write well; in Germany, to experiment bravely in new forms; in France, to philosophize either seriously or lightly upon life as they find it; in Russia, to treat soberly of problems physical and spiritual; in Spain, to depict the Spanish heart and conscience and atmosphere; in Ireland, to reflect the life and thoughts, the humour and tragedy and encompassing aspirations, of a people. And in the United States--what? In the United States, with hardly more than two exceptions, there is at the moment not a playwright who isn’t thinking of “success” above honest work. Good and bad craftsmen alike, they all think the same. Gold, silver, copper. And the result is an endless procession of revamped crook plays, detective plays, Cinderella plays, boudoir plays, bucolic plays: fodder for doodles. The cowardice before the golden snake’s eye spreads to the highest as well as to the lowest. Integrity is thrown overboard as the ship is steered unswervingly into the Golden Gate. The unquestionable talent of an Avery Hopwood--a George M. Cohan--a George Bronson-Howard--is deliberately self-corrupted.

The American professional theatre is to-day at once the richest theatre in the world, and the poorest. Financially, it reaches to the stars; culturally, with exception so small as to be negligible, it reaches to the drains. For both of these reaches, the American newspaper stands largely responsible. The American newspaper, in general, regards the theatre with contempt. My early years, upon leaving the university, were spent on the staff of one of them--the leading daily journal of America, it was in those days--and I shall never forget its attitude toward the theatre: cheap, hollow, debased. If a play was produced by a manager who advertised extensively in the paper, it was praised out of all reason. If a play was produced by a manager who happened to be _persona non grata_ in the office, it was dismissed with a brief reportorial notice. If a play was produced by a new and enterprising manager on the night of another production in a theatre patronized by fashionable audiences--the Empire, say--the former play, however worthy an effort it might be, was let down with a stick or two that there might be room to print the names of the fashionables who were in the Empire seats. The surface of things has changed somewhat since then, but the situation at bottom is much the same. A talented young reviewer writes honestly of a tawdry play in the _Evening Sun_; the producer of the play, an office favourite, complains; and the young reviewer is promptly discharged. A moving picture producer takes half-page advertisements of his forthcoming _opus_ in the New York newspapers, and the screen exhibit, a piece of trash, is hailed as a master work. Let a new drama by Gerhart Hauptmann be presented in the Park Theatre to-night and let Mr. John Barrymore also appear at eight-thirty in a play by some obscure hack at the Empire, and there will not be a single newspaper in the whole of New York City that will not review the latter flashy affair at the expense of the former.

It is not that the newspapers, in New York as elsewhere, are dishonest--few of them are actually dishonest; it is that they are suburban, shoddy, cheap. With only four exceptions that I can think of, the American newspaper, wherever you find it, treats the theatre as if it were of very much less importance than baseball and of but a shade more importance than a rape in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Two columns are given freely to the latest development in bootlegging in Harlem, and a begrudged half-column to a play by John Galsworthy. A society woman is accused by her husband of having been guilty of adultery with a half-breed Indian, and the allotment is four columns. On the same day, a Shakespearean production is mounted by the most artistic producer in the American theatre, and the allotment of space is two-thirds of a column. The reply of the newspapers is, “Well, we give the public what it wants! And it is more greatly interested in scandal than in Shakespeare.” Have not then the theatrical managers the right to reply in the same terms? And when they do, some of them, disgustedly reply in the same terms, what is the hypocritical appraisal of their offerings that the selfsame newspapers vouchsafe to them? If the New York _Times_ devotes three columns to a dirty divorce case, I fail to see how it can with justice or reason permit its theatrical reviewer indignantly to denounce Mr. A. H. Woods in the same issue for devoting three hours to a dirty farce.

The American drama, like the American audience, lacks repose. This is ever logically true of a new civilization. Time must mellow the mind and heart before drama may achieve depth and richness; time must mellow the mind and heart before an audience may achieve the mood of calm deliberation. Youth is a rare and precious attribute, but youth, for all its fine courage and derring-do, is inclined to be superficial. Its emotions and its reactions are respectively of and to the primary colours; the pastels it is impatient of. The American theatre, drama, and audience are the theatre, drama, and audience of the metaphysical and emotional primary colours: substantial, vivid, but all too obvious and glaring. I speak, of course, generally. For there are a few notable exceptions to the rule, and these exceptions portend in the American theatre the first signs of the coming dawn. A producer like Arthur Hopkins, perhaps the first American man of the theatre gifted with a genuine passion for fine and beautiful things and the talent with which to do--or at least try to do--them; a dramatist like young O’Neill, permitting no compromise or equivoke in the upward sweep of his dynamic imagination; an actor like Arnold Daly and an actress like Margaret Anglin to whom failure in the service of honest drama means absolutely nothing--these are they who inspire our faith in the future. Nor do they stand alone. Hume and Moeller, Jones, Peters, Simonson and Bel-Geddes, Glaspell, Wellman and Pottle--such youngsters, too, are dreaming their dreams, some of them, true enough, still silly dreams, but yet dreams. And the dreaming spreads, spreads....

But in its slow and brave ascent, the American theatre is still heavily retarded by the insular forces that, as in no other theatre save the English, operate in the Republic. The fight against outworn convention is a brave and bitter fight, but victory still rests mainly on the banners of the Philistines. The drama that dismisses sentimentality for truth, that seeks to face squarely the tragedy and comedy of love and life, that declines to pigeon-hole itself, and that hazards to view the American scene with cosmopolitan eyes, is confronted at every turn by the native Puritanism (as often shammed as inborn), and by the native parochialism and hypocrisy. The production that derides all stereotype--all the ridiculous and mossy rubber-stamps--is in turn derided. The actor or actress who essays to filter a rôle through the mind of a human being instead of through the mind of a rouged marionette is made mock of. Here, the playgoing public finds its leaders in three-fourths of the newspaper reviewing chairs, chairs influenced, directly or indirectly, by an intrinsic inexperience and ignorance, or by an extrinsic suggestion of “policy.”

The American theatre and drama have long suffered from being slaves to the national hypocrisy. Only on rare occasions have they been successful in casting off the shackles, and then but momentarily. The pull against them is stubborn, strong. Cracking the black snake across their backs are a hundred padrones: newspapers trembling at the thought of offending their advertisers, religious orders poking their noses into what should not concern them, corrupt moral uplift organizations and lecherous anti-vice societies itching for the gauds of publicity, meddling college professors augmenting their humble wage by writing twenty-dollar articles on subjects they know nothing about for the Sunday supplements, ex-real estate reporters and divorcée interviewers become “dramatic critics,” notoriety seeking clergymen, snide producers trying to protect their snide enterprises from the dangers of the invasion of truth and beauty. Let a group of drama-loving and theatre-loving young men, resourceful, skilful, and successful, come upon the scene, as the Washington Square Players came, let them bring flashes of authentic dramatic art into their native theatre, and against them is promptly hurled the jealous irony of the Old Guard that is dead, but never surrenders. Let a young playwright like Zoë Akins write an admirable fantastic comedy (“Papa”), and against her are brought all the weapons of the morals-in-art mountebanks. Let a producer like Hopkins break away from the mantel-leaning histrionism and palm-pot investiture, and against him is brought up the curt dismissal of freakishness.

The native theatre, for all the fact that it is on the way, is not yet ready for such things as demand a degree of civilization for receptive and remunerative appreciation. The “Pegs o’ My Heart” and “Pollyannas,” the “Turn to the Rights” and “Lightnin’s” still make millions, while the bulk of finer things languish and perish. I speak, remember, not of the theatre of one city, but of the theatre of the land. This theatre, considering it in so far as possible as a unit, is still not much above the Midway Plaisance, the honk-a-tonk, the Sunday School charade. That one, or maybe two, foreign national theatres may not be much better is no apology. Such foreign theatres--the French, say--are less national theatres than one-city theatres, for Paris is France. But the American theatre spreads from coast to coast. What it spreads, I have herein tried to suggest.

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

ECONOMIC OPINION

IF there were conscious restriction upon the expression of opinion in America, this essay would possess the pompous certainty of an official document. Instead of threading its hazardous way through a mass of confused thought, it would record in formal terms acceptable utterance. In fact, the very restrictions upon thought and speech, with the aid of scissors and a license to speech, could easily be turned into a statement of the reputable theory of the welfare of the community.

Unluckily, however, American life has not been arranged to make matters easy for the interpreter of economic opinion. Every American is conscious of a right to his own opinion about “why all of us taken together are as well off as we are” and “why some of us are better off and others of us worse off than the average of us.” Whether this privilege comes from the Bill of Rights, the constitution of the United States, or his Simian ancestry, he could not say; but he is fully assured that it is “inalienable” and “indefeasible.” No restriction of birth, breeding, position, or wealth limits his right to an opinion or persuades him to esteem his more fortunate neighbour’s more highly than his own. Nor do intellectual limitations check the flow of words and of ideas. No one is examined upon the growth of industrialism, the institutions which make up the economic order, or the nature of an industrial problem before he is allowed to speak. In fact, the idea that a knowledge of the facts about the subject under discussion, or of the principles to be applied to it, is essential to the right to an opinion is a strange notion little understood here. Even if occasionally some potentate attempts a mild restriction upon the spoken or the written word, it checks only those who talk directly and therefore clumsily. Its principal effect is through provocation to add mightily to the volume of opinion.

The result is a conglomerate mass of opinion that sprawls through the known realm of economics and into regions uncharted. The mighty men of finance spin a theory of national welfare in terms of foreign concessions no more glibly than the knights of the road in solemn convention solve with words the riddle of unemployment. The newly enfranchised women compete with the members of the Dynamite Club in proposals for setting the industrial cosmos in order. Economic opinion bobs up in the financial journals, “the labour press,” the periodicals of the “learned” societies, and in all the “Christian” advocates. It shows itself boldly in political speeches, in directors’ reports, in public hearings, and in propagandist sheets. It lurks craftily in editorials, moving pictures, drawing-room lectures, poems, cartoons, and hymns. It ranges from the sonorous apologies for the existing order voiced by the Aaron Baal Professor of Christian Homiletics in the Midas Theological Seminary to the staccato denunciation of what is by the Sons of Martha Professor of Proletarian Tactics in the Karl Marx College for Workers.

A mere semblance of order is given to this heterogeneous mass of opinion by the conditions which make it. A common system of legal, business, and social usages is to be found the country over. This has left its impress too firmly in the assumptions which underlie thought to allow this material to be separate bits from so many mental universes. The prevailing scheme of economic life is so definitely established as to force its imprint upon the opinion that moves about it. Acceptable opinion is created in its likeness, and unacceptable opinion becomes acceptable opinion when the negatives are skilfully extracted. Protestants are concerned rather with eliminating the “evils” of “capitalism” than with eradicating it root and branch. Protestantism is rather a variant of orthodox doctrine than an independent system of thought. Radical opinion that is likely to pass the decent bounds of negation is kept small in volume by a press which allows it little upon which to feed. Accordingly, varied doctrines wear the semblance of unity.

Such elements, however, do not free this adventure into speculation from its perils. They merely make the hazards mortal. In the paragraphs below the economic opinion in America is recklessly resolved into four main classes. These are the _laissez-faire_ opinion of the mid-19th century, the conventional “case for capitalism,” the protestant demand for “control,” and the academic insistence upon conscious “direction” of industrial change. Radical opinion gets a competent judgment elsewhere in this volume. Even in this bold outline the opinions of small minorities are lost to sight, and views and doctrines, seemingly alien to the authors who know their subtle differences, are often blurred into a single picture. To avoid the charge that the lion and the lamb have been pictured as one, no names have been called. Here as elsewhere particulars will rise up to curse their generalizations, and the whole will be found to be entirely too scanty to be disbursed into its parts. But the chance must be taken, and, after all, truth does not reside in copy-book mottoes.

I

The current types of economic opinion in this country all have a common origin. The men who express them are but a scant generation or two removed from the country or the small town. The opinions are so many variants of a stream of thought which goes back to a mid-19th century America of small towns and open country. This primitive economic opinion was formed out of the dust of the ground in the likeness of an exploitative America. The conditions which shaped it might be set forth in two lines of a school history thus: First, abundant natural resources; second, a scanty population; and third, the principle of letting the individual alone.

It was a chance at an economic opportunity which made America of the 19th century the “land of promise.” The raw materials of personal wealth were here in soil, stream, and mine. The equipment necessary to the crude exploitative farming of the time was easy to possess. Since there was an abundance, the resources essential to a chance at a living were to be had for the asking. One with enterprise enough to “go it alone” lived upon what he himself and his wealth in wife and children produced. He did not have to drive a shrewd bargain for the sale of his labour nor purchase the wherewithal to be fed and clothed in a market. There was no confusing scheme of prices to break the connection between effort and reward; opportunity and responsibility went hand in hand; success or failure was of one’s own fashioning. Where nature does most, man claims all; and in rural America men were quite disposed to claim personal credit for nature’s accomplishments. Since ample resources smothered even mediocre effort in plenty, the voice of chronic failure which blamed circumstance, fate, or “the system” was unheard. A freedom to have and to hold economic resources plentiful enough to supply all was the condition of material prosperity.

Even when the lure of natural resources drew men from agriculture to industrial exploitation conditions did not change materially. The population of the new towns for a while kept at least one foot upon the soil. When at last the city possessed its people, aliens came out of Southeastern Europe to do the “dirty work,” and the native born passed up into administrative, clerical, or professional positions. The alternative of farm employment and the rapid expansion of industry fixed a rough minimum beneath which wages could not fall. The expanding machine technique with large scale production by quantity methods turned out an abundance of goods evidenced alike in lower prices and in higher standards of living. The “captains of industry” were regarded by the community as the creators of the jobs which they dispensed and as the efficient cause of the prosperity of the neighbourhood. The trickle of immigration that swelled to a “stream” and rose to a “tide” is an eloquent testimonial of the time paid by the peasantry of Europe to the success of the American system of letting the individual alone in his business.

These conditions brought forth the lay economic theory acceptable to the national community. Its precepts came from experience, rather than from books; by intuition, rather than by reason. The welfare of the individual and the wealth of the nation were alike due to free institutions. In business and industry the individual was to be free to do as he pleased unless specifically forbidden by the State. The State was powerless to interfere with the individual unless granted specific “constitutional” authority to do so. Each knew what he wanted and was able to take care of himself. The interests of all were an aggregate of the interests of individuals. The prevailing scheme of institutions was accepted as a part of the immutable world of nature. Private property, if defended at all, was good because it gave the individual security and enabled him to enjoy the fruits of his own labour. The right of contract, exercised in a market characterized by “higgling,” gave one an occasional adventure beyond the horizon of a household economy. If perchance the individual stumbled into a bad bargain occasionally, so much the better. The mistake was a useful exercise in the development of the cardinal virtue of self-reliance. When the coming of industrialism made contract the basis of all industrial relations, the older justification was still used. Competition, with which it was always associated, was regarded as the prime agency in the organization of industry. It forced the elements of production into order and exercised a moral restraint over them. Under its régime men were rewarded in accordance with their deserts. In general, it was true beyond peradventure that “opportunity” knocked once “at every gate”; that there was “plenty of room at the top”; that each built the ladder by which he rose; and that even the humblest was “master of his fate.”

Out of such raw materials there was fashioned a body of professional economic theory. In a sense it was an imported product; for its earlier statement was that of English “classical” economics. But in reality it was the return of an earlier export, for accepted theory had been made from crude individualistic notions which England had got from America. In addition, at the hands of American economists it received a far more elaborate and articulate statement than had been given it overseas. These theorists used subtle analysis, ponderous logic, and circumlocution; but their decorous processes brought them to much the same conclusions that practical men gained from their limited experiences. Its strength and its acceptability were wholly due to the precision and verbiage with which it reduced to formal terms the common-sense economics of the day.

In its terms the economic order is made up of individuals. Each of these is actuated by the motive of self-interest. Each has for disposal personal services, goods, or property rights. Each must live upon goods and services purchased from others. Each must compete with his fellows in the sale of his wares and the purchase of his articles of livelihood. Because of the competition of sellers the wages of labour, the profits of capital, and the prices of goods cannot be forced to untoward heights. Because of the competition of buyers they cannot be driven too low. The equilibrium of this double competitive process assures to each a return which represents the just value of the service, the property right, or the good. Prices, by moving up and down in response to changing conditions, stimulate and retard consumption and production. Their very movement constantly reallocates resources to the production of a variety of goods and services in just the proportion which the consumers demand. In this theory the institutions which comprise the framework of the economic order are taken for granted. It has no place for an interference by the State with “private business.” It regards monopoly as a thing to be abjured, whether appearing as a capitalistic combine or as a union of workingmen. In the Eden of free enterprise the community’s resources yield all they have and competition rewards justly all the faithful who by serving themselves serve society. It is small wonder that sermons were preached upon “The Relation of Political Economy to Natural Theology.”

II

The conditions which made the economic opinion of the America of small towns and open country are gone. With their passing the older theories have been reshaped to new purposes. There are no longer free economic opportunities for all comers. Natural resources have been appropriated, and the natural differences between men have been enhanced by the artificial ones of ownership and inheritance. Wealth and control have alike been stripped from the many and concentrated in the few. The prevailing unit in business is the corporation. Establishments have been gathered into industries, and these have been articulated into a mighty industrial system, with its established rights, its customary ways of doing things, and its compulsions upon those who serve it. The older personal relation of “master” and “servant” abides only in indices of the records of the law courts. The contract of employment is now between a “soulless” but “legal entity” and a mere creature of flesh and blood. The more human individual, the survival of a less mechanical age, no longer lives upon the fruit of his individual toil. His welfare is pent in between his wages and the prices which he must pay for his necessities. Beyond this immediate bargain lies a mysterious economic system filled with unknown causes which threaten his income and even his employment. Those who possess have come into succession to those who ventured. In short, free enterprise has given way to an established system.

These events have left their mark upon economic opinion. It is altogether fitting that those who fell heir to the wealth piled up by free enterprise should gain its outer defences of theory and dialectic. So the older economics, with its logic and its blessing, has come as a legacy to those who have. Its newer statement, because of its well-known objective, may be called “the case for capitalism.” In its revision the adventurous militarism bent upon exploitation has given way to a pacifistic defence of security, possession, and things as they are.

In outward form few changes were necessary to convert the older theory of _laissez-faire_ into a presentable case for capitalism. A more rigid and absolute statement of the classical doctrine was almost enough. In its terms the economic order is independent of other social arrangements. It is an automatic, self-regulating mechanism. Over it there rules an immutable and natural “law of supply and demand.” This maintains just prices, prevents exploitation, adjusts production and consumption to each other, secures the maximum of goods and services from the resources at hand, and disburses incomes in accordance with the merits of men and the verity of things. So just and impartial is the operation of this law that interference by the State amounts to meddlesome muddling. It cannot override natural law; therefore it should not.

It differs most from the older economics in the more explicit statement of the function of institutions. The growing inequality of income, of control, and of opportunity have presented facts that have to be faced. But even here, instead of contriving new defences, the advocates of capitalism have refurbished the older ones. The thing that is finds its justification in that which was. Property rights are to be preserved intact, because private property is essential to personal opportunity; just as if the propertyless did not exist and each was to win his living from his own acres or his own shop. The right of contract is not to be abridged, because the interests of both parties are advanced by a bargain between equals; just as if the corporate employer and the individual employé were alike in their freedom, their capacity to wait, and their power to shape the terms of the bargain. Prices are to be self-determined in open market, because competition will best reconcile the conflicting interests of buyers and sellers; just as if there was no semblance of monopoly among producers, no open price agreements, and no informal understandings. Individual initiative is not to be abridged, because it creates the wealth of the nation; just as if routine had no value for efficiency and the masses of men still had discretion in economic matters. The arrangements which make up the economic order find their validity in the symbolic language of ritual rather than in a prosaic recital of current fact.

This defence crosses the frontier which separates the economic from the political order only to appropriate the prestige of democracy. Its real concern is the preservation of the prevailing system wherein business controls industry for purposes of profit. Its formal solicitation is lest “the form of government” be changed. This concern finds expression in veneration for the work of the “fathers” (rather young men, by the way), not of machine technology and business enterprise, but of “representative government” and of “constitutional authority.” Its creed becomes propaganda, not for the defence of business, the security of corporations, or the preservation of managerial immunities, but for the defence of the nation, the security of America, and the preservation of “constitutional” rights. The newer economic arrangements are masked behind political rights and given the values of the political institutions which antedate them by many decades. In short, the staunchest defenders of the prevailing economic system believe that “their economic preferences are shared by the constitution of the United States.”

If we may borrow a term from its advocates, this body of opinion must be pronounced “theoretical.” In their speech a “theory” is a generalization which goes much further than its particulars warrant. In that sense their conclusions are not “practical.” The essential question with which this body of opinion is concerned is whether the scheme of institutions which focus upon profit-making make the members of the community, severally and collectively, as well off as they ought to be. It seems offhand that a realistic defence of the prevailing order might be convincingly formulated. At any rate, “the case for capitalism” is good enough to get into the records. Instead, its advocates have confused their own pecuniary success with the well-being of the community and have argued that because profits have been made the system is good. Like the classical economists they vindicate the system by assumption.

III

In the wake of the new industrialism there has come an economic opinion of protest. It is being gradually formulated by professional men, by farmers, by trade unionists, and by the younger business men who have escaped being “self-made.” Its hesitating and confused statement is due to the disturbed conditions out of which it comes. The varied interests of its many authors prevents unity of words or of principles. Its origin in the contact of minds steeped in the older individualism with the arresting facts of the newer economic order explains its current inarticulate expression. It can be set forth briefly only by subordinating the reality of variety to the tendencies which are clearly inherent within it.

The objective of this newer opinion is a modification of the prevailing order, rather than its overthrow. It is quite conscious of defects in its arrangements and knows that its fruits are not all good. It has never considered the question of the efficiency or inefficiency of the system as a whole. The older individualistic notions are strong enough to give an intuitive belief that the theory of the control of industry by business for profit is essentially sound. But it would eliminate the bad, patch up the indifferent, and retain the good. It would set up in the government an external authority which through regulation and repression would make business interests serve the community. Its faith is in private enterprise compelled by the State to promote “public welfare.” Its detail can best be suggested by typical illustrations.

There is, first of all, the attitude of the protestants towards freedom of contract. They accept the prevailing theory that the relations of buyer and seller, employer and employé, owner and agent, can safely be left to the free choice of all concerned. But they point out that in practice the principle does not give its assumed results. For, whereas the theory assumes the parties to be equal in their power to determine the terms of the contract, it is a matter of common knowledge that employers and labourers occupy unequal bargaining positions. They would leave relations to be determined by free bargaining; but, as a preliminary, they would attempt to establish equality of bargaining power. To that end they would have the contract made by “collective bargaining” between employers and employés “through representatives” chosen by each. Moreover, they would use the State to better the position of the weaker party. Thus legislation has been passed depriving employers of their right of requiring employés, as a condition of employment, not to remain members of labour unions. Although the courts have found such legislation to be “an arbitrary interference with the liberty of contract which no government can justify in a free land,” its advocates will insist that their aim has been only “to establish that equality in position between the parties in which liberty of contract begins.”