Chapter XII: Part 12

There is, in the next place, a growing opinion among the protestants that the State is “a moral agent” and should determine the rules under which business is to be carried on. They point out that in business there are bad as well as good conditions, that business men engage in proper as well as in improper practices, and that some activities harm while others help the community. In many instances the employer finds it to his advantage to establish conditions which the interests of the workers and of the consumers require. In others, the elevation of standards waits upon the pleasure of the most inconsiderate employer. The prohibition of child labour, the shortening of the working day, and the payment of a minimum wage may be advantageous alike to labourers and to the community; yet these innovations involve an increase in cost and cannot be made against the competition of the producer who will not establish them. In such cases it is the duty of the State to establish minimum conditions which must be met by all employers. The imposition of such standards in no way affects the system under which business is carried on; for the competition of rival sellers can be just as acute and just as considerate of the public, if all of them are forced to pay their employés a living wage, as if they are all free to force wages down to starvation. Upon this theory the State has established uniform weights and measures, prohibited the use of deleterious chemicals, stopped the sale of impure food, provided compensation for the human wear and tear of industry, and established minimum standards of safety, health, and service.

There is, finally, a growing opinion that in some industries the profit-making motive must be superseded by some other. In the railway industry it has been repeatedly shown that the pecuniary interest of the management fails to coincide with that of either the owners or of the shippers. Long ago the determination of charges for service was put beyond the discretion of the officials. Of late there has been an increasing tendency to make accounts, services, expenditures, valuations, and other matters meet standards of public service. When this has been effected, as it will be, the officials of the roads will become mere subordinates responsible to a public authority. Then profit-making as a guide to administration will have given way to an official judgment of results in terms of established standards. Then it will be discovered that public control formally rejected has been achieved by indirection. But many times ere this American opinion has come by devious paths to goals which its individualism has not allowed it to regard as quite desirable.

For the moment the medley of opinion here roughly characterized as a demand for control is dominant. Its proponents are almost as naïve as the advocates of capitalism in a belief in the essential goodness of a mythical system of “free enterprise.” They differ from them in placing greater emphasis upon voluntary associations and in demanding that the State from without compel business to serve the common good. As yet they have formulated no consistent theory of economics and no articulate programme for achieving their ends. Without a clear understanding of the development of industry and of the structure of the economic order, they are content to face specific problems when they meet them. They are far from ready to surrender an inherited belief in an individualistic theory of the common good.

IV

The changes of the last four decades, which make up “The Industrial Revolution in America,” have left their mark upon the economics of the schools. If there was a time when the thought of the professed economists was a thing apart from the common sense of the age, it ended with the coming of industrialism. Differ as it may in phrase, in method, and in statement, the economics in solid and dull treatises reflects, as it has always reflected, the opinions of the laity. If there were agreement among the sorts of men who gather at ball games and in smoking cars, the books on economics would all read alike. But when the plumber differs from the banker and the scrub woman refuses to take her ideas from the coupon clipper, it is futile to expect mere economists to agree. To some, the classical doctrine still serves as a sabbatical refuge from modern problems. Others, who “specialize” in trusts, tariffs, and labour are too busy being “scientific” to formulate general opinions. Still others insist upon creating a new economics concerned with the problem of directing industrial development to appointed ends. Each of these schools has a membership large enough to allow dissension within the ranks.

The revolt against the classical economics began when it encountered modern fact. Beyond the pale of doctrine taught by certified theorists appeared studies upon corporations, international trade, railway rates, craft unionism, and other matters of the newer fact. For a time those who studied these subjects were content to describe in superficial terms the results of their observations. But as facts accumulated they provoked generalizations at variance with the accepted principles of the older competitive theory. At the same time the rise of a newer history concerned with development rather than chronology, a new ethics that recognized the existence of a social order, and a new psychology that taught that the content of men’s behaviour is poured in by the environment, together made the foundations of the older economics very insecure.

For a time this protest found expression only in critical work. The picture of an economic order as a self-regulating mechanism, peopled with folk who could not but serve the community in serving themselves became very unreal. The complexity of industrialism made it hard to believe that the individual had knowledge enough to choose best for himself. The suspicion that frequently thought follows action made it hard to continue to believe in man’s complete rationality. The idea that incomes are different because opportunities are different led to a questioning of the justice of the ratings of men in the market. The unequal division of income made impossible pecuniary calculations in which each man counted for one and only for one. With these assumptions of 19th-century economics passed “the economic man,” “the Crusoe economy,” and the last of the divine theories, that of “enlightened self-interest.” It was no longer possible to build a defence of the existing order upon “the hedonistic conception of man” as “a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him inert.”

The most immediate effect of this criticism was a change in method. The older process of juggling economic laws out of assumptions about human nature, human motives, and the beneficence of competition lost prestige. It was evident that if the system was to be appraised the facts must be had. Accordingly a veritable multitude of facts, good, bad, and mostly indifferent were treasured up. This process of garnering information soon made it evident that the facts about the relationship of industry to the welfare of the community were too varied and too numerous to be separately catalogued. Since only totals could be used, economics came to rely upon facts presented in the quantitative language of statistics.

But since facts are not possessed of the virtue of self-determination, they did not yield an opinion which was very relevant or very truthful. Their use was for the moment nothing more than a substitution of the superstition of facts for that of logic. The facts were of value, because when properly interpreted they gave the story of what the economic system had done. But without the aid of standards it was impossible to determine whether it had worked well or ill, whether it had much or little to give in return for the solicitous concern about it. It was evident that modern industrialism was developing without conscious guidance. As long as no goal was fixed it was impossible to tell whether industrial development was proceeding in the right direction. As long as we were unmindful of the kind of society we wished ours to be, we could not appraise its accomplishments. Without standards all that could be said was that the system had worked as well as it had worked and that we were as well off as we were well off. The problem, therefore, became one of judging the system on the basis of the facts by means of standards.

Thus the newer economics has been of service in stating the problem with which opinion must be concerned. The “prevailing” economic order is one of many schemes of arrangements for making industry serve the purposes of the community. The system has been slowly evolved out of the institutions of the past, is constantly being affected by circumstances, and for the future is capable of conscious modification. How well it has served its purpose cannot be attested by an abstract argument proceeding from assumptions about human nature and the cosmos. A judgment upon its relative goodness or badness requires an appraisal of the facts in terms of standards. These standards must be obtained from our notions of the kind of society we want this to be. These notions must proceed from a scientific study of the properties of things and the needs of human beings. That judgment will be one not of goodness or badness, but of the relative merits of a very human scheme of arrangements compared with its alternatives.

The economists are reluctant to pass a judgment upon the prevailing order. The relevant facts are too scanty and the standards too inexact to warrant an appraisal of the virtues and the vices of “capitalism.” They distrust the eulogies of apologists because they do not square with the known facts. They are not convinced by the reformers, because they fear that they know as little about their own schemes as they do about current arrangements. They insist that a general judgment must be a progressive affair. The system will change through gradual modification; the larger problem will be solved by attention to an endless succession of minor problems. Each of these must be met with the facts and with an ideal of what our society should be. They have too little faith in the rationality of the collect to believe that problems can be faced in battalions or that a new order can emerge as a work of creation. They have little fear for “the future of the nation,” if only problems can be intelligently handled as they emerge. Their attitude towards the present system is one, neither of acceptance nor of rejection, but of doubt and of honest inquiry. Their faith is neither in the existing order nor in a hand-me-down substitute, but in a conscious direction of the process of change.

* * * * *

This tedious narrative has failed entirely in its purpose, if it has not revealed the strength and the weakness of economic opinion in America. Its merits stand out boldly in the preceding paragraphs; its defects are too striking to be concealed. The reader has already been informed; but the writer must inform himself. The essay, therefore, will close with an explicit statement of some three of the more obvious characteristics.

First, its most striking characteristic is its volume. In quantity it contains enough verbal and intellectual ammunition to justify or to wreck a dozen contradictory economic orders. If, in an orderly way, opinion became judgment and judgment ripened into the society of to-morrow, it would stand condemned. For little of it has a practical consequence and our ways of expression are very wasteful. But it also affords a harmless outlet for the dangerous emotions aroused by the wear and tear of everyday work in a humdrum universe. And, if it is true that we are, all of us, Simians by lineage, this is by far the most important function it serves.

Second, it is grounded none too well in information and principles. The ordinary mortal is busied with his own affairs. He lacks the time, the patience, and the equipment necessary to get at the facts about the material welfare of the nation. In the most casual way he makes up his mind, using for the purpose a few superficial facts, a number of prejudices, and a bit of experience. He has little idea of where we are in the course of social development, of the forces which have brought us here, or of where we ought to be going. Since the opinions of groups and of the nation are aggregates of individual opinion, the ideas of those who have an intellectual right to speak are not a large part of the compound.

Third, despite its crudeness and variety, it possesses elements of real value. Its very volume creates at least a statistical probability that some of it is of high quality. The waste of much of it gives the rest a real chance of expression in social policy. The common features of industrialism are giving to men something of a common experience out of which there will come a more or less common-sense appreciation of problems and of ideals. This will dictate the larger features of a future social policy. The particularized opinion which finds expression in the detailed formulation of programmes must be left to the experts. The great masses of men must learn that these problems are technical and must trust the judgment of those who know. Despite the record of halting development and of confused statement, the pages above indicate that the economic opinion in America is coming slowly to an appreciation of the factors upon which “the good life for all” really rests.

But enough. Opinion by being economic does not cease to be opinion, and an essay about it is only more opinion.

WALTON H. HAMILTON

RADICALISM

The first obstacle to an assessment of radicalism in America is the difficulty of discovering precisely what American radicalism is. According to his enemies, a radical is a person whose opinions need not be considered and whose rights need not be respected. As a people we do not wish to understand him, or to deal with what he represents, but only to get him out of sight. We deport him and imprison him. If he writes a book, we keep it out of the schools and libraries. If he publishes a paper, we debar it from the mails. If he makes a speech, we drive him out of the hall and shoo him away from the street-corner. If by hook or crook he multiplies himself to considerable numbers, we expel his representatives from legislative chambers, break up his parades, and disperse his strikes with well-armed soldiery.

These being the associations which cluster about the word, it has naturally become less a definition than a weapon. Statisticians in the Federal Trade Commission publish certain figures dealing with the business of the packing-houses--a Senator loudly calls these devoted civil servants “radicals,” and they are allowed to resign. A labour leader, following the precedent of federal law established for over a half a century, espouses the eight-hour day, but because he has the bad taste to do so in connection with the steel industry, he becomes a “radical,” and is soundly berated in the press. If one were to ask the typical American Legion member how he would describe a radical--aside from the fact that a radical is a person to be suppressed--he would probably answer that a radical is (a) a pro-German, (b) a Russian or other foreigner, (c) a person who sends bombs through the mail, (d) a believer in free love, (e) a writer of free verse, (f) a painter of cubist pictures, (g) a member of the I.W.W., (h) a Socialist, (i) a Bolshevist, (j) a believer in labour unions and an opponent of the open shop, and (k) any one who would be looked upon with disapproval by a committee consisting of Judge Gary, Archibald Stevenson, and Brander Matthews.

There is scarcely more light to be had from the radicals themselves. Any one who feels a natural distaste for the censorious crowd of suppressors is likely to class himself with the free spirits whom they oppose. To call oneself a radical is in such circumstances a necessary accompaniment of self-respect. The content of the radicalism is of minor importance. There is an adventurous tendency to espouse anything that is forbidden, and so to include among one’s affirmations the most contradictory systems--such as Nietzscheanism and Communism, Christianity of the mystical sort and rebellion. And when these rebels really begin to think, the confusion is increased. Each pours his whole ardour into some exclusive creed, which makes him scorn other earnest souls who happen to disagree about abstruse technical points. Among economic radicals, terms like “counter-revolutionary” and “bourgeois” are bandied about in a most unpleasant fashion. If, for instance, you happen to believe that Socialism may be brought about through the ballot rather than through the general strike, numbers of radicals will believe you more dangerous than the Czar himself; it is certain that when the time comes you will be found fighting on the wrong side of the barricade. Creeds have innumerable subdivisions, and on the exact acceptance of the creed depends your eternal salvation. Calvinists, Wesleyans, Lutherans, and the rest in their most exigent days could not rival the logical hair-splitting which has lately taken place among the sectarian economic dissenters, nor has any religious quarrel ever surpassed in bitterness the dogmatic dissidence with which the numerous schools of authoritarian rebellion rebel against authority.

There is a brilliant magazine published in New York which takes pride in edging a little to the left of the leftmost radical, wherever for the moment that may be. Its editor is a poet, and he writes eloquently of the proletariat and the worker. Not long ago I was speaking of this editor to an actual leader of labour--a man who is a radical, and who also takes a daily part in the workers’ struggles. “Yes,” he said, “he certainly can write. He is one of the best writers living.” And he went on wistfully, “If the labour movement only had a writer like that!”

There is another brilliant magazine published in New York which takes exquisite pains to inform the reader that it is radical. In precise columns of elegant type, Puritan in its scorn of passion or sensation, it weekly derides the sentimental liberal for ignorance of “fundamental economics.” Not long ago it made the startling discovery that Socialists favour taking natural resources out of private ownership. And its “fundamental economics,” whenever they appear in language simple enough for the common reader to understand, turn out to be nothing more dangerous than that respectable and ancient heresy, the single tax.

Another method of definition is now in common use--a method which seems easy because of its mechanical simplicity. People are arranged in a row from left to right, according to their attitude toward the existing order. At the extreme right are the reactionaries, who want to restore the discarded. Next to them are the conservatives, who wish to keep most of what exists. At their elbow are the liberals, who are ready to examine new ideas, but who are not eager or dogmatic about change. And at the extreme left are the radicals, who want to change nearly everything for something totally new. Such an arrangement is a confusing misuse of words based on a misconception of social forces. Society is not a car on a track, along which it may move in either direction, or on which it may stand still. Society is a complex, with many of the characteristics of an organism. Its change is continuous, although by no means constant. It passes through long periods of quiescence, and comparatively brief periods of rapid mutation. It may collect itself into a close order, or again become dispersed into a nebula. There is much in its development that is cyclical; it has yet undiscovered rhythms, and many vagaries. The radical and the reactionary may be agreed on essentials; they may both wish sudden change and closer organization. The conservative may be liberal because he wishes to preserve an order in which liberal virtues may exist. Or a liberal may be so cribbed and confined by an unpleasant constriction of social tissue that he becomes radical in his struggle for immediate release. The terms are not of the same class and should not be arranged in parallel columns.

The dictionary definition is enlightening. “Radical--Going to the root or origin; touching or acting upon what is essential or fundamental; thorough.... _Radical reform_, a thorough reform.... Hence Radical Reformer equals Radical” (New English Dictionary). In this sense radicalism is an historic American tradition. The revolt of the Colonies against England and the formation of the Republic were, indeed, far from the complete break with the past which the schoolboy assumes them to have been, but what lives in the minds of the American people is, nevertheless, not the series of counterchecks which men like Hamilton and Madison wrote into the Constitution, but rather the daring affirmations of Jefferson which have a real kinship with the radical spirit of the French Revolution. Talk of “inalienable rights” such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was genuine radical talk; it searched out the bases of human relationship, proclaimed them against authority, and sought to found on them a system of government.

So strongly has this conception seized the imagination of Americans that it largely accounts for their almost instinctive hostility to new kinds of political change. The roots of politics have been uncovered, the change has in fact been made once for all--so they reason. To admit that any new fundamental alteration is necessary is to be disloyal to the historical liberation. Because the conservative American believes himself a complete democrat, because for him the “new order” was achieved in 1776, he is intolerant of modern radicals. Suggestions of new revolution touch him closely on his pride. In this sense Jefferson has been less a spur to future generations than an obstacle. If his fine frenzy about rights had been less eloquently expressed, if it had not obscured in a cloud of glory the true nature of the foundation of our government--a highly practical compromise which embodied a few moderate advances and many hesitancies--we should have a different temper about change to-day. We should not assume that all desirable fundamental modification of social and political structure had been completed nearly a century and a half ago.

The greatest historic expression of American radicalism has thus become the altar of the conservatives. To the unlettered man it may seem strange that a Supreme Court of elderly radicals will not allow Congress to forbid child-labour because of their loyalty to an 18th-century limitation of the federal government, presumably in the interest of freedom and humanity. To workmen voting for the eight-hour day the language of Jefferson did not seem hostile--they were struggling to pursue happiness in a way that he must have approved. And yet it is the sacred “right” of contract which deprived them, as voters, of the right to legislate for shorter hours. Workmen using their collective economic power to gain industrial freedom are met by a shower of injunctive denials, based chiefly on that same right of contract. In order to stay any further liberation of the human body and spirit, judges and officials and industrial barons have only to invoke the phrases of freedom thrown out against an ancient despotism. They have only to point out that freedom as defined abstractly over a hundred years ago forbids practical freedom to-day. Frozen radicalism of the past chills and destroys the new roots of American life.

Some appreciation of this state of affairs underlies the prevailing tendency to believe that all new radicalism has a foreign origin. It is, indeed, part of the best nationalistic tradition to attribute subversive doctrines to foreigners. This is the habit in every country. But in the United States the habit is perhaps more deep-seated than elsewhere. Americans are by definition free and equal; if then any one talks or acts as if he were not free and equal, he must have been born somewhere else. The American Government, being not a faulty product of human growth, but a new creation sprung perfect out of the ineffable minds of the Fathers, is unassailable; if any one assails it, he cannot know it, and must be subjected to courses in English and Civics (Americanization) until he recognizes its perfection. Treason in this country is not simple treason to a ruler, to a class, or to a system as elsewhere; it is an act of sacrilege, by one uninitiated, upon a religious mystery.

Of course there are and have been Americans whose radicalism is less crust and more meat. The spirit of Jefferson still lives, after all, to confute the interpretation put upon his words. And imported doctrine has actually had less to do with most of the radical movements in America than has American tradition itself. It is an easy step from the conception of political liberty to the conception of economic liberty, and the step has been made here as readily as in Europe. In a country which for so long offered extraordinary opportunities to the individual business man, it is only natural that economic liberty should have been conceived as a means of protecting his enterprise; and as a matter of fact our economic legislation for many years has been sprinkled with victories of the small business men and farmers over the interests which had already become large enough to seem to them oppressive. The regulation of the railroads, the succession of popular financial doctrines, and the anti-trust legislation, were all initiated by the interpretation of economic democracy naturally arising in the vigorous class of the small entrepreneurs. With the slow weakening of this class by its disintegration, on one hand into captains and lieutenants of the great principalities of industry, and on the other into permanently salaried or waged members of the rank and file, comes a corresponding tendency to change the prevailing conception of economic democracy. The radicalism of workmen in the United States has often been no less sweeping or assertive than the radicalism of workmen anywhere--witness the I.W.W. Even violence in the labour struggle has been practised chiefly by one hundred per cent. Americans--the steel workers in Homestead in 1892 and the West Virginia miners in Mingo County in 1921 were of old American stock. And the moment the predominating group in American thought and activity is composed of those who expect to live by their daily work rather than of those who expect to accumulate property, we are likely to see the rise of an economic radicalism more akin to that which exists in Europe, and one which, because of its sanction in our tradition, will be twice as militant and convinced.

For, after all, economic radicalism arises neither from a merely stupid desire for more material goods, nor from an intellectual adherence to a particular formula of industrial organization. It arises from a desire to be free, to achieve dignity and independence. Poverty is distressful not so much because of its physical hardships as because of its spiritual bondage. To be poor because one chooses to be poor is less annoying than to be moderately paid while the man who fixes one’s wages rides in a Rolls-Royce. The most modest aspects of the labour movement are attempts of the workmen to gain some voice in determining the conditions under which they must work--in other words, to extend democracy into industry. And when the workman wakes up to the fact that industrial policies are governed by a comparatively small class of owners, and that the visible result of those policies seems to be a large class of underemployed, undernourished, and under-housed families on one hand, and a small class of abundantly supplied families on the other, he feels that he is suffering an indignity. You may challenge him to prove that any other system would work better. You may argue that if all the wealth of the rich were distributed equally, he would receive but a trifle. Such reasoning will affect him little. If every one must be miserable, he at least wants to share and exercise whatever power exists to alter that misery. Kings have argued that the people could rule no better than they, but that has not prevented peoples from demanding representative government. The American tradition is sure to be as subversive a motive in industry as it has been in the State. The technical problem of how industry may be better organized, important as it is, is subordinate to this cry of the personality. Essentially, this sort of radicalism arises from the instinct of the workman to achieve an adult relationship to the industrial world.

The impact of the war upon industry, and the reverberation of its social results abroad, for some time stimulated this latent feeling in American workmen. For the first time in decades the competition of the unemployed and the immigrant was virtually removed, and the wage-earner began to feel secure enough to assert his personality. He was necessary to the community in an immediate way. The policy of the government was to recognize this fact, and to prevent an unduly rapid increase in wages and in the power of organized labour by compromising with it on certain simple issues like collective bargaining and the eight-hour day. But larger aspirations arose in the rank and file, and when the Russian Revolution sent a word of emancipation around the world, they were ready to listen. In spite of the crushing force of the whole ruling propaganda machinery, which had been so successful in arousing hatred against Germany, countless American workmen sensed the approach of a new order as a result of the success of the Bolsheviki. A secondary impulse of the same sort, felt even more strongly in some quarters, arose from the Nottingham programme of the British Labour Party. But affairs moved slowly, hope was deferred, and at length the new spirit lost much of its freshness and power. The very acrimoniousness and volume of the controversy over what had or had not been done in Russia wearied most people of the whole matter. The many expected revolutions in other countries, which missed fire so many times, caused disillusionment. The doctrinaire and even religious adherents of the Russian Communists began to make trouble for every radical organization in the country by their quarrels and divisions. At length, the war being over, the American labour movement itself began to display a weakness in the face of renewed attack on the part of its opponents, which showed how illusory had been many of its recent gains and how seriously its morale had been injured.

Economic radicalism never looked--on the surface--weaker than it does in the United States to-day. On the strength of statements by Mr. Gompers and some other leaders of the trade unions, we are likely to assume that organized labour will have nothing to do with it. The professed radicals themselves have been weakened by dissensions and scattered by persecution. Yet a brief survey of the formal groups which now profess radical theories will indicate why the future of American radicalism should not be assessed on the evidence of their present low estate.

The Socialist Party, even more than the Socialist Parties in other countries, was placed by the war in a difficult situation. With its roots not yet firmly in the soil, except in a few localities and among diverse national elements, it was faced with the necessity, in accordance with its principles and tradition, of denouncing the entrance of the United States into hostilities. But this decision could command no effective support from the workers organized on the economic field, who under a different leadership adopted a different attitude. Nor was the party strong enough among any other element of the population to make its decision respected. The only immediate result of the gesture was therefore to place this unarmed little force in the most exposed position possible, where it drew the fire of all those who were nervously afraid the people would not sanction the war. Socialism was not judged on the basis of its economic tenets, but was condemned as disloyal and pro-German; and the effect was to render the party even more sectarian and unrepresentative than ever before. It had adopted a position in which it could not expect recruits except from moral heroes, and no nation nourishes a large proportion of these. Such episodes make good legend, but they do not lead to prompt victories. Even those who later have come to believe that the Socialists were right about the war are likely to express their belief in some other form than joining the party.

In this weakened condition, the Socialist Party after the war developed internal fissures. Many bitter words have been exchanged as to whether the “Left Wingers” were or were not a majority of the party, whether they were or were not more orthodox than those in control of the party machinery, and whether, if they were more orthodox, their orthodoxy was wise. At any rate, they broke away and formed two new parties of their own, a fact which is the chief point of interest to one who is more concerned with the larger issues of American radicalism than with the minutiæ of Socialist politics. The Communist Party and the Communist Labour Party, whatever may have been the legitimacy of their gestation in the bowels of Socialism, certainly found their reason for being chiefly in logic which originated in Moscow and Berlin rather than in the American situation. At once selected for persecution by government officials, they burrowed underground, doubtless followed by a band of spies at least as numerous as they. From these subterranean regions have come rumours of a fourth party--the United Communist, which swallowed most of the Communist Labourites and some of the Communists. At last accounts the Communists and the United Communists were each attempting to prove the other counter-revolutionary by reference to the latest documents from international revolutionary headquarters.

It is hazardous in the extreme for an outsider to speak of the differences in doctrine among these groups. It is probably fair to say, however, that the Communist parties are chiefly distinguished by their total lack of interest in anything save a complete revolution, because this is the only kind they believe possible. They reject as “compromises” partial gains of all sorts; piecemeal progress by evolutionary methods rather offends them than otherwise. Their eyes are turned always toward some future revolutionary situation; for this their organization and their theories are being prepared. This being the case, the validity of their position will be tested by the event. If, as the milder Socialists believe, economic changes may come gradually by process of growth and smaller shocks, the Communists are likely to remain a nearly functionless and tiny minority, even in the labour movement. If, as the Communists believe, the present order in the normal course of its development is destined to experience a sudden collapse similar to that which occurred in Russia near the end of the war, they will become the true prophets, and their mode of thought and action will presumably have fitted them to assume leadership.

The Farmer-Labour Party is a recent growth far less doctrinaire than either the Socialist or the Communist groups. It has neither prophet nor Bible, but is based rather on the principle of gathering certain categories of people together for political action, trusting that as they become organized they will work out their own programme in relation to the situation, and that that programme will develop as time goes on. The categories to which it appeals are chiefly the industrial workers and the small farmers, who have in general common economic interests as opposed to the large owners of land and capital. It hopes that other elements in the population, realizing that their major interests are much the same as those of the unionists and the farmers, will join forces with them to produce a majority. As an illustration of the operation of such tactics, the Farmer-Labourites point to the success of the Independent Labour Party of Great Britain, first in aiding the foundation of the British Labour Party, and second in building up for that party an increasingly coherent radical programme.

In all these cases, however, not much confidence is placed in the actual political machinery of elections. There is a widespread scepticism about the ability to accomplish industrial changes by the ballot, on account of experience with political corruption, broken election promises, adverse court decisions, and political buncombe in general. These parties are formed as much for the purpose of propagating ideas and creating centres of activity as for mobilizing votes. All radical parties lay great stress on the industrial power of the organized labour movement. This is not to say that they do not recognize the importance of the State in industrial matters. All agree that control of political machinery will in the long run be necessary, if only to prevent it from checking the advance of the people through the courts and police. But they also agree that control of the State is not held and cannot be attained by political machinery alone. The present influence of the proprietors of industry on politics is due, they see, chiefly to economic power, and the workers consequently must not neglect the development of their own economic organization. The Communists are completely hopeless of attaining results through the present election machinery; the Socialists and Farmer-Labourites believe it possible to secure a majority at the polls, which may then execute its will, if the workers are well enough organized for industrial action.

Outwardly the most successful of the radical movements is the least doctrinaire of all. It is unnecessary to repeat the history and achievements of the Nonpartisan League--an attempt on the part of organized farmers to use the machinery of the State in order to gain economic independence from the banking, milling, and packing interests. Other groups of farmers have aimed at a similar result through co-operation, with varying success.

In the industrial labour movement proper there have been numerous radical minorities. The most uncompromising of these, as well as the most characteristically American, was the Industrial Workers of the World, who aspired to build up a consciously revolutionary body to rival the unions composing the American Federation of Labour. This decline is due not so much to suppression as to their previous failure to enlist the continued support of the industrial workers themselves. Like the Communists, the I.W.W. predicated their success on a revolutionary situation, and lacking that situation they could not build a labour movement on an abstract idea. Over long periods not enough people are moved by a philosophy of salvation to give staying power to such an organization in the daily struggle with the employers. Other similar attempts, such as the W.I.I.U., and the more recent One Big Union, have encountered similar difficulties. They grow rapidly in crises, but fail under the strain of continued performance.

The failure of American radicals to build up a strong movement is in part due, of course, to the natural difficulties of the social and economic situation, but it is also due to the mental traits which usually accompany remoteness from reality. This is illustrated in the history of the I.W.W., if we accept William Z. Foster’s acute analysis. The regular trade-union movement, slowly evolving towards a goal but half consciously realized, overcoming practical obstacles painfully and clumsily, as such obstacles usually are overcome, was too halting for these impatient radicals. They withdrew, and set up rival, perfectionist unions, founded in uncompromising revolutionary ardour. These organizations were often unable to serve the rank and file in their practical difficulties, and consequently could not supplant the historic labour movement. But they did draw out of that movement many of its most sincere and ardent spirits, thus depriving it of the ferment which was necessary to its growth. The I.W.W., for their part, failing to secure any large grip on reality, regressed into quarrels about theory, suffered divisions of their social personality, and at length--except in the far West--became little more than economic anchorites. As Foster says, “The I.W.W. were absolutely against results.”

Too much of American radicalism has been diverted to the easy emotional satisfaction which is substituted for the arduous process of dealing with reality. We suffer a restriction of the personality, we cry out against the oppressor, we invent slogans and doctrines, we fill our minds with day dreams, with intricate mechanisms of some imaginary revolution. At the same time we withdraw from the actual next step. Here is the trade-union movement, built up painfully for over a century, a great army with many divisions which function every day in the industrial struggle. How many radicals know it in any detail? How many have paid the slightest attention to the technique of its organization, or have devoted any time to a working out of the smaller problems which must be worked out before it can achieve this or that victory? Here are our great industries, our complex systems of exchange. How many radicals really know the technique of even the smallest section of them? Radicals wish to reorganize the industrial system; would they know how to organize a factory?

If radicalism arises from the instinct for economic maturity, then it can find its place in the world only by learning its function, only by expressing its emotion in terms of the actual with which it has to deal. A period of adolescence was to be expected, but to prolong the characteristics of that period is to invite futility. And as a matter of fact American radicalism now exhibits a tendency to establish more contacts with reality. Instead of withdrawing from established unions to start a new and spotless labour movement, radicals are beginning to visualize and to carry out the difficult but possible task of improving the organization of the existing unions, and of charging them with new energy and ideas. Unions which were founded by radicals--such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America--are devoting their efforts not to talking of a future revolution, but to organizing the workers more firmly in the present, to establishing constitutional government in industry through which tangible advances may be made and safeguarded, and to improving the productivity of industry itself. Engineers, encouraged by labour organizations, and in some cases actually paid by them, are investigating the problem of economic waste, and are demonstrating by line upon line and precept upon precept how the chaos of competition, industrial autocracy, and a controlling profit motive are reflected in idle hours, low wages, high prices, and inferior products. The co-operative movement is slowly providing a new and more efficient machinery of distribution, while co-operative banks are building up a reserve of credit for those who wish to experiment with undertakings conducted for other purposes than the profit of the proprietor. Such functional use of the labour movement is more dangerous to the existing disorder than volumes of phrases or a whole battalion of “natural rights.”

Extremists call such activities compromise. They are compromise in the sense that any hypothesis must be changed to fit the facts, but they involve no compromise with scientific truth. The alchemist compromised when he gave up the search for the philosopher’s stone and began to learn from the elements. He surrendered a sterile dogma for a fruitful science. In proportion as radicals learn how to put their emotions to work, in proportion as they devise ways to function in the world in which we live, will they make possible not only unity among themselves, but a rapprochement with other Americans. A man who believes there is no real possibility of change short of complete revolution can unite with a man who has no theory about the matter at all so long as they do not discuss abstract doctrine, but concentrate upon the problem of how to bring about a particular effect at a particular time. The most radical theories, if expressed in terms of concrete situations, will be accepted by those who are wary of generalities, or do not understand them. The theories will be tested in the fact. The operation of such a process may be blocked by those who dogmatically oppose all experiment, but in that case the forces of reason and of nature will be so clearly on the side of the radical that there can be no doubt about his ultimate fruitfulness.

GEORGE SOULE

THE SMALL TOWN

America is a nation of villagers, once remarked George Bernard Shaw in a moment of his most exclusive scorn for what he believed was our crude and naïve susceptibility to the modes and moods, to say nothing of the manners, of the professional patriots during that hectic period when Wilhelm was training to become the woodman of Amerongen. Now Shaw is the oracle of the Occident, and when he speaks there is no docile dog this side of Adelphi Terrace presumptuous enough to bark. At least there should not be; and in any event, neither history nor H. G. Wells records any spirited protest on America’s part to the Shavian accusation. It was allowed to stand invulnerable and irrefutable. Of course, in our hearts we know Shaw is right. We may for the moment be signifying _rus in urbe_, but between you and me and the chief copy-reader of the Marion (Ohio) _Star_, _in urbe_ is a superfluous detail.

Show me a native New Yorker and I will show you something as extinct as a bar-tender. There are no native New Yorkers. All New Yorkers come from small towns and farms. Ask Dad, ask the Sunday editor, ask the census-taker--they know. And what is true of New York is true of Boston and Chicago. The big men, the notable men of the big cities, hail from the small towns, the Springfields, the Jacksons, the Jamestowns, Georgetowns, Charlestowns--yes, and from the Elizabeths and Charlottes--of the nation.

Under the circumstances any back-to-the-land movement in this country seems futile if not ridiculous. The land is still confident and capable of taking care of itself. It needs no aid from the city chaps and asks none. The Freudians are not deceived for a moment over the basis of a return-to-the-farm enterprise. They recognize it for what it is--a sentimental complex superinduced by the nervous hysteria of the city. But even the amazingly small proportion of the population that is not Freudian refuses to become influenced by the cry of the sentimentalists. Because it is keenly, though unpretentiously, aware of the genuinely rural state of its culture and civilization.

The civilization of America is predominantly the civilization of the small town. The few libertarians and cosmopolites who continue to profess to see a broader culture developing along the Atlantic seaboard resent this fact, though they scarcely deny it. They are too intelligent, too widened in vision to deny it. They cannot watch the tremendous growth and power and influence of secret societies, of chambers of commerce, of boosters’ clubs, of the Ford car, of moving pictures, of talking-machines, of evangelists, of nerve tonics, of the _Saturday Evening Post_, of Browning societies, of circuses, of church socials, of parades and pageants of every kind and description, of family reunions, of pioneer picnics, of county fairs, of firemen’s conventions without secretly acknowledging it. And they know, if they have obtained a true perspective of America, that there is no section of this vast political unit that does not possess--and even frequently boast--these unmistakably provincial signs and symbols.

I do not mean to imply that such aspects make America an unfit place in which to live. On the contrary, America’s very possession of them brings colour and rugged picturesqueness, if not a little pathos, to the individual with imagination sufficient to find them. Mr. Dreiser found them and shed a triumphant tear. “Dear, crude America” is to him a sweet and melancholy reality. It is a reality that has been expressed with a good deal of prophecy--and some profit--by the young novelists. Small-town realism with a vengeance, rather than a joy, has been the keynote of their remarkable success during the past year. However, they pulled the pendulum of cultural life too far in one direction. They failed, for the most part, of appreciating the similarity of human nature in city as in country, with the result that their triumph is ephemeral. Already the reaction has set in. There are now going on in the work-rooms of the novelists attempts to immortalize Riverside Drive, Fifth Avenue, Beacon Street, Michigan Boulevard, and Pennsylvania Avenue.

Unless they penetrate into the soul of these avenues, unless they perceive that these avenues are not spiritually different from Main Street, though they may be clothed in the habiliments of metropolitan taste and fancy, they will fail to symbolize correctly America. They will be writing merely for money and controversial space in the literary supplements.

For the soul of these avenues is a soul with an _i_ substituted for _u_. It is the soul of the land. It is a homely, wholesome provincialism, typifying human nature as it is found throughout the United States. We may herd in a large centre of population, assume the superficialities of cosmopolitan culture and genuinely believe ourselves devils of fellows. It takes all the force of a prohibition law to make us realize that we are more sinned against than sinning. Then are we confronted sharply by the fact that the herd is appallingly inefficient and inarticulate in a conflict with isolated individualism.

The prohibition movement originated in farming communities and villages where the evils of alcohol are ridiculously insignificant. No self-respecting or neighbour-respecting villager could afford to be known as a drinking man. His business or his livelihood was at stake. Then why did he foster prohibition? Why did he seek to fasten it upon the city resident who, if he drank, did not lose apparently his own or his neighbour’s respect? Chiefly because of his very isolation. Because he was geographically deprived of the enjoyments which the city man shared. I can well imagine a farmer in the long sweating hours of harvest time or a small town storekeeper forced to currying favour with his friends and neighbours 365 days in a year, resolutely declaring that what he cannot have the man in the city shall not have. The hatching of all kinds of prohibitory plots can be traced to just such apparent injustices of life. Dr. Freud would correctly explain it under the heading of inferiority-complex.

City men have marvelled at the remarkable organization of the reformers. It is not so much organization, however, as it is a national feeling perceived and expressed simultaneously. Cities may conduct the most efficient propaganda against such a feeling, they may assemble their largest voting strength to assail it. All in vain. The country districts roll up the majorities and the cities are left unmistakably high and dry.

So it is with most of the laws and movements of America. The rural sections have but to will them and they become in due time established facts. An idea merely has to take root in the mind of some socially oppressed individual. He talks it over with his friends at lodge meeting or during an informal hour at a board of trade meeting. He receives encouragement. He imparts the idea to his wife, who carries it to her literary club, where it is given further airing. It spreads to the volunteer firemen’s clubrooms, to the grange picnics and the church socials. It is discussed in the pulpits. Finally it reaches the ears of the village and county politicians who, impressed by its appeal to the moral force of the community, decide after hours in the back room of the post-office or the national bank to interest the congressman or assemblyman from their district in its merits as a possible law upon the statute books. The congressman and assemblyman, acutely aware of the side on which their bread is buttered, agree to do “everything within their power” to put the measure through. Having the assistance of other congressmen and assemblymen, most of whom are from rural districts, their tasks assuredly are not difficult.

Before the appearance of the automobile and the movie upon the national horizon, the small town was chiefly characterized by a distinctly rural and often melancholy peacefulness. A gentle air of depression hung over it, destructive of the ambitious spirit of youth and yet, by very reason of its existence, influencing this spirit to seek adventure and livelihood in wider fields. Amusements were few and far between. It was the day of the quilting party, of the Sunday promenade in the cemetery, of buggy-riding, of the ice-cream festival and the spelling bee. The bucolic note was ever present.

Such an environment, while joyous to the small boy, became hopelessly dull and lifeless to the youth of vitality and imagination. Restlessness with it tormented him day and night until it grew into an obsession. Especially did he dislike Sunday, its funereal quiet with stores closed and other possible avenues of excitement and adventure forbidden. He began to cherish dreams of a life strange and teeming in distant cities.