Chapter XIII: Part 13

As he grew older and a measure of independence came to him he fled, provided there was no business established by a patient and hard-working ancestry which might lure him into remaining home. And even that did not always attract him. He was compelled to go by his very nature--a nature that desired a change from the pall of confining and circumscribed realism, the masks of respectability everywhere about him, the ridiculous display of caste, that saw a rainbow of fulfilled ideals over the hills, that demanded, in a word, romance.

He, who did not feel this urge, departed because of lack of business opportunities. Occasionally he returned disillusioned and exhausted by the city and eager to re-establish himself in a line of work which promised spiritual contentment. But more often he stayed away, struggling with the crowd in the city, returning home only for short vacation periods for rest and reminiscence, to see his people and renew boyhood friendships. At such times he was likely to be impressed by the seeming prosperity of those boys he left behind, of the apparent enjoyment they found in the narrow environment. The thought may have occurred to him that the life of the small town had undergone a marked change, that it had adopted awkward, self-conscious urban airs.

Suddenly he realizes that the automobile and the movie and to some extent the topical magazine are mainly responsible for the contrast. The motor-car has given the small town man an ever-increasing contact with the city, with life at formerly inaccessible resorts, with the country at large. And the movie and the magazine have brought him news and pictures of the outside world. He has patronized them and grown wiser.

The basis, the underlying motive, of all cultural life in the small town is social. The intellectual never enters. It may try to get in but the doors are usually barred. There is practically no demand for the so-called intellectual magazines. Therefore, they are seldom placed on sale. But few daily papers outside of a radius of fifty miles are read. Plays which have exclusive appeal to the imagination or the intellect are presented to rows of empty seats. On the other hand, dramas teeming with primitive emotions and the familiar devices of hokum attract large audiences, provided the producing managers care to abide by the present excessive transportation rates. There is but little interest manifested in great world movements, such as the economic upheaval in Eastern Europe. Normalcy is, indeed, the watchword so far as intellectual development is concerned.

It is in the social atmosphere that the American village has its real _raison d’être_. Therein do we meet the characteristics that have stamped themselves indelibly upon American life. The thousand and one secret societies that flourish here have particularly fertile soil in the small towns. Count all the loyal legionaries of all the chapters of all the secret societies between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and you have a job suited only to the most irrepressible statistician. And the most loyal live in the small towns and villages of the United States. The choice is not limited. There are societies enough to suit all kinds of personalities and purses.

The Knights of Pythias, the Knights of the Maccabees, the Odd Fellows, the Elks, the Eagles, the Loyal Order of the Moose, the Modern Woodmen, the Masons with their elaborate subdivisions of Shriners and Knights Templar--all count their membership throughout the nation. And the women, jealous of their husbands’ loyalty to various and complex forms of hocus-pocus, have organized auxiliary societies which, while not maintaining the secrecy that veils the fraternal orders, nevertheless build up a pretentious mystery intriguing to the male mind.

No town is a self-respecting town unless it can boast half a dozen of these societies. They are the fabric of which the basis of the social structure is built. They are the very essence of America. They dot the national landscape. Every city, as if to prove conclusively its provincial nature, displays one or more temples devoted to the rituals of fraternal organization.

Recently the South has revived the order of the Ku Klux Klan which flourished after the Civil War as a means of improving upon the orderly course of the law in dealing with the Negro race. Here is the apotheosis of the secret society, with its magnificent concealment of identity in a unique form of dress, its pretensions to 100 per cent. Americanism, its blatant proclamations of perpetuating the great and glorious traditions of the republic. The Negro has already organized to offset this propaganda. He knew that unless he could show secret orders of imposing strength he had no right even to the questionable heritage of habitation here. He would be outside the spirit of the times. He owed it to America, to “dear, crude America,” to organize lodges and secret societies; and he has done so.

Undoubtedly the secret society plays a large part in the greatness of America. It has made the American class-conscious. It has made him recognize his own importance, his own right to the national distinction of good-fellowship. It provides him temporary surcease from domestic and business details, though there are countless numbers of men who join these orders to make business details, so far as they affect them, more significant.

The amazing prevalence of conventions in America is an outgrowth of the secret societies. Life to many 100 per cent. Americans is just one lodge convention after another. Held in a different city each year, a distinction that is industriously competed for, the convention has become a fixed fact in American cultural life. Here is the one occasion of the year when the serious diddle-daddle is laid aside, and refuge and freedom are sought in such amusements as the convention city can offer. The secret order convention has inspired the assembly of all kinds and descriptions of conventions--trade conventions, religious conventions, educational conventions--until there is no city in the land boasting a first-class hotel that does not at one time or another during the year house delegates with elaborate insignia and badges.

Probably the first parade held in America was that of a class-conscious fraternal organization eager to display its high standard of membership as well as a unique resplendence in elaborate regalia. The parade has continued an integral part of American life ever since. There is something of the vigour, the gusto and crudeness of America in a parade. It has come to represent life here in all its curious phases.

The parade had become an event of colourful significance when P. T. Barnum organized the “greatest show on earth.” He decided to glorify it--in his dictionary “to glorify” really meant “to commercialize”--and once and for all time associate it chiefly with the circus. He succeeded, mainly because the residents of the villages were receptive to the idea. They saw a bizarre relief from the monotony of existence. The farmers rolled down from the hills in their lumber-wagons and found an inarticulate joy, storekeepers closed shop and experienced a tumultuous freedom from the petty bickerings of trade, men and women renewed their youth, children were suddenly thrown into a very ecstasy of delight. Thus, the circus parade became part and parcel of American civilization.

And the precious and unique spirit created by the circus parade has been carried on in innumerable representations. To-day America shelters parades of every conceivable enterprise. Firemen have a day in every small town of the land on which they joyously pull flower-laden hose-carts for the entertainment of their fellow-citizens. Bearing such labels as Alerts, Rescues and Champion Hook and Ladder No. 1, they march proudly down Main Street--and the world goes hang. The volunteer firemen’s organization is an institution peculiar to the American small town,--an institution, too, that is not without class-consciousness. The rough-and-ready, comparatively illiterate young men form one group. The clerks, men engaged in the professions and social favourites compose another. This class is usually endowed by the wealthiest resident of the town, and its gratitude is expressed usually by naming the organization for the local Crœsus.

The Elks parade, the Knights of Pythias parade, veterans of various wars parade, the Shriners and Knights Templar parade, prohibitionists parade, anti-prohibitionists parade, politicians parade, women parade, babies parade--everybody parades in America. Indeed, America can be divided into two classes, those who parade and those who watch the parade. The parade is indelibly identified with the small town. It is also inalienably associated with the large city, composed, as it is, of small-town men.

There has lately taken place in the villages throughout the country a new movement that has civic pride as its basis. It is the formation of boosters’ clubs. Everybody is boosting his home town, at least publicly, though in the privacy of the front porch he may be justly depressed by its narrowness of opportunity, its subservience to social snobbery, its intellectual aridity. “Come to Our Town. Free Sites Furnished for Factories,” read the signs along the railroad tracks. “Boost Our Town” shout banners stretched across Main Street.

Is there not something vitally poignant in such a proud provincialism? Is not America endeavouring to lift itself up by its boot-straps, to make life more comfortable and interesting? The groping, though crude, is commendable. It is badly directed because there is no inspiration back of it, because its organizers are only remotely aware how to make life here more interesting. However, there is the effort and it is welcome.

Perhaps, when the towns--and for that matter the cities--realize that artistic sensitiveness is necessary to achieve comfort and interest we shall have boosters who are as enthusiastic on the front porch as in the board of trade meeting. When will our towns take artistic advantage of their river-fronts? The place for the most beautiful walk and drive and park presents usually unsightly piers, factories and sheds. Railroad tracks are often laid in the very heart of the town. For many years the leading hotels in practically all of our towns and cities were built in close proximity to the railroad station. In seeking to save a traveller time and convenience hotel proprietors subjected him to the bodily and mental discomforts that are related to the vicinity of a railroad station. Of late there is a marked tendency to erect hotels in quiet residential streets away from the noise and confusion of shops and railroad yards.

The billboard menace, while diminishing, is still imposing. It is to the everlasting shame of the towns and cities that in an era of prohibitions no legislative effort has been made to stop the evil of desecrating our finest streets with advertising signs. Such commercial greed is inconceivable to the foreign visitor. It is one of his first impressions, though he charitably takes refuge in public in attributing it to the high tension of our existence.

While the first symptoms of artistic appreciation are beginning to be faintly discerned upon the American horizon, the old and familiar phases of social life in the country are still being observed. The picnic of first settlers, the family reunion, the church supper, the sewing circle, the Browning society--all have national expression. The introduction of such modern industrial devices as the automobile has not affected them in the least. It can truly be asserted that the flivver has even added to their popularity. It has brought people of the country districts into closer contact than ever before. It has given a new prestige to the picnics and the reunions.

What offers more rustic charm and simplicity than a family reunion? Practically every family in the farming districts that claims an ancestral residence in this country of more than fifty years holds one annually. It is attended by the great and the near-great from the cities, by the unaffected relatives back home. Babies jostle great-grandparents. Large and perspiring women bake for days the cakes and pies to be consumed. The men of the house are foolishly helping in making the rooms and the front lawn ready. At last the reunion is at hand--a sentimental debauch, a grand gorging. Everybody present feels the poignancy of age. But while the heart throbs the stomach is working overtime. The law of compensation is satisfied. “A good time was had by all” finds another expression in the weekly paper, and the reunion becomes a memory.

At pioneer picnics one finds the family reunion on a larger scale. The whole township and county has for the time become related. It is the day of days, a sentimental tournament with handshaking as the most popular pastime. Organized in the rugged primitiveness of the early part of the 19th century by men who were first to settle in the vicinity, the pioneer picnic has been perpetuated, until to-day it is linked inalterably with America’s development. It has weathered the passing of the nation from an agricultural to a great industrial commonwealth. It has stood the gaff of time. And so it goes on for ever, a tradition of the small town and the farming community. While it has been divested almost entirely of its original purpose, it serves to bring the politicians in touch with the “peepul.” Grandiloquent promises are made for a day from the rostrum by a battalion of “Honourables”--and forgotten both by the “Honourables” and the public intent upon dancing and walking aimlessly about the grounds. The politicians smile as they continue to preserve their heroic pose, and the “peepul,” satisfied that all is well with the world, turn to various gambling devices that operate under the hypocritical eye of the sheriff and to the strange dances that have crept up from the jungle, for it is a day filled with the eternal spirit of youth. There is ingenuous appeal in the fair samples of the yokelry present. There is a quiet force beneath the bovine expressions of the boys. The soul of America--an America glad to be alive--is being wonderfully and pathetically manifested. No shams, no superficialities, no self-conscious sophistication are met. Merely the sturdy quality of the true American civilization, picturesque and haunting in its primitiveness.

The county fair belongs in the same classification as the first-settler picnic. It is the annual relaxation by farmers and merchants from the tedious tasks of seeing and talking to the same people day after day. It offers them a measure of equality with the people in the city with their excursion boats, their baseball games, their park sports. And they make the most of their opportunity. They come to see and to be seen, to risk a few dollars on a horse race, to admire the free exhibitions in front of the side-shows, to watch with wide eyes the acrobatic stunts before the grandstand; to hear the “Poet and the Peasant” overture by the band, proud and serious in a stand of its own.

Three or four days given to such pleasures naturally bestow a fine sense of illusion upon the visitors. They begin to believe that life has been specially ordered for them. They see through a glass lightly. They care not a whiff about the crowded excitements of the city. They have something infinitely more enjoyable than a professional baseball game or an excursion ride down the river. They have days of endless variety, of new adventures, of new thoughts. They, too, know that America cannot go wrong so long as they continue to find illusion. And they are correct. They may not suspect that American culture is crude. They do know, however, that it is dear. They should worry.

Against such a background have the flavour and essence of American life been compounded. Their influence has extended in all directions, in all walks of industry. They have left their impress upon the character of the country, upon the mob and the individual. Sentimental attachment to the old ties, to boyhood ideals and traditions remains potent though a little concealed by the mask, be it affected or real, of sophistication. It is the voice of a new land, of a vigorous and curious nationalism that is being exerted. There obviously cannot be among such a naturally healthy people a supercilious contempt for sentiment. We may laugh a little haughtily at the amazing susceptibility of folks to the extravagant eloquence of itinerant evangelists. We may look on an “old home week” with a touch of urban disdain. We may listen to the band concert on a Saturday night in the Court House Square with a studied indifference. We may assume an attractive weariness in watching the promenaders on Main Street visit one ice-cream emporium after another. But deep down in our hearts is a feeling of invincible pride in the charming homeliness, the youthful vitality, the fine simplicity, yes, and the sweeping pathos of these aspects of small-town civilization.

LOUIS RAYMOND REID

HISTORY

“Nescire autem quid antea quam natus sis
acciderit id est semper puerum esse.”

_Cicero._

“History is bunk.”

_Henry Ford_

The burghers of Holland, being (like the Chinese) inclined towards a certain conservatism of both manners and habits, continued the tradition of the “front parlour”--the so-called “good-room”--well into the 20th century. Every farmer had his “front parlour” filled with stuffy air, stuffy furniture, and an engraving of the Eiffel Tower facing the lithographic representation of a lady in mid-seas clinging desperately to a somewhat ramshackle granite cross.

But the custom was not restricted to the bucolic districts. His late Majesty, William III (whose funeral was the most useful event of his long life), had been married to an estimable lady of Victorian proclivities, who loved a “tidy” and an “antimacassar” better than life itself. An aristocracy, recruited from the descendants of East India Directors and West India sugar planters, followed the Royal Example. They owned modest homes which the more imaginative Latin would have called “Palazzi.” Most of the ground floor was taken up by an immense “front parlour.” For the greater part of the year it was kept under lock and key while the family clustered around the oil lamp of the “back parlour” where they lived in the happy cacophony of young daughters practising Czerny and young sons trying to master the intricacies of “paideuo--paideueis--paideuei.”

As for the “front parlour” (which will form the main part of my text), it was opened once or twice a twelve-month for high family functions. A week beforehand, the cleaning woman (who received six cents per hour in those blessed Neanderthal days) would arrive with many mops and many brooms. The covers would be removed from the antique furniture, the frames of the pictures would be duly scrubbed. The carpets were submitted to a process which resembled indoor ploughing and for fully half an hour each afternoon the windows were opened to the extent of three or four inches.

Then came the day of the reception--the birthday party of the grandfather--the betrothal of the young daughter. All the relatives were there in their best silks and satins. The guests were there in ditto. There was light and there was music. There was enough food and drink to keep an entire Chinese province from starving. Yet the party was a failure. The old family portraits--excellent pieces by Rembrandt or Terborch--looked down upon grandchildren whom they did not know. The grandchildren, on the other hand, were quite uncomfortable in the presence of this past glory. Sometimes, when the guests had expressed a sincere admiration of these works of art, they hired a hungry Ph.D. to write a critical essay upon their collection for the benefit of the “Studio” or the “Connoisseur.” Then they ordered a hundred copies, which they sent to their friends that they might admire (and perhaps envy) the ancient lineage of their neighbours. Thereafter, darkness and denim covers and oblivion.

The history of our great Republic suffers from a fate similar to that of these heirlooms. It lives in the “front parlour” of the national consciousness. It is brought out upon a few grand occasions when it merely adds to the general discomfort of the assisting multitude. For the rest of the time it lies forgotten in the half dark of those Washington cellars which for lack of National Archives serve as a receptacle for the written record of our past.

Our popular estimate of history and the value of a general historical background was defined a few years ago by Henry Ford. Mr. Ford, having made a dozen flivvers go where none went before and having gained untold wealth out of the motor-car industry, had been appointed an ex-officio and highly esteemed member of our national Council of Wise Men. His opinion was eagerly asked upon such subjects as child-raising, irrigation, the future of the human race, and the plausibility of the Einstein theory. During a now memorable trial the subject of history came up for discussion, and Mr. Ford (if we are to believe the newspaper accounts) delivered himself of the heartfelt sentiment that “history is bunk.” A grateful country sang Amen!

When asked to elucidate this regrettable expression of dislike, the average citizen will fall back upon reminiscences of his early childhood and in terms both contrite and unflattering he will thereupon describe the hours of misery which he has spent reciting “dreary facts about useless kings,” winding up with a wholesale denunciation of American history as something dull beyond words.

We cannot say much in favour of late Stuarts, Romanoffs, and Wasa’s, but we confess to a sincere affection for the history of these United States. It is true there are few women in it and no little children. This, to us, seems an advantage. “Famous women of history” usually meant “infamous trouble” for their much perturbed contemporaries. As for the ever-popular children motif, the little princes of the Tower would have given a great deal had they been allowed to whitewash part of Tom Sawyer’s famous fence, instead of waiting in silken splendour for Uncle Richard’s murder squad.

No, the trouble is not with the history of this land of endless plains and a limitless sky. The difficulty lies with the reader. He is the victim of an unfortunate circumstance. The Muses did not reach these shores in the first-class cabin of the _Aquitania_. They were almost held up at Ellis Island and deported because they did not have the necessary fifty dollars. They were allowed to sneak in after they had given a solemn promise that they would try to become self-supporting and would turn their white hands to something useful.

Clio, our revered mistress, has tried hard to live up to this vow. But she simply is not that sort of woman. An excellent counsellor, the most charming and trusted of friends, she has absolutely no gift for the practical sides of life. She was forced to open a little gift-shop where she sold flags and bunting and pictures of Pocahontas and Paul Revere. The venture was not a success. A few people took pity on her and tried to help. She was asked to recite poetry at patriotic gatherings and do selections from the “Founding Fathers.” She did not like this, being a person of shy and unassuming character. And so she is back in the little shop. When last I saw her, she was trying to learn the Russian alphabet. That is always a dangerous sign.

And now, lest we continue to jumble our metaphors, let us state the case with no more prejudice than is strictly necessary.

The earliest settlers of this country brought their history with them. Little Snorri, son of Gudrid and Thorfinn Karlsefni, playing amidst the vines of his father’s Labradorian garden, undoubtedly listened to the selfsame sagas that were being told at the court of good King Olaf Tryggvason in distant Norway. The children of San Domingo shared the glories of the Cid with the boys and girls who visited the schools of Moukkadir’s ancient capital. And the long-suffering infants of the early New England villages merely finished an historical education that had begun at Scrooby and had been continued at No. 21 of the _Kloksteeg_ in Leyden.

During the 17th century, the greater part of the Atlantic coast became English. The Dutch and the French, the Spanish and Swedish traditions disappeared. The history of the British Kingdom became the universal history of the territory situated between the thirtieth and the fiftieth degree of latitude. Even the American Revolution was a quarrel between two conflicting versions of certain identical principles of history. Lord North and George Washington had learned their lessons from the same text-book. His Lordship, of course, never cut the pages that told of Runymede, and George undoubtedly covered the printed sheets which told of the fate of rebels with strange geometrical figures. But the historical inheritance of the men who fought on the left bank of the Fish Kill and those who surrendered on the right shore was a common one, and Burgoyne and Gates might have spent a profitable evening sharing a bottle of rum and complimenting each other upon the glorious deeds of their respective but identical ancestors.

But during the ’twenties and ’thirties of the 19th century, the men of the “old régime”--the founder and fighters of the young Republic--descended into the grave and they took their traditions, their hopes, and their beliefs with them. The curtain rose upon a new time and upon a new people. The acquisition of the Northwestern Territory in 1787 and the purchase of Napoleon’s American real-estate in the year 1803 had changed a little commonwealth of struggling Colonies into a vast empire of endless plains and unlimited forests. It was necessary to populate this new land. The history of the Coast came to an end. The history of the Frontier began. English traditions rarely crossed the Alleghanies. The long struggle for representative government took on a new aspect in a land where no king had ever set foot and where man was sovereign by the good right of his own energy.

It is true that the first fifty years of the last century witnessed the arrival upon these shores of millions of men and women from Europe who had enjoyed a grammar school education in the land of their birth. But dukes do not emigrate. Those sturdy fellows who risked the terrors and horrors of the Atlantic in the leaky tubs of the early forties came to the country of their future that they might forget the nightmare of the past. That nightmare included the biography of Might which was then the main feature of the European text-book. They threw it overboard as soon as they were well outside of the mouth of the Elbe or the Mersey. Settled upon the farms of Michigan and Wisconsin, they sometimes taught their children the songs of the old Fatherland but its history never. After two generations, this migration--the greatest of all “treks” since the 4th century--came to an end. Roads had been made, canals had been dug, railroads had been constructed, forests had been turned into pastures, the Indian was gone, the buffalo was gone, free land was gone, cities had been built, and the scene had been made ready for the final apotheosis of all human accomplishment--civilization.

The schoolmaster has ever followed in the wake of the full dinner-pail. He now made his appearance and began to teach. Considering the circumstances he did remarkably well. But he too worked under a disadvantage. He was obliged to go to New England for his learning and for his text-books. And the historian of the Boston school, while industrious and patient, was not entirely a fair witness. The recollection of British red-coats drilling on the Common was still fresh in the minds of many good citizens. The wickedness of George III was more than a myth to those good men and women whose own fathers had watched Major Pitcairn as he marched forth to arrest Adams and Hancock. They sincerely hated their former rulers, while they could not deny their love for the old mother country. Hence there arose a conflict of grave consequence. With one hand the New England chronicler twisted the tail of the British lion. With the other he fed the creature little bits of sugar.

Again the scene changed. The little red school-house had marched across the plains. It had followed the pioneer through the passes of the Rocky Mountains. It had reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The time of hacking and building and frying with lard came to a definite end. The little red school-house gave way for the academy of learning. College and University arose wherever a thousand people happened to be together. History became a part of the curriculum. The schoolmaster, jack of all learned trades and master of many practical pursuits, became extinct. The professional historian made his appearance. And thereby hangs a sad tale which takes us to the barren banks of the Spree.

Ever since the Thirty Years War, Germany had been the battlefield of Europe. The ambitions of the Napoleon who was four feet tall and smooth shaven and the prospective ambitions of the Napoleon who was five feet tall and who waxed his moustachios, had given and were actually giving that country very little rest. The intelligentsia of the defunct Holy Roman Empire saw but a single road which could lead to salvation. The old German State must be re-established and the kings of Prussia must become heirs to the traditions of Charlemagne. To prove this point it was necessary that the obedient subjects of half a hundred little potentates be filled with certain definite historical notions about the glorious past of Heinrich the Fat and Konrad the Lean. The patient historical camels of the Teutonic universities were driven into the heart of _Historia Deserta_ and brought back those stupendous bricks of learning out of which the rulers of the land could build their monuments to the glorious memory of the Ancestors.

Whatever their faults and however misguided the ambition of these faithful beasts of burden, they knew how to work. The whole world looked on with admiration. Here, at last, in this country of scientific precision, history had been elevated to the rank of a “_Wissenschaft_.” Carrying high their banners, “For God, for Country, _und wie es eigentlich dagewesen_,” all good historians went upon a crusade to save the Holy Land of the Past from the Ignorance of the Present.

That was in the blessed days when a first-class passage to Hamburg and Bremen cost forty-six dollars and seventy-five cents. Henry Adams and John Lothrop Motley were among the first of the pilgrims. They drank a good deal of beer, listened to many excellent concerts, and assisted, “privatissime and gratis,” at the colloquia docta of many highly learned _Geheimräte_, and departed before they had suffered serious damage. Others did not fare as well. Three--four--five years they spent in the company of the Carolingians and the Hohenstaufens. After they had soaked themselves sufficiently in Ploetz and Bernheim to survive the _Examen Rigorosum_ of the _Hochgelehrte Facultät_, they returned to their native shore to spread the gospel of true _Wissenschaftlichkeit_.

There was nothing typically American in this. It happened to the students of every country of the globe.

Of course, in making this point, we feel that we expose ourselves to the accusation of a slight exaggeration. “How now,” the industrious reader exclaims, “would you advocate a return to the uncritical days of the Middle Ages?” To which we answer, “By no means.” But history, like cooking or fiddling, is primarily an art. It embellishes life. It broadens our tolerance. It makes us patient of bores and fools. It is without the slightest utilitarian value. A handbook of chemistry or higher mathematics has a right to be dull. A history, never. And the professional product of the Teutonic school resembled those later-day divines who tried to console the dying by a recital of the Hebrew verb _abhar_.

This system of preaching the gospel of the past filled the pulpits but it emptied the pews. The congregation went elsewhere for its historical enlightenment. Those who were seriously interested turned to the works of a few laymen (hardware manufacturers, diplomats, coal-dealers, engineers) who devoted their leisure hours to the writing of history, or imported the necessary intellectual pabulum from abroad. Others took to the movies and since those temples of democratic delight do not open before the hour of noon, they spent the early morning perusing the endless volumes of reminiscences, memoirs, intimate biographies, and recollections which flood the land with the energy of an intellectual _cloaca maxima_.

But all this, let us state it once more, did not matter very much. When all is peace and happiness--when the hospitals are empty of patients--when the weather is fine and people are dying at the usual rate--it matters little whether the world at large takes a deep interest in the work of the Board of Health. The public knows that somewhere, somehow, someway, there exists a Board of Health composed of highly trained medical experts. They also appreciate from past experiences that these watchful gentlemen “know their job” and that no ordinary microbe can hope to move from Warsaw to Chicago without prompt interference on the part of the delousing squad. But when an epidemic threatens the safety of the community, then the public hastens to the nearest telephone booth--calls up the Health Commissioners and follows their instructions with implicit faith. It demands that these public servants shall spend the days of undisturbed health to prepare for the hour of sickness when there is no time for meditation and experiment.

The public at large had a right to expect a similar service from its historians. But unfortunately, when the crisis came, the scientific historical machine collapsed completely.

In Germany, the home country of the system of _historische Wissenschaftlichkeit_, the historian became the barker outside the Hohenzollern main tent, shouting himself hoarse for the benefit of half-hearted fellow citizens and hostile neutrals, extolling the ancestral Teutonic virtues until the whole world turned away in disgust. In France, they arrange those things better. Even the most unhealthy mess of nationalistic scraps can be turned into a palatable dish by a competent cook of the Parisian school. In England, the historian turned propagandist, and for three years, the surprised citizens of Copenhagen, Bern, and Madrid found their mail boxes cluttered with mysterious bundles of state documents duly stamped, beautifully illustrated, and presented (as the enclosed card showed) with the compliments of Professor So-and-so of Such-and-such College, Oxford, England. In Russia, a far-seeing government had taken its measures many years before. Those historians who had refused to be used as _cheval de bataille_ for the glory of the house of Romanoff, were either botanising along the banks of the Lena or had long since found a refuge in the universities of Sofia and Geneva. I do not know what happened in Japan, but I have a suspicion that it was the same thing, the entire world over.

The historian turned apologist. He was as useful as a doctor who would show a partiality to the native streptococcus on the grounds of loyalty to the land of his birth.

What happened on this side of the ocean after the first three years of “peace without victory” had given place to “force to the uttermost” is too well known to demand repetition. Long before the first American destroyer reached Plymouth, the staunch old vessel of history had been _spurlos versenkt_ in the _mare clausum_ of the Western hemisphere. Text-books were recalled, rehashed, and revamped to suit the needs of the hour. Long and most deservedly forgotten treatises were called back to life and with the help of publishers’ blurbs and reviews by members of the self-appointed guardians of national righteousness they were sent forth to preach the gospel of domestic virtue. Strange encyclopædias of current information were concocted by volunteers from eager faculties. The public mind was a blank. For a hundred years the little children had learned to dislike history and grown-ups had revaluated this indifference into actual hate. This situation had been created to maintain on high the principles of scientific historical investigation. Let popular interest perish as long as the Truth stand firm. But in the hour of need, the guardians of the Truth turned gendarmes, the doors of Clio’s temple were closed, and the public was invited to watch the continuation of the performance in the next moving-picture house. At Versailles the curtain went down upon the ghastly performance.

After the first outbreak of applause the enthusiasm waned. Who had been responsible for this terrible tragedy? The supposed authors were branded as enemies of mankind. Nations tottered and ancient Empires crumbled to dust and were hastily carried to the nearest historical scrapheap. The ambitious monarch, who for thirty years had masqueraded as a second Charlemagne, made his exit amidst properties borrowed from the late King Louis Philippe. The gay young leader of the Death Head Hussars developed into the amateur bicycle-repairer of the island of Wieringen. International reputations retailed at a price which could only be expressed in Soviet rubles and Polish marks and no takers. The saviour of the world became the invalid of the White House. But not a word was said about those inconspicuous authors of very conspicuous historical works who had been the henchmen of the _Oberste_ and _Unterste Kriegsherren_. They went back to the archives to prepare the necessary post-mortem statements. These are now being published at a price which fortunately keeps them well out of reach of the former soldiers.

In certain dramas and comedies of an older day it was customary to interrupt the action while the Chorus of moralising Villagers reviewed what had gone before and drew the necessary conclusions. It is time for the “goat-singers” to make their appearance.

“Are you, O Author,” so they speak, “quite fair when you pronounce these bitter words? Are we not all human--too human? Is it reasonable to demand of our historians that they shall possess such qualities of detached judgment as have not been seen on this earth since the last of the Mighty Gods departed from High Olympus? Has a historian no heart? Do you expect him to stand by and discuss the virtues of vague political questions, when all the world is doing its bit--while his children are risking their lives for the safety of the common land?”

And when we are approached in this way, we find it difficult to answer “no.” For we too are an animated compound of prejudice and unreasonable preferences and even more unreasoning dislikes, and we do not like to assume the rôle of both judge and jury.

The evidence, however, gives us no chance to decide otherwise. What was done in the heat of battle--what was done under the stress of great and sincere emotions--what was written in the agony of a thousand fears--all that will be forgotten within a few years. But enough will remain to convince our grandchildren that the historian was among those most guilty of creating that “state of mind” without which modern warfare would be an impossibility.

Here the music of the flutes grows silent. The Chorus steps back and the main action of our little play continues. The time is “the present” and the problem is “the future.” The children who are now in the second grade will be called upon to bear the burden of a very long period of reconstruction. America, their home, has been compared to an exceedingly powerful and influential woman who is not very popular but who must not be offended on account of her eminent social position. The folk who live along our international Main Street are not very well disposed towards a neighbour who holds all the mortgages and lives in the only house that has managed to survive the recent catastrophe. It will not be an easy thing to maintain the peace in the neurasthenic community of the great post-war period. It has been suggested that the Ten Commandments, when rightly applied, may help us through the coming difficulties. We beg to suggest that a thorough knowledge of the past will prove to be quite as useful as the Decalogue. We do not make this statement hastily. Furthermore, we qualify it by the observation that both History and the Decalogue will be only two of a great many other remedies that will have to be applied if the world is to be set free from its present nightmare of poison gas and high-velocity shells. But we insist that History be included. And we do so upon the statement of a learned and famous colleague who passed through a most disastrous war and yet managed to keep a cool head. We mean Thucydides. In his foreword to the History of the Peloponnesian War he wrote: “The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things, must resemble, if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.”

When we measure out achievements in the light of this ancient Greek ideal, we have accomplished very little indeed. An enormous amount of work has been done and much of it is excellent. The great wilderness of the past has been explored with diligent care and the material lies, carefully classified, in those literary museums which we call libraries. But the public refuses to go in. No one has ever been able to convince the man in the street that time employed upon historical reading is not merely time wasted. He carries with him certain hazy notions about a few names, Cæsar and Joan of Arc (since the war) and Magna Charta and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He remembers that Paul Revere took a ride, but whither and for what purpose he neither knows nor cares to investigate. The historical tie which binds him to the past and which alone can make him understand his own position in relation to the future, is non-existent. Upon special occasions the multitude is given the benefit of a grand historical pyrotechnic display, paid for by the local Chamber of Commerce, and a few disjointed facts flash by amidst the fine roar of rockets and the blaring of a brass band. But this sort of historical evangelising has as little value as the slapstick vespers which delight the congregation of Billy Sunday’s circus tent.

We live in an age of patent medicines. The short-cut to success is the modern _pons asinorum_ which leads to happiness. And remedies which are “guaranteed to cure” are advertised down the highways and byways of our economic and social world. But no such cure exists for the sad neglect of an historical background. History can never be detached from life. It will continue to reflect the current tendencies of our modern world until that happy day when we shall discontinue the pursuit of a non-essential greatness and devote our energies towards the acquisition of those qualities of the spirit without which human existence (at its best) resembles the proverbial dog-kennel.

For the coming of that day we must be as patient as Nature.

HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON

SEX

“The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.”

In one of the popular plays of last season, a melodrama toned up with snatches of satire and farce, the wife was portrayed as a beaten dog heeling her master after he has crushed her down across the table the better to rowel off her nose. Not until the would-be mutilator was finally disposed of by an untrammelled Mexican did the woman feel free to go to her lover, and even then she took little or no satisfaction in the venture. As for the lover, he had to be robbed of his pistol by the husband and shot at, and then--the husband out of the way--threatened by the bandit with the loss of the woman, before he felt free to take her. The two New Englanders were made happy in spite of themselves--and in accordance with the traditions or conventions of the audience.

To leave a husband for a lover is in theory un-American, unless the husband gives a legal ground for divorce and the divorce is secured. In several States cruelty is a legal ground, and so the conjugal fidelity of the stage-heroine was perhaps overdrawn. But the feeling that she was presumed to share with the audience--that the initiative towards freedom in love should not come from her--is a characteristic trait of American morality. If your husband is unrestrainedly a brute or a villain, you may leave him, in fact it behooves you to leave him, but if he is merely a bore, or perhaps a man you like well enough as a friend, but only as a friend, you must stay on with him in an intimacy where boredom readily becomes aversion and mere friendliness, disgust. The fact that you do not love a person is no reason at all, in American opinion, for not living as if you did.

This opinion or attitude is explicit in American divorce law. In none of the States is divorce granted either by mutual consent or at the desire, the overt desire, of either person. In fact collusion, as mutual consent is called, is accounted a reason against granting divorce, and desire for divorce on the part of one remains ineffectual until the other has been forced into entertaining it. He or she must be given due ground. Disinclination to intimacy is not of itself due ground. You must express disinclination in a way so disagreeable that he or she will want to get rid of you. The law sets a premium on being hateful, declares indeed that in this case it is an indispensable condition to not being miserable.

The grotesqueness, from either a social or psychological point of view, would be too obvious to emphasize, if the implications of this attitude towards divorce were not so significant of American attitudes at large towards sex--attitudes of repression or deception. Of deception or camouflage towards divorce there is one other conspicuous point I should like to note. “Strictness of divorce” is commonly argued to be protection of marriage for the sake of children, since brittle marriage is destructive of the family life. It is safe to say that from no contemporary discussion of divorce will this argument be omitted; and it is equally safe to say that the rejoinder that divorce laws should therefore discriminate between parents and non-parents will, by the opponents of divorce, pass unheeded. That this distinction should be so persistently ignored is accountable only, it seems to me, on the ground of emotional self-deception. What else but a covert emotional attitude could make tenable the irrationality, and what else is that attitude but that joy in mating is of negligible value, that sex emotion, if not a necessary evil, is at any rate a negligible good, deserving merely of what surplus of attention may be available from the real business of life? Indifference towards sex emotion is masked by concern for offspring.

In France, we may note, this confusion between parenthood and mating does not exist. The parental relation in both law and custom is highly regulated, much more regulated than among English-speaking peoples, but it is unlikely that it would be argued in France that mating and parenthood were inseparable concepts. Unlikely, because the French attitude towards sex differs so radically from the Anglo-Saxon.

To the French, as to many of the Continental peoples of Europe, sexual interest is normally to be kept stimulated, neither covered over nor suppressed. And in this case stimulation is seen to depend largely upon the factor of interrelation. Sex-facts are to be related to other facts of life, not rigidly or _a priori_, as in the American view that mating is inseparable from parenthood, but fluently and realistically, as life itself moves and finds expression. And sex-facts in European opinion are to be interrelated in a philosophy of sex. Failure to make these interrelations, together with the attitude of suppression, seem to me to be the outstanding aspects of the characteristically American attitude towards sex.

There is no need in this post-Freudian day of dwelling upon the effects of suppression of sex instinct or impulse. Suppression leads, we are told, either to sublimation, in which case it is diversion, rather than suppression, or it leads to perversion or disease. Unfortunately sex-pathology in the United States has been given little or no study, statistically. We have no statistical data of health or disease in relation to the expression or suppression of sex instinct, and no data on the extent or the effects of homosexuality or of the direction of the sex impulses towards self. Opinion therefore becomes merely a matter of personal observation and conclusion, observation of individuals or small groups. My own conclusion or guess in regard to perversion in this country is that part of the commonly observed spirit of isolation or antagonism between the sexes, and part of the spirit of competition between individuals, are associated with homosexual or masturbatory tendencies which get expressed in varying degrees according to varying circumstances. More particularly the lack of warmth in personal intercourse which makes alike for American bad manners and, in the more intellectual circles, for cheerlessness and aridity is due, I think, to failure of one kind or another in sex relations. I mean cultural failure, not merely individual failure.

May not some such theory of sex failure account also for that herd sense which is so familiar a part of Americanism, and which is not incompatible with the type of self-seeking or pseudo-individualism of which American individualism appears to be an expression? It is a tenable hypothesis that sexually isolated individuals become dependent upon the group for stimulus, whether of emotion or will, whereas persons in normal sex relations, although they may contribute to the group or co-operate with it, remain comparatively independent of it, finding stimulus in sex and its sublimations.

If this theory is valid, we may expect to find a comparatively large number of sex failures in those circles which are characterized by what Everett Dean Martin has recently called crowd behaviour, reform circles intolerant of other mindedness and obsessed by belief in the paramountcy of their own dogma.

“_Leur printemps sans jeunesse exige des folies,
Leur sang brûlant leur dicte des propos amers,
L’émeute est un remède à la mélancolie,
Et nous aurions la paix si leurs yeux étaient clairs,
Ou leur femme jolie._”

Were a set of tests for sex failure or sex fulfilment applied to the more outstanding propagandists of this country, likewise, of course, for comparative purposes, to an adequate number of non-propagandists, the results might be of considerable significance. I recommend the undertaking to the National Research Council in co-operation with some organization for social hygiene.

Meanwhile in what measure propagandism of various sorts may be a perversion of sex or a sublimation remains speculative; and in applying theory one should be thoroughly aware that from the day of Sappho and before to the day of Elizabeth Blackwell and after, even to the Russian Revolution, sex failure of one kind or another, the kind considered at the time most despicable, has commonly been imputed to persons or groups disapproved of on other grounds or reprobated. Some sublimation of sex in the United States there must be, of course, not only, in propaganda movements, but in other expressions of American culture, in American art and letters and science, in philanthropy, in politics, finance, and business. By and large, however, in all these cultural expressions does one see any conspicuous measure of sex sublimation? Is not the concern practical rather than devotional, a matter of getting rather than giving, of self-advancement or family support rather than of interest in ideas and their forms or in the values of taste or of faith?

Interest in impersonal subjects in general is not an American trait. Personal concrete terms are the terms commonly used. Americans, as we say, are not given to abstract thought or philosophy. They are interested in facts as facts, not as related to other facts. How expect of Americans, therefore, that kind of curiosity about sex which leads to a philosophy of sex? Sex curiosity in American life does not lead past curiosity about isolated facts, and that means that it leads not to philosophy but to gossip and pruriency. Not long ago I was talking with a woman about a common acquaintance to whom I referred as singularly free through sophistication and circumstance to please any man she liked. “What do you mean? Have you heard any scandal about her?” snapped out my companion, not at all interested in the general reflection, but avid of information about illicit affairs.