Chapter XXV: The Conservation of the American Home

The American home is rapidly becoming a failure. After countless ages of biological and social evolution, that marvelous process of change and growth which has produced us, we are committing suicide as a nation and as a people. A home without children is not, in a social sense, a home at all. It is only a place in which, and a condition under which, two persons of opposite sex live together more happily and comfortably, perhaps less so, than they could do apart.

The American home, the home in which healthy, intelligent and characterful children are bred and reared, both for their own sakes and the nation's service--this home is the veritable rockbottom of our national well-being. Let the home fail, and all our wealth and material achievement is naught but poverty and trash.

The millions of homes in which there are no children, or only one child, the birth of which was perhaps wholly unintentional, are so many millions of tombs in which the nation's hope and future lie buried. The millions of young unmarried Americans, between the ages of twenty-one and forty years, whatever be the cause of their unnatural and unsocial condition, are just so many millions of Americans who have rejected life. All of the unmarried, all of the married who do not reproduce themselves, are a crushing accusation against our national intelligence, our national morals, and our national social policy. What do these figures not mean in terms of disappointment and despair, of social purpose unfulfilled, of negative sorrow and anguish in the heart of the individual, of souls unfed in terms of every higher realization of life?

A people which can calmly behold a large per cent of its marriageable young people homeless and childless has confessed itself to be a broken and dissolving remnant among the nations. We, lords of the richest land in all the four quarters of the world, voluntarily place our national head upon the block and beckon to the executioner, axe in hand, to make haste.

Visualize this old-time American home--on the hillside, among the trees. For many generations it has stood foursquare against every blast of winter, every ugly aspect of circumstance. From its wide portals have gone forth a myriad of the young and gay, the hopeful and the brave. Its offspring peopled all our West. Its victories in the wilderness, through a hundred years, have no counterpart in all the history of humanity. The history of America has been the history of the American home--of what that home has accomplished for the citizens that were born and reared under its sheltering roof.

Open the door! Wait! You shall see none enter here. Only a going out--a funeral procession. A death march sounds forth, a mighty people, the hope of the world--such a people is borne to the grave. Where there is no laughter of children, there Death is King. And those that see make jest and frolic.

In the even scales of biological law and of mathematical calculation, our people are being weighed in the balance and found wanting. We Americans, all that we have been, and all that we are, are being borne to the grave in execution of the law. We have been tried and condemned by a just Judge.

It is a most dangerous error to undertake to build a national life on the individual as a unit. "God has set the solitary in families," said Moses, as he led his people through the vast wilderness unto the promised land. We may destroy all else, but leave the home and the family, and yet all the elements and works that make the nation can be once again regained and rebuilt. We may possess all else, wealth and power, all the arts and all the knowing, thriving schools and majestic temples--but if the home crumbles and decays, we perish with it utterly.

Oh! The deep, deep and terrible tragedy of our Nordic race in America! We have been decimated by fratricidal war. Our flesh and blood have been corrupted by industrialism. Now, however, we go to our destruction simply because we do not care to live. We go as blindly as a species of animals whose conditions of life have been completely upset by new forces with which they do not know how to deal. Sheep and swine, nay, the wild beasts of the field, could not act with such utter carelessness and immorality as we. All that we have done will perish with us. Other nations have lived and left record of their labors in a lofty literature or a resplendent art. The glory of the temples they have builded keeps their memory green centuries after their very language is forgotten. The people of the age of Pericles will live on in their work, to beautify and glorify humanity for twice ten thousand years. But we Americans are perishing miserably to leave no record of high value, because our greater work has been bound up in our very selves. We have all lived and labored together as free men. We have proven to a faithless world that the humblest toiler could wield the mightiest and most glittering scepter of power. We have made good the proud boast of a triumphant democracy. All that we have been, as a beckoning star among the nations, all that we have meant to the world of hope in the common man, is doomed to perish with us.

All I seek to do in these chapters is to bring the mind and heart of my country to this place. Here, in the old-fashioned American home, we shall do battle. Here we shall fight the last fight, to win or to lose. If we are to have a greater and better America, we must begin by breeding better Americans in larger numbers. There is no other way. The man who says our young men and women, in general, do not desire homes and children, says a falsehood. We neither desire nor expect fifteen children in the home. What we do insist upon, in recreating all the conditions about that home, is two, three, four, and sometimes, in exceptional cases, five or six children. For our country as a whole, during this century, we crave but a small increase in native born population in every decade--perhaps ten or twelve per cent. We would reject, by taking forethought and preventing marriage, the children of the criminal, the children of the imbecile and the insane, the children of those who are accursed with incurable diseases or incurable indolence. We would remould all that needs remoulding in order to receive into the hearts and the homes of our country the children of the healthy and the industrious, the honest and intelligent, the high-minded and the sensitive.

Give our young people of America but half a chance! Let them have their own country in which to test out the labor of their hands and the love of their hearts! Let them again lay upon themselves the first duty of the supreme law of nature! They can and will preserve to this continent every higher value, every article of faith left to their keeping. Remove from their environment a competition that is unfair and killing. Give them bread and not a stone for their toil. Give them solid assurance and not a gnawing insecurity of livelihood, and they will give to their country a future through the sons and daughters of their love.

To admit that there is a growing number of our young women who reject child-bearing as a burden is merely to re-emphasize the crying need of a socializing education. It is the work of those who know and who care, to teach those who are ignorant and careless of duty. We teach our young people that they must help prepare themselves for citizenship and self-support. Citizenship for our American young women includes the essential duty of motherhood, and for our young men the duty of the creation and support of a family. A cornerstone of our ethical teaching should be the preparation of the minds of the young for home-building and parenthood. Every able-bodied man, or woman, who deigns to eat, should perform some sort of useful work. Similarly every normal young man and woman who accepts life should be gladly willing to create life. Around and above these homes and these children we must place the protection of every means furnished by applied science. To educate them and to fit them for useful work and public service, we must apply the first fruits of our nation's wealth. To offer to these young citizens, upon maturity, full opportunity for fruitful labor and self expression, we must be ready to reject much error that is ancient, and accept much truth that is new and sometimes startling.

America consists of and exists in the home. The home is America. To lose the fight here is to lose all. To win at this point is to win for ourselves national salvation, and for the world our share in its ultimate redemption.

A FINAL WORD

Let me confess that I alone am responsible for the reorganization of the Ku Klux Klan. No one suggested it to me. No one helped me in the formulation of its new task, nor in the working out of any of its basic principles or methods. So it may not be entirely uninteresting to the reader for me to close this statement with a brief narrative of the first growth of this concept in my own mind.

To begin with, my childhood fancies were much laid hold of by the stories I heard of the original Ku Klux Klan. These stories were told me in my own home. Sometimes in Negro cabins the old darkies would play upon my boyish mind with marvelous tales of the hosts of white-robed horsemen--the souls of the departed soldiers of the great war--who were used to ride up and down the countryside. Sometimes I would imagine these cavalcades passing swiftly and silently, like a white cloud, across the starry heavens. Later, when a more accurate book of knowledge of this strange epoch of American history was opened up to me, I eagerly devoured all the reading I could find pertaining to the subject. Yet the impressions made upon me by the legendary account never entirely lost their force. So, as I grew to manhood, my mind, perhaps overburdened while yet too young, with a sense of the responsibilities of citizenship, made the service of my country a deeply set conviction. I never went very joyously either to my studies or to my active duties. To my generation, as it grew up in the defeated, broken and impoverished South, the problems of life presented heavy tasks rather than stirring issues. We had to make all our beginnings as a people over again. Our mood was much like that of the Puritan founders of New England when they set themselves to struggle against the stern climate and the thin and unfruitful soil of their section. A statement of Robert E. Lee to a member of his staff the day before he surrendered at Appomattox has been more than once my sheet-anchor. "Captain," said our great leader, "I should gladly lay down my life, but it is now my duty to live. The way for me has been hard, very hard--no pathway of duty is easy--only those who have encountered obstacles, faced difficulties, and endured extreme hardships, know how much easier it would be for me to die, than to live in response to the call of duty."

We people of the South lived on. We have tried to do our duty. We have even tried to forget the past, though often it may not seem so to our fellow citizens.

In 1898 it was my privilege to enlist in the glorious service of our reunited country. Of course every youth who then donned the uniform imagined that he would proceed at once to Cuba and do battle for the liberation of that country from the tyranny of the Spanish monarchy. My first evening in camp, under the old flag of the Union, was an experience never to be forgotten. I believe that all of the thousand young men in the Alabama regiment with which I served felt their hearts moved by something of the same great emotion. We were to be under the command of Nelson Miles and Fitzhugh Lee, of Wesley Merritt and Joe Wheeler.

The heat and noise of the day gave way to the soft, warm flush of the evening. Such an evening! Under the clearest of skies and the brightest of stars I stood on guard at midnight. My mind seemed to be so passive, so sensitive, so subjected to the thoughts that rushed out of the universe, from the past and the mysterious present and the unknowable future, to take possession of my soul. I saw my country ennobled by the great task of liberty and of love to which she had set herself on that occasion. United at last! United in a common cause! Reforming a Union which had always existed in the hearts of all, underneath those superficial forces which so long troubled us and kept us apart. And now a great fountain of joy and of pride, pressing from the heart, filled every artery almost to bursting. On that night I first understood my country and saw, emblazoned in the sky, the part to which the Lord of Hosts had called her.

To a young man whose heart is truly enlisted in the issue of a great war, the mighty thrill of the soul is the ultimate experience of life. So is the banner of his country raised aloft. So are his arms consecrated by the deepest impulses of the spirit. Lyric poetry has often exhausted its meters and its music at the altar of the lesser loves. On that strangest of nights I knew that here was a love that makes the heart of youth deny all that comes from self and lift burning eyes to the stars.

Oh my people--soldiers--workers--pioneers--adventurers--saviors--in the four quarters of the earth! Be you--your deeds--your vision,--all in all--imperishable! The world listens to hear the sound of the song you sing upon the march. Somehow I feel and know that you shall live--gloriously--throughout the ages.