Introducing the American Spirit Part 15

It is amusing to find that you Americans, and you are the most American of them all--you Americans who have invented cash registers and time clocks, those symbols of unfaith in humanity, are so full of faith in your relation to big, national and international problems.

Your optimism may, after all, be due to your ignorance, coupled with the fact that you are living in a land vast and isolated, which has not quite exhausted its resources and opportunities. The most materialistic people on earth in your relations.h.i.+p to each other, you leap into remarkable idealism in the sphere of politics and diplomacy. If it is true that "G.o.d takes care of children and fools," then G.o.d is taking wonderfully good care of you Americans, who seem to me to be both.

In our country we would put a man of Mr. Bryan's type in charge of an orphan asylum, and feel that the children would be safe with him at least till their twelfth year; and yet I know that he has done vigorous fighting, and I shall give him a chapter in my book about America, which as you know I intend to write and have already begun.

It was quite a change of atmosphere when I went from the Department of State to the White House. The President's secretary seems to me a man of large calibre, kind, yet firm. A man to like and yet to fear; just the kind of person a great man needs as a buffer against his friends, and as a guard against his enemies. The atmosphere of the White House is dignified, yet not cold; democratic, yet reserved; you feel that it is a place of power.

Above everything else you have done for me I want to thank you for making it possible for me to meet President Wilson. He is not at all the type of man I expected to find. There is nothing pedantic about him and I do not know a man in any of our universities like him. He is not as easy to a.n.a.lyze as Mr. Bryan, he is by far the greater, more complex and stronger nature. He has the firmness which rulers should possess, and may be too unyielding when once he has made up his mind to anything.

He knows more than Mr. Bryan but is not as dogmatic, not nearly as friendly, and yet I came nearer to that which I sought in him, and I think I understood him better. He let me do all the talking, but asked all manner of questions; yet he told me more that way than Mr. Bryan, who did all the talking.

If President Wilson is a politician, he is a new kind which I have never met before. I think he has made many mistakes, which of course is natural. There is only one of your presidents who never made mistakes, and that was President Roosevelt. He made blunders, which he had the pugnacity and the sheer physical courage to turn into political capital, and then blundered again.

President Wilson was in the midst of the Mexican muddle when I saw him, yet he seemed to me very well poised, and bearing his many burdens, not like a martyr or a saint, but as a really strong man ought to bear them.

Of course you do not believe that I took your eulogies of America "_fur baare Muenze_" (at their face value). There are two Americas and you are living in but one of them. Your America lies in the high alt.i.tudes of Lake Mohonk, Hull House, and Grinnell College. The other America which you tried to hide from me I saw, just because you tried to hide it. It is sordid, base, selfish, and above all strong; but that you do not seem to know.

You have _modified_ my view of America, but you have not _changed_ it.

You are still a big experiment as a nation, and I am not sure that it will be a successful one. You have nothing to teach us in government, business or education. Just one thing I envy you--your faith in your unfinished country and in yourself as a force in its making.

As you know, I do not share your faith; especially do I not believe that one individual or many individuals can change the course of empires.

You think yourself citizen, king and priest; but you are merely an atom, a conscious atom of course, and in that and that alone, in that you are conscious, and know yourself a part of the whole and believe yourself an effective part of it, lies happiness. I enjoyed hearing you talk about the American Spirit; you talked about the soul of a country as if you had seen it and felt it and loved it.

My dear friend, you do not know your own soul, nor the stuff out of which it is made, and yet in your American conceit you talk about the soul of a country. It was an interesting psychological study to watch you, and it gave me much amus.e.m.e.nt as well as something to think about.

I enjoyed you most of all in your own little town, your college and your hospitable, beautiful home. I feared you would burst from pride and complacency as you interpreted the "American Spirit" from that little place; a speck, and not even a well-defined speck, on the map of your country.

You, a world traveller, have at last become a really narrow provincial, I should say a very happy one, as provincials always are. You wanted me to see your country through the June atmosphere of your Commencement; a democratic, peaceful, rose-laden America. I saw it through the smoke and grime of Chicago, the crowded tenements of New York, the injustice of your courts and the corruption of your politics.

Yet I am glad I saw _your_ America, and I want to thank you for your ardent endeavor to show it to me as you want it to be, and not as it is.

My wife sends her thanks and greetings. She received more benefit out of her visit than I. I have had to promise to remodel the house, and put in another bathroom which is to be between our bedrooms. The new bathtub must be porcelain and we are to have an instantaneous heater. She still talks a good deal of the "_gute_ cornflecks" and "grep frut" which we both enjoyed so much. Above all she remembers the courtesy of the men, and if the servant did not place her chair for her at table, I fear I should now have to do it.

America certainly is a Paradise for women, but it is "_Die Hoelle_" for men.

Remember that when you and any of your family come to Berlin you are to be our guests. I trust you will come soon, for conditions over here look dubious, and the war, "_der grosse Krieg_," may come before we know it.

_Herzliche Gruesse von Haus zu Haus._ _Auf Wiedersehen._

XV

_The Challenge of the American Spirit_

I am sure the Herr Director will not object if I have the last word; for while he was with me that privilege was seldom mine and obtained only by dint of strategy.

Since his departure, the great war which he prophesied has moved over Europe and hides every bit of fair and peaceful sky like a storm-cloud; its thunder and destructive lightning fill the air, leaving scarcely a place safe and undisturbed.

Not a soul is unafraid, not a heart is without pain and sorrow, and the Herr Director himself, although past middle age, has volunteered to serve in the trenches, slippery from oozing blood and foul from the spattered brains of men. The "fiddling, twiddling diplomats, the haggling, calculating merchants of Babylon, the sleek lords with their plumes and spurs" have had their way, and the poor, blind, ignorant millions, made mad by hate, do their brutal bidding.

We, on this safer side, who as yet have not loosed the dogs of war, have calculated the loss to Europe in the fratricidal slaughter of its most virile men, in the loss of its arts and trades, in the wreck and ruin to houses and homes and in the age-long poverty which awaits. Much counting has been done as to what we shall make out of this sure bankruptcy that is to come to the nations which are our compet.i.tors for the world's trade, and what glory shall be ours when New York, and not London shall be the new Babylon, with power to make the "Epha small and the Shekel great."

With the incalculable loss to the European nations there has come to some of them a gain in national unity upon which under no circ.u.mstances we may count.

It has been with no small sense of pride that I have demonstrated to the Herr Director and to others the fact that, in spite of our youth as a nation, and the varied national, linguistic and religious rootage of our population even in the Colonial period, we have grown to be one people. Even the constant inflow of new and more varied human material has not weakened us but indeed the sense of national unity has grown stronger. I have watched with joy the processes by which this alien element was becoming one with us, the fading away of animosities and inherited prejudices, and the making of a new people out of the world's conglomerate.

The war has brought about a r.e.t.a.r.dation of this process, and we shall have great cause for grat.i.tude if no permanent damage is done to our nation's spirit, a loss for which no possible gain in any direction could compensate. The term "Hyphenated American," which has now come into use, if it indicates anything more than the place of a man's national or racial origin, and the very natural sympathies arising therefrom, is an insult to the man to whom it is applied, and a confession of divided allegiance, if voluntarily a.s.sumed.

It may be interesting to note that it was His Majesty, the Emperor of Germany, who repudiated the hyphen when a German-American delegation called on him on the occasion of some royal anniversary.

When the delegation was introduced in this hyphenated manner, he said: "Germans I know, Americans I know, but German-Americans I do not know."

Although the hyphen has always existed, it has a.s.sumed new meaning in these troubled days and is applied as a term of opprobrium, largely to Americans of German birth; people who have always been loyal to the country of their adoption, and, I think, are no less loyal now.

If there has been wavering in their devotion, if the process of yielding themselves to the ideals and interests of this country has been arrested, they are not altogether to blame, and we ourselves are not altogether blameless.

It was thoroughly in harmony with the American Spirit that our sympathies should go out to brave little Belgium, and turn from the ruthless conqueror who was much nearer to us culturally and in greater harmony with us spiritually. It was also natural for the German people in this country to challenge the evident bias of the press, and the resultant prejudices arising in the minds of their friends and neighbors. Being German they knew what a German soldier is capable of doing, and of what atrocities he is guiltless; although in the attempt to defend their people they in turn became as unfair as we, condoning every act of the Germans and besmirching their enemies.

How far this bias can carry one is ill.u.s.trated by the German pastor in a neighboring town, one of the gentlest souls I know, who, when told of the destruction of the _Lusitania_, said: "Thanks be to G.o.d, let the good work go on." He will not have to live very long to repent of this.

To match him I may quote a most lovable Quaker lady nearly ninety years of age, who, with a violence in striking contrast to the Quaker character, expressed as her dearest wish that she might be permitted to kill the Emperor of Germany, and I am almost sure she was not alone in that pious desire, even among the members of her family.

The German press and the German pulpit have fanned this reawakened Germanic spirit, not always from lofty motives, and many an editor and pastor have found this antagonism a source of revenue and a hope of perpetuating their influence.

If the American press both in its news and editorial columns has been painful reading to any one who loves fair play, it did not help him to turn to the German press, whose utterances were made more distressing by the fact that not infrequently they contained expressions bordering on treason. Had their editors lived in Germany and spoken of the Emperor in the same words which they applied to their President, their terms of imprisonment, if combined, would reach into eternity.

Even after the war the attempt will be made to keep alive this antagonism, and if possible to widen the breach. It will be a serious challenge to our national spirit, for I doubt that we can maintain a vital unity unless it represents one country, one people, and one language.

I know of no way in which to meet this danger effectively; but I do know that it is not through reprisals or punishments. Perhaps it is best to hope that at the close of the war we shall all recover our sanity.

Certain it is that the American people have in the Germans in this country too valuable and powerful an element to alienate, and the German people who have made this country their home have too great a sense of the value of it and its inst.i.tutions, to them and their children, to be willing to jeopardize the American Spirit, because of that which must be but a pa.s.sing phase in the history of our poor, misguided, human race.

Besides the threatened break in unity, the American Spirit is being challenged by a call to arms, not merely to avert any momentary, threatened danger, but to be permanently safeguarded, prepared against its predatory neighbors all around the globe. Whether those who join in this call know it or not, or wish it or not, it means militarism. When just such arguments were used for Germany's preparedness, when that gospel was being preached with all possible fervor, one of the wisest Germans said: "_Wehrkraft wird immer Mehrkraft_" ("Defensive power always becomes offensive power"), and I am sure that the average American will say that, in the case of Germany, this has proved true.

If I were arguing for military preparedness, I would not be so insistent upon the building of new fortresses, or the acc.u.mulation of ammunition.

I would insist upon training our children in obedience and reverence. I would give them schoolmasters who know what they teach and who would demand strict application to the curriculum. I would oppose the growing pedagogic idea that the schoolroom is a playground, and that knowledge may be acquired without hard work. I would restore the rod and banish the coddler. I would call in our high school boys from the side lines, from their vicarious athletics and their slavish imitation of college customs, and teach them how to dig trenches and serve cannon, which seem to be the chief need in modern military operations.

It is folly to believe that the _fiasco_ of the Russian armies was due to the lack of ammunition or of sufficient fortresses; it was due to the lack of good schools and to the lack of discipline among its educated cla.s.ses.

With the decay of our pioneer spirit, which is inevitable, with the growth of a leisure cla.s.s, with groups of men and women who know no other way to justify their existence than to play bridge or go to Tango teas; with a large cla.s.s of people less unfortunately situated, who have to work for their living, but from whom the state asks nothing in the way of service except the payment of taxes which are easily evaded, it is a great question how to keep our virility and how to foster a patriotism which may be counted upon in the time of national danger. I am fairly sure that some other way than the militaristic way ought to be found. I am not sure that we shall find it; because only those who seek shall find.

There are some things we may profitably learn from Germany, and one is the maintenance of a state which by its very nature will compel devotion. A state deeply concerned with the well-being of every individual; a state which sees to it that impartial judgment shall be meted out, and that the scales do not tip to those who weight them with gold.

A state which eliminates graft and is able to train an efficient army of public servants is more likely to gain and keep the loyalty of its citizens than one which, although technically free, is shackled by corruption and graft, and which, while giving each man the power to become a king, places the major emphasis upon property rather than upon person. Yes, we have a great deal to do to be properly prepared, besides authorizing congress to spend millions for "reeking tube and iron shard."

What I most fear for the American Spirit is the loss of that which makes it really American and truly Spirit, the loss of its democracy. I am confident that the form of our government is not endangered, and whatever military success may come to monarchic governments we shall not envy them their kings nor put ourselves in bondage to them. If this republic is still an experiment then we shall see the experiment through to the end as a republic.