January 14, 1931
In any case, American optimism has taken a serious beating; the national morale
is weak. The energy and faith for a fresh start seem now not to be forthcoming:
a dreadful apathy, un-sureness and discouragement is felt to have fallen upon
us. It is as if we were afraid to go on with what we were doing before or as if
we no longer had the heart for it. I want to suggest that the present
depression may be nothing less than one of the turning-points in our history,
our first real crisis since the Civil War. The Americans at the present time seem to be experiencing not merely an
economic breakdown but a distinct psychological change.
From the time
of the Civil War on, all our enthusiasm and creative energy went into the
development of our tremendous resources. This development had two aspects: one
was the exploration of the continent and the engineering feats involved in
reclaiming it; the other the amassing of tremendous fortunes. Today the
discoveries have all been made: we no longer look towards the West, as the
Europeans once looked to America, as to a world of untold treasures and wonders
– and the excitement of mastering new seacoasts, new rivers, forests, prairies
and mountains seems now completely spent. This was already true at the time of
the European War (when, incidentally, we were running into a business
depression), but the war gave us a new objective- new discoveries, the
discovery of Europe; new heroic stunts of engineering, the transportation of
our army to France. Since the end of the war, however, we have, as a people,
had nothing to carry us along except the momentum of money-making. We have been
trying still to find in it the exhilaration of the wildness and size of the continent
– the breaking it in to the harness of the railroads, the stumbling upon sudden
riches. But during these last years our hope and our faith have all been put
behind the speed of mass production, behind stupendous campaigns of
advertising, behind cyclones of salesmanship. Our buoyancy had become hysterical.
And the reaction from a hysterical exhilaration is a slump into despondency and
inertia.
What we have lost is, it may be, not merely our way in the economic labyrinth
but our conviction of the value of what we are doing. Money-making and the kind
of advantages which a money-making society provides for money to buy are not
enough to satisfy humanity – neither is a system like ours in which everyone is
out for himself and the devil take the hindmost, with no common purpose and
little common culture to give life stability and sense. Our idolization of our
aviators – our extravagant excitement over Lindbergh and our romantic
admiration (now beginning to cool off) for Byrd – has been like a last
desperate burst of American idealism, a last impulse to dissociate our national
soul from a precipitate progress that was taking us from automobiles and
straight through electric refrigerators to Tom Thumb golf-courses.
The old American ideal and legend of the poor boy who gets to be a millionaire,
which gradually came to take the place of the poor boy who got to be President,
has today lost almost all its glamor. Not only do people not hope to be Hoover
– they do not even hope so often as they did to be Carnegie or Henry Ford. The
romance of the poor boy was he romance of the old democratic chance, of the
career open to the talents – but the realities of a millionaire society have
turned out to be the monstrosities of capitalism: the children of the
successful poor boy get lazy and sick on their father’s money, and the poor
boys who afterwards arrive on the scene discover that – with the crippling of
the grain market, the elimination of the factory worker by the development of
the machine and the decimation of the white-collar class, even though sometimes
apparently well on their way to getting in on the big money themselves, by
enormous business mergers – the career is no longer open to the extent that had
originally been hoped. What began as the libertarian adventure of
eighteenth-century middle-class democracy seems to have ended in the cul de sac
of an antiquated economic system.. And capitalist-minded as the Americans have
now become, they seem to feel they are in a cul de sac. It is as if they did
not dare to go on.
In spite of the fundamental absurdity of so much of
what we have lately been doing, we are considerably better educated and
intelligent than we once were, and since the war we have been closer to Europe.
The Buicks and Cadillacs, the bad gin and Scotch, the radio concerts
interrupted by advertising talks, the golf and bridge of the suburban
household, which the bond salesman can get for his money, can hardly compensate
him for the daily work of a kind in which it is utterly impossible to imagine a
normal human being taking satisfaction or pride – and the bond salesman is the
type of the whole urban office class. The brokers and bankers who are shooting
themselves and jumping out of windows have been disheartened by the
precariousness of their professions –but would they be killing themselves if
they loved it? Who today, in fact, in the United States can really love our
meaningless life, where the manufacturer raises the workers’ wages only in order
to create a demand for the gadgets which for better or worse he happens to have
an interest in selling them, while agriculture goes hang, and science and art
are left to be exploited by the commercial laboratories, the market for commercial
art illustration and the New York publishers’ racket, or to be fed in a
haphazard way by a dole from the fortunes of rich men who have been
conscience-stricken or simply overpowered at finding themselves at the end of
their careers with enough money on their hands to buy out an old-fashioned
empire?
We liberal have professed not to love it, yet we have tried to believe in it,
none the less. In a country where money changes hands so often and social
position fluctuates so easily, where the minds of the working class have seemed
largely to have been absorbed into the psychology of the middle class, we have
been unable to believe in the Marxist doctrine that capitalism must inevitably
give rise to class warfare , and we have perhaps never taken sufficiently
seriously Karl Marx’s prediction that for many years to come the stupid
automatic acquisitive instinct of humanity would still be so far ahead of its
capacity for intelligent and disinterested behavior that the system of private
enterprise would never be able to run itself with foresight enough to avoid a
wreck. It used to be pointed out that in America our support of this system was
indestructible, since the stock market made it possible for anybody who had
been able to save a little money to become a capitalist himself, with interests
presumably identical with those of J. P. Morgan and Charlie Schwab. But can we
expect that to be true in the future? – and even if people persist in aspiring
to be stock-market capitalists, should they be encouraged in this or even left
to their luck? Should they not rather be shown that their interests are incompatible
with capitalism itself?
Yet the truth is that we liberals and progressives have been betting on
capitalism – and that most of our heroes and allies, heterodox professors like Dewey
and Beard, survivors of the old republican tradition like Wilson and Justice
Holmes, able and well-educated labor organizers like the officers of the
Amalgamated, intelligent journalists like Lippmann and Chase, though all
sincere and outspoken democrats, have been betting on capitalism, too. And now,
in the abyss of starvation and bankruptcy into which the country has fallen,
with no sign of any political leadership which will be able to pull us out, our
liberalism seems to have little to offer beyond a discrete recommendation of
public ownership of water power and certain other public utilities, a cordial
feeling that labor ought to organize in a non-social-revolutionary way and a
protest, invariably ineffective, against a few of the more obviously atrocious
of the jailing, beatings-up and murders with which the industrialists have been
trying to keep the working class docile.
Doesn’t this program today seem rather inadequate? We liberals have always
insisted on the desirability of a planned society – the phrase ‘social control’
has been our blessed Mesopotamian word. If this means anything, does it not mean
socialism? And should we not do well to
make this plain? It may be said at the present time it is utopian in America to
talk about socialism: but with the kind of administration that the country has
largely been getting, do not all our progressive proposals, however reasonable
or modest, seem utopian? It is not obvious, as was lately made plain by an
article in this magazine, that a government like our present one is incapable
of acting in good faith in even the simple matter of preserving the water power
which is supposed to be operated for the general benefit from being exploited
by private profiteers? Our society has finally produced in its specialized
professional politicians one of the most useless and obnoxious groups which has
perhaps ever disgraced human history- a group that seems unique among governing
classes in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated and incompetent all at
once. We know that we are not even able to depend on them today to protect us
against the frankly disreputable race of blackmailers, thieves and assassins
who dominate our municipal life. We know that we cannot even complain that the
racketeers are breaking the laws which are supposed to be guaranteed by the
government, because the government differs little from the racketeers. How can
we expect them, then, to check the relatively respectable scoundrels who merely
rob us of public utilities by more or less legalistic means?
Yet, as I say, it may be true, with the present breakdown, we have come to the
end of something, and that we are ready to start on a different tack. If we
look back at the depressions of the last fifty years, we see that through every
one of them there always remained something for which the Americans could still
legitimately feel ambition or enthusiasm, some to challenge the national spirit
and appeal to the national imagination. After 1885, there we still the West and
the consolidation of the railroads; after the prolonged depression of the
nineties, the final consolidation of great industries such as United States
Steel as well as the crusade led by Theodore Roosevelt against these great
corporations in the interests of the dangerously increasing number of those who
were being injured by the process of consolidation, and the robustious
Rooseveltian imperialism; after the slump of the early years of the European
War, our entrance into the war, and after the slump following the war, the period
of the glorification of the automobile and the airplane. Today the further
consolidation of the big business units is ruining more people than in
Roosevelt’s time, and there is no sign of a Roosevelt or a Wilson to revive our
political vision and to persuade the people who are out of luck that something
is about to be done for them. It may be that the whole money-making and
–spending psychology has definitely played itself out, and that Americans would
be willing, for the first time now, to put their traditional idealism and their
genius for organization behind a radial social experiment. The future is as
blank in the United States today as the situation is desperate: the President
seems so inhibited by dread of encouraging subversive forces and by faith in
the capacity of the capitalist system to right itself and survive that it is impossible
for him to act, and when he tries to, he is deadlocked by Congress; nor have the
industrialists or the financiers come forwards with any constructive proposal.
But this very blindness of the outlook may mean that we are looking in the
wrong direction and that help may be coming from some other quarter. In the
meantime, one gets the impression that
the people who don’t deal in, ideas are doing more thinking at the present time
than the professional ideologues.
The minds of the general public have, furthermore,
been more affected by the example of Soviet Russia than is easily grasped by
anyone who has been in the habit of assuming that it is only the radical or
liberal who understands what Russia is up to, and that the ordinary American
citizen is bound to be stupidly prejudiced against the Soviet system. During
the NEP period in Russia, the capitalist powers were relieved to feel that the
Russians had been forced to recognize the impracticability of Communism and
were quietly returning to laissez faire. But with the inauguration of the
Five-Year Plan to eliminate capitalism business in Russia, the aspect of things
changed. The apparent success of the plan has had its effects on all classes in
all the rest of the world – on the Americans, surely, not last. In the course
of this winter of our capitalist quandary, the Soviets have been emerging from
the back pages of the New York newspapers and are now given much and prominent
space- even to interviews with Stalin’s mother; and behind what one reads on the
subject in even the reactionary papers, one feels as much admiration as
resentment. After all, the great Communist project is distinguished by almost
all the features that Americans have been taught to glorify –the extreme
efficiency and economy combined with the ideal of a herculean program- like a
Liberty Loan drive – to be put over by concerted action to the tune of
impassioned boosting. The Russians, furthermore, on their own side, have been
studying American methods: they have imported a thousand American engineers and
put them at the head of enormous enterprises with practically a free hand, and
one would not be at all surprised to hear that Mr. Edward I. Bernays had been
in Moscow at the time of the recent trial. We have already, in spite of the
Treasury regulation, been doing a good deal of trading with Russia, and an
important New York Bank was at one time on the point of advancing to the
Soviets the loan that has been advocated by this magazine.
The Communists in the United States assume that, by their very nature, neither
our government nor our business is capable of learning anything from or of
associating itself with the Soviets. They believe that a war against Russia is
inevitable. They believe, moreover that they themselves constitute a trained
compact minority which, at the moment when American capitalism shall have
finally broken down completely and been left helpless in its ignorance and
anarchic selfishness, will be able to step in and man the works. To liberals,
this idea has always sounded absurd, but who will say that it is entirely
fantastic today when the machine is so badly in need of repairs, and one can
see no political group in any position of power that has either a sensible plan
or even good intentions? I believe that if the American radicals and
progressives who repudiate the Marxist dogma and the strategy of the Communist
Party still hope to accomplish anything valuable, they must take Communism away
from the Communists, and take it without ambiguities, asserting that their
ultimate goal is the ownership by the government of the means of production. If we want to prove the Communists wrong, if
we want to demonstrate that the virtue has gone out of American democracy , if
we want to confute the Marxist cynicism implied by ‘ economic laws’ the
catastrophic outcome of which is, after all, predicted only on an assumption of
the incurable swinishness and inertia of human nature – if we seriously want to
do this, an American opposition must not be afraid to dynamite the old
conceptions and shibboleths* and to substitute new ones as shocking as
necessary. Who knows but they may seem less shocking to the ordinary suffering
public than to us shibboleth experts ourselves?
When John Dos Passos proposed last summer that what was really needed in the
United States was a publicity expert like Ivy Lee to familiarize the public
with the idea of Communism and induce people at least to remain neutral towards
Communist agitation instead of clapping all the Communists in jail, the
suggestion, to some, sounded comic. Yet Dos Passos at once had a letter from a
publicity man in San Francisco, who said that the same idea had recently occurred
to him and that he would like nothing better than a chance to carry it out.
There are some signs that the liberals are having ideas as well as the
publicity men: Stuart Chase has said lately that the past year may represent ‘the
end of an epoch’ and has offered a set of suggestions for rescuing the economic
structure, and John Dewey has just proposed to Senator Norris** that he lead a
new political party. The extreme illiberalism of the post-Wilsonian period has
had the effect of discouraging liberals. We have gone on complaining and recommending,
but with a vigor that has tended to diminish in proportion as we came to be conscious
that people were not listening to us. Who knows but, if we spoke out now with
confidence and boldness, we might find our public at last?
* a
belief or custom that is not now considered as important and correct as it was
in the past. They still cling to many of the old shibboleths of education.
** George Norris of Nebraska https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/George_Norris.htm
