Part 9

And some from the second hundred:

The ability to sing through--words and music--the national anthem.

The ability courteously and effectively to receive orders from a superior.

The avoidance of vulgarity and profanity in one’s public speaking.

The ability to read silently without lip movements.

The habit of placing the page one is reading so that there will not be shadows upon it.

The ability to refrain from conversation under conditions where it is annoying or disagreeable to others.

The ability to converse intelligently about municipal and district civic matters.

The ability to comprehend accurately the meaning of all common abbreviations and signs one meets with in reading.

The ability, during one’s reading, to distinguish between an author’s central theme and his incidental remarks.

I refrain from any more: all these got enough votes to put them among the first 200 objectives--200 out of 1581. Nor do I choose them unfairly; most of those that I have not listed were quite as bad as those I have. But, you may protest, the good professor handed his cards to a jury of little girls of eight or nine years, or to the inmates of a home for the feeble-minded! He did, in fact, nothing of the kind. His jury was very carefully selected. It consisted of eighty teachers of such professional keenness that they were assembled at the University of Chicago for post-graduate study. Every one of them had been through either a college or a normal school; forty-seven of them held learned degrees; all of them had been engaged professionally in teaching English, some for years. They came from Michigan, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Toronto, Leland Stanford, Chicago and Northwestern Universities; from Oberlin, De Pauw, Goucher, Beloit and Drake Colleges; from a dozen lesser seminaries of the higher learning. They represented, not the lowest level of teachers of English in the Republic, but the highest level. And yet it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers!

I present Dr. Pendleton’s laborious work as overwhelming proof of a thesis that I have maintained for years, perhaps sometimes with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing? Here and there, true enough, a competent teacher of English is encountered. I could name at least twenty in the whole country. But it does not appear that Dr. Pendleton, among his eighty, found even one. There is not the lightest glimmer of intelligence in all the appalling tables of statistics and black, zig-zag graphs that he has so painfully amassed. Nor any apparent capacity for learning. The sound thing, the sane thing and the humane thing to do with his pathetic herd of A. B.’s would be to take them out in the alley and knock them in the head.

5

_The Heroic Age_

JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON, by Claude G. Bowers. Boston: _The Houghton Mifflin Company_. JEFFERSON AND MONTICELLO, by Paul Wilstach. Garden City, L. I.: _Doubleday, Page & Company_. CORRESPONDENCE OF JOHN ADAMS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1812-1826, selected by Paul Wilstach. Indianapolis: _The Bobbs-Merrill Company_. [The American Mercury, March, 1926.]

Jefferson, in one of his last letters to Adams, dated March 25, 1826, spoke of the time when both came into fame as the heroic age. The phrase was certainly not mere rhetoric. The two men differed enormously, both in their personalities and in their ideas--perhaps quite as much as Jefferson differed from Hamilton or Adams from his cousin Sam--but in one thing at least they were exactly alike: they were men of complete integrity. As Frederick the Great said of the Prussian _Junker_, one could not buy them, and they would not lie. The fact, at times, made them bitter enemies, and the virtues of the one were cancelled by the virtues of the other, to the damage of their common country. But when they stood together, they were irresistible, for complete integrity, when it does not spend itself against itself, is always irresistible--one of the few facts, to me known, that is creditable to the human race. The masses of men, like children, are easily deceived, but in the long run, like children again, they show a tendency to yield to character. Bit by bit it conquers them. They see in it all the high values that they are incapable of reaching themselves. They see the courage that they lack, and the honesty that they lack, and the resolution that they lack. All these things were in both Adams and Jefferson. They fell, in their day, into follies, but I don’t think that anyone believes they were ever _pushed_ into them. Adams, no doubt, could be bamboozled, but neither he nor Jefferson could be scared.

I fear that the gallant iconoclasts who revise our history-books sometimes forget all this. Engaged upon the destruction of legends, all of them maudlin and many of them downright insane, they also, at times, do damage to facts. One of these facts, it seems to me, ought not to be forgotten, to wit, that it took a great deal of courage, in the Summer of 1776, to sign Jefferson’s celebrated exercise in colonial Johnsonese. There were ropes dangling in the air, and they were uncomfortably near. There were wives and children to be considered, and very agreeable estates. However dubious their primary motives, the men who signed took a long chance, quietly, simply, and with their faces to the front. How many of their successors in our own time have ever followed their example? I find it hard to think of one. The politician of to-day lacks their courage altogether; he lacks their incorruptible integrity. He is a complete coward. The whip of the Anti-Saloon League is enough to make him leap and tremble; the shadow of the rope would paralyze him with terror. He is for sale to anyone who has anything valuable to offer him, and the day after he has sold out to A he is ready to sell out to A’s enemy, B. His honor is that of a street-walker.

So far we have progressed along the highroad of democracy. The gentleman survives in our politics only as an anachronism; his day is done. Mr. Bowers, in “Hamilton and Jefferson,” traces the beginning of the decline; Mr. Wilstach, in the volume of Adams-Jefferson letters, shows it in full tide. Both authors are partial to Jefferson, and present charming portraits of him, especially Mr. Wilstach, in his other book, “Jefferson at Monticello.” It seems to me that they often confuse the man and his ideas, especially Mr. Bowers. Jefferson was unquestionably one of our giants. There was more in his head than there has been in the heads of all the Presidents in office since he went out. He was a man of immense intellectual curiosity, profound originality, and great daring. His integrity was of Doric massiveness. But was he always right? I don’t think many reflective Americans of to-day would argue that he was. Confronting enemies of great resourcefulness and resolute determination, he was forced, bit by bit, into giving his democratic doctrine a sweep and scope that took it far beyond the solid facts. It became a religious dogma rather than a political theory. Once he was gone, it fell into the hands of vastly inferior men, and soon it had reached its _reductio ad absurdum_. Jefferson died in 1826. By 1829, when Jackson came in, it was a nuisance; by 1837, when he went out, it was a joke.

Jefferson’s enthusiasm blinded him to the fact that the liberty to which he had consecrated the high days of his early manhood was a two-headed boon. There was, first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own government, levy their own taxes, and make their own laws--in brief, freedom from the despotism of the King. There was, second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased--in brief, freedom from the despotism of the majority. Hamilton was as much in favor of the first kind of liberty as Jefferson: he made, in fact, even greater sacrifices for it. But he saw that it was worth nothing without the second kind--that it might easily become worth less than nothing, for the King, whatever his oppressions _en gros_, at least gave some protection to the isolated subject. Monarchy might be the protector of liberty as well as the foe of liberty. It had been so, in fact, in the Prussia of Frederick. And democracy might be far more the foe than the protector. It was obviously so in the France of the Reign of Terror. Hamilton, a hard-headed man, given to figures rather than to theories, saw all this; Jefferson, a doctrinaire, even in his best moments, saw only half of it. That failure to see together was at the bottom of their difference--and their difference came very near wrecking the United States. Burr’s bullet probably prevented a colossal disaster. But it also opened the way for troubles in the years to come. We are in the midst of them yet, and we are by no means near the end of them.

The shadow of Jeffersonism, indeed, is still over us. We are still bound idiotically by the battle-cries of a struggle that was over more than a century ago. We have got the half of liberty, but the other half is yet to be wrested from the implacable fates, and there seems little likelihood that it will be wrested soon. All the fears of Hamilton have come to realization--and some of the fears of Jefferson to fill the measure. Minorities among us have no rights that the majority is bound to respect; they are dragooned and oppressed in a way that would make an oriental despot blush. Yet behind the majority, often defectively concealed, there is always a sinister minority, eager only for its own advantage and willing to adopt any device, however outrageous, to get what it wants. We have a puppet in the White House, pulled by wires, but with dangerous weapons in its hands. Law Enforcement becomes the new state religion. A law is something that A wants and can hornswoggle B, C, D, E and F into giving him--by bribery, by lying, by bluff and bluster, by making faces. G and H are therefore bound to yield it respect--nay, to worship it. It is something sacred. To question it is to sin against the Holy Ghost.

I wonder what Jefferson would think if he could come out of his tomb and examine the Republic that he helped to fashion. He was a man of towering enthusiasms, but he was also sharply intelligent: he knew an accomplished fact when he saw one. My guess is that, at the first Jefferson Day dinner following his emergence, he would make a startling and scandalous speech.

6

_The Woes of a 100% American_

THE NEW BARBARIANS, by Wilbur C. Abbott. Boston: _Little, Brown & Company_. [The American Mercury, May, 1925.]

It would be easy to poke fun at this disorderly and indignant tract; even, perhaps, to denounce the learned author, in a lofty manner, as a mere jackass. His argument, at more than one place, is so shaky that it tempts ribaldry with a powerful lure, almost a suction. His premisses are often gratuitous and absurd; his conclusions are often fantastic. Worse, he argues in circles, and it is frequently hard to make out what he is advocating, and why. Worst of all, the urbanity suitable to a learned gentleman resident in Sparks street, Cambridge, Mass., sometimes yields to a libido far more suitable to an auctioneer, a Federal district attorney or a Methodist bishop, and he rants dreadfully. But against all this there is yet something to be said, and that something, I think, is sufficient to stay the impulse to have at him brutally, either with cackles or with invective. It is, in brief, this: that what he inveighs against, given his natural and laudable prejudices, is plentifully sufficient to excuse all his indignation, and all his incoherence, and even his occasional departures from the strict letter of the record--that it is a merit in any man, facing what he deems to be incubi and succubi, to belabor them in a hearty and vociferous manner, and without too pedantic a respect for the rules of evidence. That merit has nothing to do, at bottom, with his rightness or wrongness; it lies in his mere sincerity. Dr. Abbott is obviously full of sincerity; no fair reader can doubt it for an instant. But he has something more: he has under him a respectable body of facts, sound ones as well as shaky ones. The deductions he draws from them are often extravagant, and now and then he mingles them with assumptions that seems to me to do violence to the most elemental common sense. Nevertheless, his basic facts remain, and if I were an Anglo-Saxon as he is I suspect that they would fever me as they fever him.

What he complains of, in a few words, is the assault that has been made of late upon the old American tradition and the fundamental canons of American idealism, _i. e._, upon the body of ideas that Americans cherish as peculiarly their own, and believe in with a romantic devotion. What he complains of, especially, is that this assault has been made, in the main, by men who are not “Anglo-Saxons” (the professor himself quotes the term: a touching concession to ethnological exactness)--that it has been largely led by men whose very Americanism, when they claim to be Americans at all, is open to question. When I say open to question, I mean, of course, by “Anglo-Saxon” Americans. Dr. Abbott seems to be firmly convinced that these are the only ones entitled to the name. They are the pure stock; their ancestors conquered the continent unaided. They alone partake of the true national spirit, and may be trusted to guard the national hearth. All other Americans are in the position of visitors, interlopers, relatives-in-law. They may become in time, if they are good, creditable assistant Americans, but they can no more enter into the full national heritage, as free equals, than they can lift themselves by their boot-straps. The American tradition, it appears, must forever remain a bit strange to them; they are the children, not of heroes, but of serfs. Thus it is no wonder that their political notions, when they make bold to state them, are exotic and subversive. They can imagine government only as a power above and beyond the citizen. If they are not in favor of kaiserism, then they are in favor of communism, which is simply kaiserism imposed from below. Their politics is essentially a slave politics. They stand opposed eternally to that self-reliant and somewhat pugnacious individualism which is the mark of the true “Anglo-Saxon.” If they ever come into power the Constitution will be destroyed and freedom will perish.

Dr. Abbott’s book, as I have said, is somewhat difficult; perhaps I misrepresent him in a few details. But in the main, I believe, I gather his doctrine correctly; it is, indeed, a doctrine that has grown very familiar. The Ku Klux has carried it into every hamlet in the land, and bolstered it with the authority of Holy Writ. I could, if I would, amuse myself by exhibiting the holes in it. Is it a fact, then, that the “Anglo-Saxons” conquered the continent unaided? What of the Spaniards and French? What of the Dutch and Germans? What of the Scotch-Irish? Is it a fact that they invented the American scheme of government? What of Rousseau? Is it a fact that all assaults upon that scheme have been made by assistant Americans? What of Jefferson, Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, Bryan? Is it a fact that all the enemies of the Constitution came from below the salt? What of the Eighteenth Amendment: does it damage the Bill of Rights more or less than the late Dr. La Follette’s vaporous schemes? Such questions suggest themselves in great variety. I could roll them off until you stood agape. But I have no desire to press a professor of history unduly; his authority, in the last analysis, cannot be upset by facts. And in the present case, whatever his errors in detail, it seems to me to be quite clear that the fundamental facts are on his side. There _is_ unquestionably a difference between the “Anglo-Saxon” American and the non-“Anglo-Saxon”--a difference in their primary instincts, in their reactions to common stimuli, in their ways of looking at the world. And that difference, of late years, _has_ come to the estate of a conflict, with the “Anglo-Saxon” striving to keep what he has--his point of view, his cultural leadership, his political hegemony--and the non-“Anglo-Saxon” trying to take it away from him. To deny that conflict is to fall into an absurdity far worse than any Dr. Abbott is guilty of. To admit it is to admit his clear right, nay, his bounden duty, to do battle for his side, passionately, desperately, and with any weapon at hand.

This he does in his book, and up to the limit of his forensic skill, which, I regret to have to add, is not noticeably great. If, at times, he grows a bit muddled, and even maudlin, then let us not hold the fact against him, for a man performing a _pas seul_ upon a red-hot stove cannot be expected to achieve an impeccable step. It seems to me that this red-hot stove, at the moment, is under every conscious “Anglo-Saxon” in our great Republic--that he must be an insensate clod, indeed, if he does not feel the heat. The cultural leadership of the country is passing out of his hands, and he is beginning to lose even his political hegemony. I sat in the Democratic National Convention in 1924 as the Hon. Al Smith rolled up his votes, and watched the Ku Kluxers on the floor. They were transfixed with horror: if it was a comedy, then pulling tonsils is also a comedy. Dr. Abbott mentions Dreiser. The influence of Dreiser upon the literature of to-morrow in this land--upon all the youngsters who are now coming to maturity in the universities, and turning away from their ordained professors--will be a hundred times as potent as that of any New Englander now alive. Who is Dreiser? When the grandfathers of the Republic were hanging witches at Salem his forbears were raising grapes on the Rhine. Dr. Abbott professes history at Harvard. During the past ten years but one professor at that great university has materially colored the stream of ideas in America. He has since escaped abroad--and is a Spaniard. Every day a new Catholic church goes up; every day another Methodist or Presbyterian church is turned into a garage. But there is no need to labor the point. The fact is too obvious that the old easy dominance of the “Anglo-Saxon” is passing, that he must be up and doing if he would fasten his notions upon the generations to come. And the fact is equally obvious that his success in that emprise, so far, has been extremely indifferent--that, despite the great advantages that he enjoys, of position, of authority, of ancient right, he is making very heavy weather of it, and not even holding his own. I am frankly against him, and believe, as I have often made known, that he is doomed--that his opponents will turn out, in the long run, to be better men than he is. But I confess that I’d enjoy the combat more if he showed less indignation and more skill.

Dr. Abbott himself reveals many characteristic “Anglo-Saxon” weaknesses. His incoherence I have mentioned. There is also a downright inconsistency, often glaring. On one page he denounces all non-“Anglo-Saxons” as opponents of democracy; on another (for example, page 242) he denounces the fundamental tenets of democracy himself. This inconsistency is visible in nine “Anglo-Saxon” gladiators out of ten. What ails them all is that they have to defend democracy, and yet do not believe in it. Has any good “Anglo-Saxon” ever believed in it? I sometimes doubt it. Did Washington? Did John Adams? Jefferson did, but wasn’t there a Celtic strain in him--wasn’t he, after all, somewhat dubious, a sort of assistant American? In any case, the surviving Fathers were all apparently against him. In our own time how many “Anglo-Saxons” of the educated class actually believe in democracy? I know of none, and have heard of none. The late war revealed their true faith very brilliantly and even humorously. It was a crusade for democracy, and yet one of the shining partners was the late Czar of Russia! The assault upon the Kaiser was led by Roosevelt! The chief official enemy of absolutism was Wilson! No wonder the whole thing collapsed into absurdity. Dr. Abbott falls into a similar absurdity more than once. His book would be vastly more effective if he took all the idle prattle about democracy out of it, and grounded it upon the forthright doctrine that the “Anglo-Saxons,” having got here first, own the country, and have a clear right to impose political disabilities upon later comers--in other words, if he advocated the setting up of an “Anglo-Saxon” aristocracy, with high privileges and prerogatives, eternally beyond the reach of the mongrel commonalty. This, in point of fact, is what he advocates, however much he may cloud his advocacy in democratic terms. I call upon him with all solemnity to throw off his false-face and come out with the bald, harsh doctrine. There is more logic in it than in his present nonsense; he could preach it more powerfully and beautifully. More, he would get help from unexpected quarters. I can speak, of course, only for one spear. I might quibble and protest, but I’d certainly be sorely tempted.

7

_Yazoo’s Favorite_

AN OLD-FASHIONED SENATOR, by Harris Dickson. New York: _The Frederick A. Stokes Company_. [The Nation, October 14, 1925.]

Some time ago, essaying a literary survey of the Republic, I animadverted sadly upon the dreadful barrenness of the great State of Mississippi. Speaking as a magazine editor, I said that I had never heard of a printable manuscript coming out of it. Speaking as a frequenter of the Athenian grove, I said that I had never heard of it hatching an idea. Instantly there was an uproar from Iuka to Pascagoula. The vernacular press had at me with appalling yells; there were demands from the Ku Klux that I come down to Jackson and say it again; Kiwanis joined the Baptist Young People’s Society in denouncing me as one debauched by Russian gold. Worse, the Mississippi intelligentsia also had at me. Emerging heroically from the crypts and spring-houses where they were fugitive from Rotary, they bawled me out as ignorant and infamous. Had I never heard, they demanded, of Harris Dickson, the Mississippi Balzac? Had I never heard of John Sharp Williams, the Mississippi Gladstone?

I had, but remained unmoved. I now continue unmoved after reading Balzac’s tome on Gladstone. It is, in its small way, a tragic book. Here, obviously, is the best that Mississippi can do, in theme and treatment--and it is such puerile, blowsy stuff that reviewing it realistically would be too cruel. Here the premier literary artist of Mississippi devotes himself _con amore_ to the life and times of the premier Mississippi statesman--and the result is a volume so maudlin and nonsensical that it would disgrace a schoolboy. The book is simply mush--and out of the mush there emerges only a third-rate politician, professionally bucolic and as hollow as a jug.