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The Promise Of American Life by Herbert David Croly

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THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE

BY HERBERT CROLY

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

* * * * *

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted
June, 1910; April, 1911; March, 1912.

Norwood Press
J.S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




Dedicated

TO THE MEMORY OF THE LATE

DAVID GOODMAN CROLY




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I
WHAT IS THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE?

CHAPTER II
THE FEDERALISTS AND THE REPUBLICANS

CHAPTER III
THE DEMOCRATS AND THE WHIGS

CHAPTER IV
SLAVERY AND AMERICAN NATIONALITY

CHAPTER V
THE CONTEMPORARY SITUATION

CHAPTER VI
REFORM AND THE REFORMERS

CHAPTER VII
RECONSTRUCTION; ITS CONDITIONS AND PURPOSES

CHAPTER VIII
NATIONALITY AND DEMOCRACY

CHAPTER IX
THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND ITS NATIONAL PRINCIPLES

CHAPTER X
A NATIONAL FOREIGN POLICY

CHAPTER XI
PROBLEMS OF RECONSTRUCTION--PART I

CHAPTER XII
PROBLEMS OF RECONSTRUCTION--PART II

CHAPTER XIII
CONCLUSIONS--THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE NATIONAL PURPOSE

INDEX




THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE




CHAPTER I


I

WHAT IS THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE?

The average American is nothing if not patriotic. "The Americans are
filled," says Mr. Emil Reich in his "Success among the Nations," "with
such an implicit and absolute confidence in their Union and in their
future success that any remark other than laudatory is inacceptable to
the majority of them. We have had many opportunities of hearing public
speakers in America cast doubts upon the very existence of God and of
Providence, question the historic nature or veracity of the whole fabric
of Christianity; but never has it been our fortune to catch the
slightest whisper of doubt, the slightest want of faith, in the chief
God of America--unlimited belief in the future of America." Mr. Reich's
method of emphasis may not be very happy, but the substance of what he
says is true. The faith of Americans in their own country is religious,
if not in its intensity, at any rate in its almost absolute and
universal authority. It pervades the air we breathe. As children we hear
it asserted or implied in the conversation of our elders. Every new
stage of our educational training provides some additional testimony on
its behalf. Newspapers and novelists, orators and playwrights, even if
they are little else, are at least loyal preachers of the Truth. The
skeptic is not controverted; he is overlooked. It constitutes the kind
of faith which is the implication, rather than the object, of thought,
and consciously or unconsciously it enters largely into our personal
lives as a formative influence. We may distrust and dislike much that is
done in the name of our country by our fellow-countrymen; but our
country itself, its democratic system, and its prosperous future are
above suspicion.

Of course, Americans have no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good
faith. Englishmen return thanks to Providence for not being born
anything but an Englishman, in churches and ale-houses as well as in
comic operas. The Frenchman cherishes and proclaims the idea that France
is the most civilized modern country and satisfies best the needs of a
man of high social intelligence. The Russian, whose political and social
estate does not seem enviable to his foreign contemporaries, secretes a
vision of a mystically glorified Russia, which condemns to comparative
insipidity the figures of the "Pax Britannica" and of "La Belle France"
enlightening the world. Every nation, in proportion as its nationality
is thoroughly alive, must be leavened by the ferment of some such faith.
But there are significant differences between the faith of, say, an
Englishman in the British Empire and that of an American in the Land of
Democracy. The contents of an Englishman's national idea tends to be
more exclusive. His patriotism is anchored to the historical
achievements of Great Britain and restricted thereby. As a good patriot
he is bound to be more preoccupied with the inherited fabric of national
institutions and traditions than he is with the ideal and more than
national possibilities of the future. This very loyalty to the national
fabric does, indeed, imply an important ideal content; but the national
idealism of an Englishman, a German, or even a Frenchman, is heavily
mortgaged to his own national history and cannot honestly escape the
debt. The good patriot is obliged to offer faithful allegiance to a
network of somewhat arbitrary institutions, social forms, and
intellectual habits--on the ground that his country is exposed to more
serious dangers from premature emancipation than it is from stubborn
conservatism. France is the only European country which has sought to
make headway towards a better future by means of a revolutionary break
with its past; and the results of the French experiment have served for
other European countries more as a warning than as an example.

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to
historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an
ideal national Promise. The Land of Democracy has always appealed to its
more enthusiastic children chiefly as a land of wonderful and more than
national possibilities. "Neither race nor tradition," says Professor
Hugo Muensterberg in his volume on "The Americans," "nor the actual past,
binds the American to his countrymen, but rather the future which
together they are building." This vision of a better future is not,
perhaps, as unclouded for the present generation of Americans as it was
for certain former generations; but in spite of a more friendly
acquaintance with all sorts of obstacles and pitfalls, our country is
still figured in the imagination of its citizens as the Land of Promise.
They still believe that somehow and sometime something better will
happen to good Americans than has happened to men in any other country;
and this belief, vague, innocent, and uninformed though it be, is the
expression of an essential constituent in our national ideal. The past
should mean less to a European than it does to an American, and the
future should mean more. To be sure, American life cannot with impunity
be wrenched violently from its moorings any more than the life of a
European country can; but our American past, compared to that of any
European country, has a character all its own. Its peculiarity consists,
not merely in its brevity, but in the fact that from the beginning it
has been informed by an idea. From the beginning Americans have been
anticipating and projecting a better future. From the beginning the Land
of Democracy has been figured as the Land of Promise. Thus the
American's loyalty to the national tradition rather affirms than denies
the imaginative projection of a better future. An America which was not
the Land of Promise, which was not informed by a prophetic outlook and a
more or less constructive ideal, would not be the America bequeathed to
us by our forefathers. In cherishing the Promise of a better national
future the American is fulfilling rather than imperiling the substance
of the national tradition.

When, however, Americans talk of their country as the Land of Promise, a
question may well be raised as to precisely what they mean. They mean,
of course, in general, that the future will have something better in
store for them individually and collectively than has the past or the
present; but a very superficial analysis of this meaning discloses
certain ambiguities. What are the particular benefits which this better
future will give to Americans either individually or as a nation? And
how is this Promise to be fulfilled? Will it fulfill itself, or does it
imply certain responsibilities? If so, what responsibilities? When we
speak of a young man's career as promising, we mean that his abilities
and opportunities are such that he is likely to become rich or famous or
powerful; and this judgment does not of course imply, so far as we are
concerned, any responsibility. It is merely a prophecy based upon past
performances and proved qualities. But the career, which from the
standpoint of an outsider is merely an anticipation, becomes for the
young man himself a serious task. For him, at all events, the better
future will not merely happen. He will have to do something to deserve
it. It may be wrecked by unforeseen obstacles, by unsuspected
infirmities, or by some critical error of judgment. So it is with the
Promise of American life. From the point of view of an immigrant this
Promise may consist of the anticipation of a better future, which he can
share merely by taking up his residence on American soil; but once he
has become an American, the Promise can no longer remain merely an
anticipation. It becomes in that case a responsibility, which requires
for its fulfillment a certain kind of behavior on the part of himself
and his fellow-Americans. And when we attempt to define the Promise of
American life, we are obliged, also, to describe the kind of behavior
which the fulfillment of the Promise demands.

The distinction between the two aspects of America as a Land of Promise
made in the preceding paragraph is sufficiently obvious, but it is
usually slurred by the average good American patriot. The better future,
which is promised for himself, his children, and for other Americans, is
chiefly a matter of confident anticipation. He looks upon it very much
as a friendly outsider might look on some promising individual career.
The better future is understood by him as something which fulfills
itself. He calls his country, not only the Land of Promise, but the Land
of Destiny. It is fairly launched on a brilliant and successful career,
the continued prosperity of which is prophesied by the very momentum of
its advance. As Mr. H.G. Wells says in "The Future in America," "When
one talks to an American of his national purpose, he seems a little at a
loss; if one speaks of his national destiny, he responds with alacrity."
The great majority of Americans would expect a book written about "The
Promise of American Life" to contain chiefly a fanciful description of
the glorious American future--a sort of Utopia up-to-date, situated in
the land of Good-Enough, and flying the Stars and Stripes. They might
admit in words that the achievement of this glorious future implied
certain responsibilities, but they would not regard the admission either
as startling or novel. Such responsibilities were met by our
predecessors; they will be met by our followers. Inasmuch as it is the
honorable American past which prophesies on behalf of the better
American future, our national responsibility consists fundamentally in
remaining true to traditional ways of behavior, standards, and ideals.
What we Americans have to do in order to fulfill our national Promise is
to keep up the good work--to continue resolutely and cheerfully along
the appointed path.

The reader who expects this book to contain a collection of patriotic
prophecies will be disappointed. I am not a prophet in any sense of the
word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing
mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism. To conceive the better
American future as a consummation which will take care of itself,--as
the necessary result of our customary conditions, institutions, and
ideas,--persistence in such a conception is admirably designed to
deprive American life of any promise at all. The better future which
Americans propose to build is nothing if not an idea which must in
certain essential respects emancipate them from their past. American
history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much
matter for regret and humiliation. On the whole, it is a past of which
the loyal American has no reason to feel ashamed, chiefly because it has
throughout been made better than it was by the vision of a better
future; and the American of to-day and to-morrow must remain true to
that traditional vision. He must be prepared to sacrifice to that
traditional vision even the traditional American ways of realizing it.
Such a sacrifice is, I believe, coming to be demanded; and unless it is
made, American life will gradually cease to have any specific Promise.

The only fruitful promise of which the life of any individual or any
nation can be possessed, is a promise determined by an ideal. Such a
promise is to be fulfilled, not by sanguine anticipations, not by a
conservative imitation of past achievements, but by laborious,
single-minded, clear-sighted, and fearless work. If the promising career
of any individual is not determined by a specific and worthy purpose, it
rapidly drifts into a mere pursuit of success; and even if such a
pursuit is successful, whatever promise it may have had, is buried in
the grave of its triumph. So it is with a nation. If its promise is
anything more than a vision of power and success, that addition must
derive its value from a purpose; because in the moral world the future
exists only as a workshop in which a purpose is to be realized. Each of
the several leading European nations is possessed of a specific purpose
determined for the most part by the pressure of historical
circumstances; but the American nation is committed to a purpose which
is not merely of historical manufacture. It is committed to the
realization of the democratic ideal; and if its Promise is to be
fulfilled, it must be prepared to follow whithersoever that ideal may
lead.

No doubt Americans have in some measure always conceived their national
future as an ideal to be fulfilled. Their anticipations have been
uplifting as well as confident and vainglorious. They have been
prophesying not merely a safe and triumphant, but also a better, future.
The ideal demand for some sort of individual and social amelioration has
always accompanied even their vainest flights of patriotic prophecy.
They may never have sufficiently realized that this better future, just
in so far as it is better, will have to be planned and constructed
rather than fulfilled of its own momentum; but at any rate, in seeking
to disentangle and emphasize the ideal implications of the American
national Promise, I am not wholly false to the accepted American
tradition. Even if Americans have neglected these ideal implications,
even if they have conceived the better future as containing chiefly a
larger portion of familiar benefits, the ideal demand, nevertheless, has
always been palpably present; and if it can be established as the
dominant aspect of the American tradition, that tradition may be
transformed, but it will not be violated.

Furthermore, much as we may dislike the American disposition to take the
fulfillment of our national Promise for granted, the fact that such a
disposition exists in its present volume and vigor demands respectful
consideration. It has its roots in the salient conditions of American
life, and in the actual experience of the American people. The national
Promise, as it is popularly understood, has in a way been fulfilling
itself. If the underlying conditions were to remain much as they have
been, the prevalent mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism
might retain a formidable measure of justification; and the changes
which are taking place in the underlying conditions and in the scope of
American national experience afford the most reasonable expectation that
this state of mind will undergo a radical alteration. It is new
conditions which are forcing Americans to choose between the conception
of their national Promise as a process and an ideal. Before, however,
the nature of these novel conditions and their significance can be
considered, we must examine with more care the relation between the
earlier American economic and social conditions and the ideas and
institutions associated with them. Only by a better understanding of the
popular tradition, only by an analysis of its merits and its
difficulties, can we reach a more consistent and edifying conception of
the Promise of American life.


II

HOW THE PROMISE HAS BEEN REALIZED

All the conditions of American life have tended to encourage an easy,
generous, and irresponsible optimism. As compared to Europeans,
Americans have been very much favored by circumstances. Had it not been
for the Atlantic Ocean and the virgin wilderness, the United States
would never have been the Land of Promise. The European Powers have been
obliged from the very conditions of their existence to be more
circumspect and less confident of the future. They are always by way of
fighting for their national security and integrity. With possible or
actual enemies on their several frontiers, and with their land fully
occupied by their own population, they need above all to be strong, to
be cautious, to be united, and to be opportune in their policy and
behavior. The case of France shows the danger of neglecting the sources
of internal strength, while at the same time philandering with ideas
and projects of human amelioration. Bismarck and Cavour seized the
opportunity of making extremely useful for Germany and Italy the
irrelevant and vacillating idealism and the timid absolutism of the
third Napoleon. Great Britain has occupied in this respect a better
situation than has the Continental Powers. Her insular security made her
more independent of the menaces and complications of foreign politics,
and left her free to be measurably liberal at home and immeasurably
imperial abroad. Yet she has made only a circumspect use of her freedom.
British liberalism was forged almost exclusively for the British people,
and the British peace for colonial subjects. Great Britain could have
afforded better than France to tie its national life to an over-national
idea, but the only idea in which Britons have really believed was that
of British security, prosperity, and power. In the case of our own
country the advantages possessed by England have been amplified and
extended. The United States was divided from the mainland of Europe not
by a channel but by an ocean. Its dimensions were continental rather
than insular. We were for the most part freed from alien interference,
and could, so far as we dared, experiment with political and social
ideals. The land was unoccupied, and its settlement offered an
unprecedented area and abundance of economic opportunity. After the
Revolution the whole political and social organization was renewed, and
made both more serviceable and more flexible. Under such happy
circumstances the New World was assuredly destined to become to its
inhabitants a Land of Promise,--a land in which men were offered a
fairer chance and a better future than the best which the Old World
could afford.

No more explicit expression has ever been given to the way in which the
Land of Promise was first conceived by its children than in the "Letters
of an American Farmer." This book was written by a French immigrant,
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur before the Revolution, and is informed by
an intense consciousness of the difference between conditions in the Old
and in the New World. "What, then, is an American, this new man?" asks
the Pennsylvanian farmer. "He is either a European or the descendant of
a European; hence the strange mixture of blood, which you will find in
no other country....

"He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great
_Alma Mater_. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race
of men, whose labors and prosperity will one day cause great changes in
the world. Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the
progress of his labor; this labor is founded on the basis of
_self-interest_; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children,
who before in vain demanded a morsel of bread, now fat and frolicsome,
gladly help their father to clear those fields, whence exuberant crops
are to arise to feed them all; without any part being claimed either by
a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord.... The American is a
new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new
ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile
dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very
different nature rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American."

Although the foregoing is one of the first, it is also one of the most
explicit descriptions of the fundamental American; and it deserves to be
analyzed with some care. According to this French convert the American
is a man, or the descendant of a man, who has emigrated from Europe
chiefly because he expects to be better able in the New World to enjoy
the fruits of his own labor. The conception implies, consequently, an
Old World, in which the ordinary man cannot become independent and
prosperous, and, on the other hand, a New World in which economic
opportunities are much more abundant and accessible. America has been
peopled by Europeans primarily because they expected in that country to
make more money more easily. To the European immigrant--that is, to the
aliens who have been converted into Americans by the advantages of
American life--the Promise of America has consisted largely in the
opportunity which it offered of economic independence and prosperity.
Whatever else the better future, of which Europeans anticipate the
enjoyment in America, may contain, these converts will consider
themselves cheated unless they are in a measure relieved of the curse of
poverty.

This conception of American life and its Promise is as much alive to-day
as it was in 1780. Its expression has no doubt been modified during
four generations of democratic political independence, but the
modification has consisted of an expansion and a development rather than
of a transposition. The native American, like the alien immigrant,
conceives the better future which awaits himself and other men in
America as fundamentally a future in which economic prosperity will be
still more abundant and still more accessible than it has yet been
either here or abroad. No alteration or attenuation of this demand has
been permitted. With all their professions of Christianity their
national idea remains thoroughly worldly. They do not want either for
themselves or for their descendants an indefinite future of poverty and
deprivation in this world, redeemed by beatitude in the next. The
Promise, which bulks so large in their patriotic outlook, is a promise
of comfort and prosperity for an ever increasing majority of good
Americans. At a later stage of their social development they may come to
believe that they have ordered a larger supply of prosperity than the
economic factory is capable of producing. Those who are already rich and
comfortable, and who are keenly alive to the difficulty of distributing
these benefits over a larger social area, may come to tolerate the idea
that poverty and want are an essential part of the social order. But as
yet this traditional European opinion has found few echoes in America,
even among the comfortable and the rich. The general belief still is
that Americans are not destined to renounce, but to enjoy.

Let it be immediately added, however, that this economic independence
and prosperity has always been absolutely associated in the American
mind with free political institutions. The "American Farmer" traced the
good fortune of the European immigrant in America, not merely to the
abundance of economic opportunity, but to the fact that a ruling class
of abbots and lords had no prior claim to a large share of the products
of the soil. He did not attach the name of democracy to the improved
political and social institutions of America, and when the political
differences between Great Britain and her American colonies culminated
in the Revolutionary War, the converted "American Farmer" was filled
with anguish at this violent assertion of the "New Americanism."
Nevertheless he was fully alive to the benefits which the immigrant
enjoyed from a larger dose of political and social freedom; and so, of
course, have been all the more intelligent of the European converts to
Americanism. A certain number of them, particularly during the early
years, came over less for the purpose of making money than for that of
escaping from European political and religious persecution. America has
always been conventionally conceived, not merely as a land of abundant
and accessible economic opportunities, but also as a refuge for the
oppressed; and the immigrant ships are crowded both during times of
European famine and during times of political revolution and
persecution.

Inevitably, however, this aspect of the American Promise has undergone
certain important changes since the establishment of our national
independence. When the colonists succeeded in emancipating themselves
from political allegiance to Great Britain, they were confronted by the
task of organizing a stable and efficient government without encroaching
on the freedom, which was even at that time traditionally associated
with American life. The task was by no means an easy one, and required
for its performance the application of other political principles than
that of freedom. The men who were responsible for this great work were
not, perhaps, entirely candid in recognizing the profound modifications
in their traditional ideas which their constructive political work had
implied; but they were at all events fully aware of the great importance
of their addition to the American idea. That idea, while not ceasing to
be at bottom economic, became more than ever political and social in its
meaning and contents. The Land of Freedom became in the course of time
also the Land of Equality. The special American political system, the
construction of which was predicted in the "Farmer's" assertion of the
necessary novelty of American modes of thought and action, was made
explicitly, if not uncompromisingly, democratic; and the success of this
democratic political system was indissolubly associated in the American
mind with the persistence of abundant and widely distributed economic
prosperity. Our democratic institutions became in a sense the guarantee
that prosperity would continue to be abundant and accessible. In case
the majority of good Americans were not prosperous, there would be grave
reasons for suspecting that our institutions were not doing their duty.

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