Your Negro Neighbor

If now we look into our American life we are brought face to face with the fact that in our haste to get rich or even to meet new conditions that must legitimately be met we are in danger of losing all of our old standards of conduct, of training, and of morality. America is still bourgeois. We have hardly begun to reap the real fruits of rich, abiding culture, and because we have not we are still wasteful, superficial, and insincere, in our economic life, in our church life, in our courts, in literature, in education, in every phase of activity.

Consider national organization. We were beguiled into thinking that our country as a whole was rich, well arrayed, amply prepared to take care of itself, invincible beyond question. As the first six months of the war slowly dragged by in their agonizing course, the conviction gradually forced itself upon us that we were only in the elementary class in economics, that we were neither organized nor prepared, and that it was after all vitally necessary for the government to assume official charge of the railroads. With our ideas of democracy we had slowly drifted into crass individualism, and sooner or later that was forced to mean selfishness. One year after the opening of the war we still had the sad spectacle of senators fiercely assailing the administration because of the tardiness of its shipping and airplane programs. We should not be too hasty in finding a scapegoat for what after all is a national delinquency. We had indeed produced such masters in large organization as Morgan and Hill and Harriman; but the talents of such men had not been utilized in Washington. Slowly we have learned that our country needs its very best brains, needs them always, and that it is folly to play petty politics when questions of great national interest are at stake. To politics as we have long understood the term the present war should give the death-blow. Let responsibilities gravitate to those who are able to shoulder them without the endless coil of officialdom. Let democracy mean the perfect freedom of the individual, the equal freedom of all individuals, but not license, and not that the rights of one individual shall endanger the rights of most. When the war began we availed ourselves of the talents of Thomas Alva Edison. Suppose we had done this ten years before. No, we were rich, comfortable, safe, invincible. Suddenly our smug self-complacency received a shock. One great result of this war is going to be to give us new ideas of efficiency in our national government. We shall place greater emphasis on having not only experts in important minor positions, but also men of supreme business talents in the places of greatest responsibility. We shall have a new searching of our whole system of party government, with its arbitrary exits and entrances, and its despicable spoils system. We shall have a glorified, a chastened, a regenerated United States – a country about whose greatness there shall be no doubt, and on whose honor there shall be no stain, a country that shall in the highest sense stand for law and efficiency and justice, and one for which not some, but all, would be willing to die, because all would know that the government was thinking wisely for every one of its citizens.

So in our courts. The same principle would work. The average citizen in America knows only this about our courts, that he wants to keep away from them. So far we have not been assured of justice. The poor man has not stood an equal chance with the rich, nor the black with the white. Money has been freely used for the changing of laws, if need be. In South Carolina a white man stole an automobile and was sentenced for thirty days; on the same day and by the same judge a Negro who stole a bicycle was sent to the chain-gang for three years. Such a travesty on justice can not much longer abide in a country that has passed through fire. Let us turn our faces to the morning.

Our churches need a new baptism. About thirty years ago the conviction began to force itself that somehow the church as an organization was becoming too set and staid in its ways, that it was in fact a beautiful antique, regarded with somewhat amused condescension by the young men and women who played golf on Sunday or the crowds that went to a baseball game. Suddenly we became fearfully introspective; we studied sociology; we read "The Inside of the Cup"; we were ashamed of the impotency of the old sermons on justification and regeneration; and we swung to the other end of the pendulum. Our churches began to be "institutional"; the most famous evangelist in the country became the one who was outstanding for his use of slang; the music in Sunday Schools became rag-time; and in general in religious services there developed a tendency to attract the crowd by using the methods of the vaudeville stage. Evening services in Protestant churches partook more and more of the nature of socialistic conferences, and, in general, dignity and reverence suffered. After a few years of this we have found that we are just at much at fault in another way as we were thirty years ago. We have done away with Puritanism, it is true; but in its stead we have placed irreverence and worldliness. Such is the situation in the church, in organized, conventional religion; when we look at the still larger principle of vital Christianity, at the heart of things of which mere churchgoing is only a symbol, we are still more appalled. Neither bigotry nor irreverence is right. Young people will not tolerate cant; but neither will they be attracted to a worship that features what they can find better done in a theater. Simple goodness and kindness, however, never fail to command respect. Love is never hissed off the stage; and the love of Christ, pure and simple, is sufficient even for the sorrow of such a sad world as ours.

What has been said about our economic life, our courts, and our churches applies also in our home-life, in education, and in literature. The family altar is almost extinct; children are not properly trained in respect for their elders; and all too generally young girls learn the lessons of extravagance and immodesty in dress. Many of our modern methods of training have so simplified and made easy the lessons to be learned that the boy who goes to school is in danger of receiving little stout mental development. Excessive emphasis on illustrations and pictures has resulted in the "moving-picture mind" that has only a modicum of initiative on its own account. In literature we have stodginess in style and decadence in morals, and vers libre, that is to say, no verse at all. In hardly anything does it seem that we have any art, any standards, any taste. Any passing fad is sufficient to gain followers and to pose as worthy achievement. I quote from a representative review of a representative novel by one of the most popular writers in America: "The reader first meets X when he is still a youth of twenty-four enjoying a trip around the world. In Y he meets an American miss of fifteen who falls wholly and entirely in love with him, and he, being somewhat in love with the idea of love, imagines himself in love with her and they become engaged. Afterward, in Paris, and a year or so later on the way home across the Atlantic, the author makes known the instability of the hero's character in the grosser forms of love. Nevertheless he marries the child, barely past her middle teens, and forthwith sets out upon a career of escapades and license… With the coming of the war he becomes first an ambulance driver and then an aviator, and his long-suffering and much-forgiving wife enters a military hospital as a nurse. But the author is discreetly silent as to the extent to which she is impressed by his assurance that he is going to be a good husband." This story was published by one of the oldest, most respectable, and supposedly most conservative firms in the United States.

It is customary for those who are brought face to face with this irreverence, this injustice, this extravagance, and this loosening of the moral code to pass upon the matter lightly as a mere passing phenomenon of our industrial advance; more recently the blame has been placed on that bearer of all burdens, the war. Such an explanation is hardly sufficient. Even before the war we were beginning to be influenced by continental standards. Now that the crisis is upon us all the more do we need to think clearly and conserve our energies for the future. Germany, under the guidance of her military philosophy, has destroyed the sanctity of the tenderest of all institutions, the home, encouraging temporary unions of men and women as a patriotic duty; and France in her hour of trial has further fallen prey to debauchery. We plead that American womanhood shall be preserved sacred and inviolate.

All of this has very close connection with our chief subject, the Negro. Such characteristics and tendencies in America as we have sketched have resulted in a peculiar brand of snobbishness that has so developed as very largely to undermine our fundamental conception of morality. Mr. Alfred Booth Kuttner has recently written in the Dial "A Study of American Intolerance," showing how the tradition of tolerance was upset by "the aftermath of the Civil War and by the sudden large influx of diversely alien immigrants which began during the seventies and eighties of the last century. The first of these is the more fundamental, and to a great extent it explains the second. Our hostility towards the foreigner was fostered by a comparison with the relations already existing towards a people in our midst." This spirit of hostility of course accounts for the Chinese Exclusion bill, for the alien land law against the Japanese in California, for the literacy test, and even for the American attitude toward the people of Latin-American countries; thus logically the Negro problem becomes the final test of our democracy, the crux on which all other great social problems have turned. We say that certain aliens are diseased or illiterate, that they are incipient anarchists or that they make working conditions intolerable; but let us suppose that in the main they become otherwise, as many of every race are already. Is the American white man, in the face of the rising brotherhood of man the world over, going to take the position that other races, and especially the colored races – the Japanese, the Chinese, the Hindu, the Negro – shall not occupy places of dignity and responsibility in this country? Does he expect to maintain the position that any person not an Anglo-Saxon, no matter how cultured or educated or talented he may be, must forever maintain a politically and socially inferior status in the greatest republic in the world? Such a position, we hold, in view of the great events now taking place in Europe, is utterly untenable. If it were the correct point of view, it would be better that we had never fired a single gun against Germany.

The End

1

This chapter is naturally indebted in some degree to the author's "A Short History of the American Negro" (Macmillan, 1913).