Our Part in the Great War

A clear analysis of our Middle West is contained in the second of Monsieur Emile Hovelaque's articles in recent issues of the Revue de Paris. In that he shows how distance and isolation have operated to give our country, particularly the land-bound heart of it, a feeling of security, a sense of being unrelated to human events elsewhere on the planet. He shows how the break of the immigrant with his Old World has left his inner life emptied of the old retrospects, cut off from the ancestral roots. That vacancy the new man in the new world filled with formula, with vague pieces of idealism about brotherhood. He believed his experiment had cleared human nature of its hates. He believed that ideals no longer had to be fought for. Phrases became a substitute for the ancient warfare against the enemies of the race. And all the time he was busy with his new continent. Results, action, machinery, became his entire outer life. The Puritan strain in him, a religion of dealing very directly with life immediately at hand, drove him yet the harder to tackle his own patch of soil, and then on to a fresh field in another town in another State: work, but work unrelated to a national life – least of all was it related to an international ideal.

And he let Europe go its own gait, till finally it has become a dim dream, and just now a very evil dream. But of concern in its bickerings he feels none. So to-day he refuses to see a right and a wrong in the European War. He confuses the criminal and the victim. He regards the Uhlan and the Gerbéviller peasant as brothers. Why don't they cease their quarrel, and live as we live?

That, in brief, is a digest of Hovelaque's searching analysis of our national soul at this crisis. We have not understood the war. We are not going to see it unless we are aided. If we do not see it, the future of the democratic experiment on this earth is imperiled. The friends of France and England lie out yonder on the prairies. The Allies have much to teach them, and much to learn from them. But to effect the exchange, England and France must be willing to speak to them through the voices they know – not alone through "Voix Americaines" of James Beck, and Elihu Root and Whitney Warren and President Lowell and Mr. Choate. England must speak to them through Collier's Weekly and the Saturday Evening Post and the newspaper syndicates. There is only one way of reaching American public opinion – the newspapers and periodicals. No other agency avails. England must recognize the function of the correspondent in the modern democracy. Through him come the facts and impressions on which the people make up its mind. He supplies public opinion with the material out of which to build policy. For our failure to understand the war, France and England must share the blame with America. We should have been ready enough to alter our indifference and ignorance into understanding, if only our writers had been aided to gain information.

But the Western Allies have little knowledge of American public opinion, and small desire to win it. They have sent some of our best men over in disgust to the enemy lines. Any one, coming on such a quest as I have been on, that of proving German methods from first-hand witness, is regarded by the Allies as partly a nuisance and partly misguided. If any public criticism is ever made of my country's attitude by the French or English, we, that have sought to serve the Allies, will be obliged to come forward and tell our experience: – namely, that it has been most difficult to obtain facts for America, as the Allies have seen fit to disregard her public opinion, and scorn the methods and channels of reaching that public opinion.

II

SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR

I found in Belgium the evidences of a German spy system, carried out systematically through a period of years. I saw widespread atrocities committed on peasant non-combatants by order of German officers. I saw German troops burn peasants' houses. I saw dying men, women and a child, who had been bayonetted by German soldiers as they were being used as a screen for advancing troops. What I had seen was reported to Lord Bryce by the young man with me, and the testimony appears in the Bryce report. I saw a ravaged city, 1,100 houses burned house by house, and sprinkled among the gutted houses a hundred houses undamaged, with German script on their door, saying, "Nicht verbrennen. Gute leute wohnen hier."

With witnesses and with photographs I had reinforced my observation, so that I should not overstate or alter in making my report at home. Opposed to this machine of treachery and cruelty, I had seen an uprising of the people of three nations, men hating war and therefore enlisted in this righteous war to preserve values more precious than the individual life. With a bitter and a costly experience, I had won my conviction that there were two wars on the western front.

When I returned from a year in the war zone, five months of which was spent at the front, I looked forward to finding a constructive program, hammered out by the social work group, which would interpret the struggle and give our nation a call to action. I looked to social workers because I have long believed and continue to believe that social workers are the finest group of persons in our American community. They seem to me in our vanguard because of a sane intelligence, touched with ethical purpose.

It was a disappointment to find them scattered and negative, many of them anti-war, some of them members of the Woman's Peace Party, some even opposing the sending of ammunition to the Allies.

Few elements in the war were more perplexing than the failure of our idealists to make their thinking worthy of the sudden and immense crisis which challenged them. Absence of moral leadership in America was as conspicuous as the presence of inexhaustible stores of moral heroism in Europe.

The very experts who have prepared accurate reports on social conditions are failing to inform themselves of the facts of this war. I have found social workers who have not studied the Bryce report, and who are unaware of the German diaries and German letters, specifying atrocities, citing "military necessity," and revealing a mental condition that makes "continuous mediation" as grim a piece of futility as it would be if applied to a maniac in the nursery about to brain a child.

I heard the head of a famous institution, a member of the Woman's Peace Party, tell what promise of the future it gave when a German woman crossed the platform at The Hague and shook hands with a Belgian woman. There is something unworthy in citing that incident as answering the situation in Belgium, where at this hour that German woman's countrymen are holding the little nation in subjection, and impoverishing it by severe taxation, after betraying it for many years, and then burning its homes and killing its peasants. An active unrepentant murderer is not the same as a naughty child, whom you cajole into a conference of good-will. A pleasant passage of social amenity does not obliterate the destruction of a nation. Such haphazard treatment of a vast tragedy reveals that our people are not living at the same deep level as the young men I have known in Flanders, who are dying to defend the helpless and to preserve justice.

I was asked by a secretary of the Woman's Peace Party to speak at Carnegie Hall to a mass meeting of pacifists. When I told her I should speak of the wrong done to Belgium which I had witnessed, and should state that the war must go on to a righteous finish, she withdrew her invitation, saying she was sorry the women couldn't listen to my stories. She said that her experience as a lawyer had shown her that punishment never accomplished anything, and the driving out of the Germans by military measures was punishment.

I have known social workers to aid girl strikers in making their demands effective. Have the social workers as a unit denounced the continuing injustice to Belgium? Protests, made by the Belgian government to Washington, of cruelties, of undue taxation, of systematic steam-roller crushing, were allowed to be filed in silence, so that these protests that cover more than twelve months of outrage are to-day unknown to the general public, and have not availed to mitigate one item of the evil. One was astonished by the sudden hush that had fallen on the altruistic group, so sensitive to corporate wrong-doing, so alert in defense of exploited children and women. Why the overnight change from sharp intolerance of successful injustice?

I find that our philanthropists are held by a theory. The theory is in two parts. One is that war is the worst of all evils. The other is that war can be willed out of existence. They believe that another way out can be found, by some sort of mutual understanding, continuous mediation, and overlooking of definite and hideous wrongs committed by a combatant, wrongs that date back many years, so that out of long-continued treachery the atrocity sprang, like flame out of dung.

They refuse to see a right and a wrong in this war. It is not to them as other struggles in life, as the struggle between the forces of decency and the vice trust with its army of owners, pimps, cadets and disorderly hotel keepers. They have let their minds slip into a confusion between right and wrong, a blurring of distinctions as sharp and fundamental as the distinction between chastity and licentiousness, between military necessity and human rights, between a living wage and sweatshop labor. In their socialized pity, they have lost the consciousness of sin.

I found a ready answer to the charges of hideous practice by the army of invasion – the answer, that war is always like that. But it is too easy to dismiss all these outrages as "war." That is akin to the easy generalizations of prohibition fanatics, of pseudo-Marxian Socialists, of Anarchists, of vegetarians, of Christian Scientists, and of many other sincere persons who overstate, who like to focus what is complex into a one-word statement. "Do away with drink at one stroke, and you have abolished unhappy marriages." "All modern business is bad." "Government is the worst of all evils." "Meat-eating leads to murder."

Just as men-of-the-world theories on the inevitability of prostitution, with its "lost" girls, had to give way to the presence of facts on the commercialized traffic, so the pacifist position on the present war is untenable when confronted with the honeycombing of Belgium with spies through long years and with the state of mind and the resultant acts of infamy recorded by Germans in their letters and diaries. There is an incurable romanticism in the literature of the pacifists that is offensive to men in a tragic struggle. Let me quote two sentences from a peace pamphlet issued by friends of mine who are among the best-known social workers in the United States:

"It (war) has found a world of friends and neighbors, and substituted a world of outlanders and aliens and enemies."

This is a quaint picture of the ante-bellum situation in Belgium, when the country was undermined with German clerks, superintendents, commercial travelers, summer residents, who were extracting information and forwarding it to Berlin, buying up peasants for spies and building villas with concrete foundations for big guns. "Friends and neighbors" is a rhetorical flourish that hurts when applied to German officers riding into towns as conquerors where for years they had been entertained as social guests.

"In rape and cruelty and rage, ancient brutishness trails at the heels of all armies."

That description is just when applied to the German army of invasion which practiced widespread murder on non-combatants. It is inaccurate, and therefore unjust, when applied to the Belgian, French and British armies. I have lived and worked as a member of the allied army for five months. It does not trail brutishness. It is fighting from high motive with honorable methods. It is unfortunate to overlay the profound reality of the war with a mental concept.

To summarize:

1. The social workers have failed to apply their high moral earnestness to this war. They have not accepted the war as a revelation of the human spirit in one of its supreme struggles between right and wrong. As the result their words have offended, as light words will always hurt men who are sacrificing property and ease and life itself for the sake of an ideal.

2. They have neglected to inform themselves of the facts of the war. As the result, they have made no positive program and taken no constructive action.

Let them deal with such facts as the German villa in the Belgian town where we lived – a villa that was a fortification with a deep concrete foundation for a heavy gun. I want them to face, as I had to face, the eighty-year-old peasant woman with a bayonet thrust through her thigh, and the twelve-year-old girl with her back cut open to the backbone by bayonets. Is it too much to ask that our social workers shall hold their peace in the presence of universal suffering and not mock noble sacrifice with tales of drugged soldiers? It was not the vinegar on hyssop that explains the deed on the cross. Is it too much to ask them to abstain from their peace parties and their anti-munitions campaigns?

We should listen to these leaders more readily if we had seen them risking their lives like the boys of the American Ambulance. To weigh sacrifice in detached phrases calls for an equal measure of service and a shared peril. If a few of our social workers had been wounded under fire, we should feel that their companions in the hazard were speaking from some such depth of experience as the peasants of Lorraine. But our idealists have not spoken from this initiation. Miss Addams is still puzzled and grieved by the response her words about drugged soldiers called out. Mr. Wilson is annoyed that his phrase of "too proud to fight" gave little pleasure to the mothers of dead boys.

With fuller knowledge our leaders will turn to and build us a program we can follow, a program of action that preserves the immutable distinction between right and wrong, that lends strength to those dying for the right. With such frank taking of sides, let me give two instances where definite results could be achieved. They are both highly supposititious cases. But they will serve.

Let us suppose, that at this moment the Russian government, under cover of the war, is harrying and suppressing the Russian revolutionary centers in Paris and London – the French and British governments remaining complacent to the act because of the present war alliance. If we had a staunch public opinion, resulting in a strong government policy at Washington which had decided there was a right and a wrong on the western front, and which had thrown the immense weight of its moral support to the defenders of Belgium, such a government would be in a position to make a friendly suggestion to France and England that "live and let live" for Russian liberalism would be appreciated.

Let us take another imaginative case. Suppose that, under cover of the war, Japan was tightening her hold on China, and gradually turning China into a subject state. If our government were on relations of powerful friendship with the Allies, it would be conceivable that England could be asked to hint gently that unseemly pressure from Tokyo was undesirable. The English fleet is a fact in the world of reality.

What is needed precisely is a foreign policy that will strengthen the tendencies toward world peace, based on justice. By our indecision and failure to take a stand, we have lessened our moral value to the world. It is weak thinking that advocates a policy and is too timid to use the instruments that will shape it. Because we want a restored Belgium and France and a world peace, we need statesmen who are effective in attaining these things. We need men who can suggest a diplomatic gain in the cause of justice that the nations will agree on, because of a government at Washington that carries weight with the diplomats who will bring it to pass. We want to see the friendship of France and England and Canada regained. We are letting all these things slip. There will come a day when it is too late to do anything except develop regrets. Why should not social workers declare themselves in time?

At a season of national gravity, when the future for fifty years may be determined inside of four years, we want those men for our leaders who can work results in the world of time and space, instead of dream liberations in the untroubled realms of moral consciousness.

Before we have an all-embracing internationalism, we must have a series of informal alliances, where the forces of modern democracy tend to range on one side, and the autocratic nations tend to range on the other side. There will be strange mixtures, of course, on both sides, even as there are in the present war. But the grand total will lean ever more and more to righteousness. Righteousness will prevail in spite of us, but how much fairer our lot if we are ranged with the "great allies – exultations, agonies, and love," and man's unconquerable will to freedom.

III

FORGETTING THE AMERICAN TRADITION

The Chicago Evening American places on its editorial page on August 10, 1916, a letter to which it gives editorial approval. The letter says: "There are thousands of German-born citizens, in fact the writer knows of no others, whose very German origin has made them immune against such influences as ancestry, literature, sentiment and language, which count for so much in their effect upon a great percentage of our population. These very men continue to be loyal Americans. If we are disloyal, what then do you call the Choates, the Roosevelts, the Eliots, and the foreign-born Haven Putnams?"

The letter is signed M. Kirchberger. Mr. Hearst finds this statement of sufficient importance to spread out before five or six million readers of his newspapers. It is of importance, because it voices the belief of an ever-increasing element in our population. Our ancestry, literature, sentiment and language do produce such men as Joseph Choate, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles William Eliot and George Haven Putnam. Those names do go straight back in our national history to the original stock, which shaped our national policy and ideals. It was their ancestry, English and American literature, their racial sentiment, and the English language, which made the historic America. Mr. Kirchberger believes them to be disloyal to the New America. I trust he and his numerous clan will define what sort of country he wants to make of us, what ancestry he wishes to have prevail, what literature he will introduce into our schools, what sentiment and what language. I hope his group will come out into the open with their program of action. For they have one. He sees clearly that the civilization of a nation is the resultant of its racial inheritance, its literature, its language and its ideas about life. He means that our civilization shall go his way, not the way of the Choates and Eliots. He has no quarrel whatever with the vague internationalism of many of our social workers because under that fog he and his kind can operate unobserved. I do not underestimate the influence of such thought as his. It is growing stronger every day. It is sharply defined, forceful, and it will prevail unless we fight it.

When one comes among us, sharing the privileges of citizenship, to tell us that he is "immune" from the claims of our great ancestry, and the noble sentiment of our past, he is striking at the heart of our nationality. He is vastly more significant than his own alien voice. For his claims are being advocated by editors and politicians. His ideas are sweeping our communities. Our nation does not live because it is a geographical unit, nor because it accepts all the races of Europe. It lives because it fought at Yorktown side by side with Rochambeau and his Frenchmen. It lives in the songs of Whittier and in the heart of Lincoln. By its past of struggle for ideas it has given us a heritage. But we have substituted pacifism and commercialism for the old struggle, and we have substituted phrases for the old ideas which cost sacrifice to maintain. If enough citizens become "immune" from the influences that have shaped us, we shall lose our historic continuity, and become the sort of nation which these enemies would have us be. But these considerations do not bring alarm to our leaders. Our leaders supply the very intellectual defense for this treason. They supply it in the doctrine of so-called internationalism.

Let us without delay select our position and hold it. Let us stand firmly on our traditions and history. We have no wish to be "immune" from our language and literature, our sentiment and ancestry. We need a fresh inoculation of those "influences." Let us reinforce the policy of Franklin which recognized the desirability of friendship with France and England. Let us restate the policy of Lincoln, who paused in the stress of a great war to strike hands with the workers of England, because they and he were at one in the love of liberty.

No single factor of race and climate, language and culture is determinative on that central power of cohesion which gathers a multitude of persons – "infinitely repellent particles" – into an organism which lives its life in unity, and forms its tradition from a collective experience. But it does not follow that some one of these factors cannot be so strengthened as to disturb the balance. If the geographical territory is carved up the nation is destroyed. Successive waves of immigration can drown out the sharply defined character of a people. This is now taking place in the United States. The proof is our reaction to the war. It is not that we revealed differences of "opinion." It is that we were untrue to our tradition.

It is easy to throw the discussion into nonsense by asking: Is there any such thing as a pure race? Are not the greatest nations of mixed blood? Do you think race and nation are the same thing? It is true that no one thing is determinative in the making of a nation. Race and language, culture and government, border line and climate, religion and economic system, are each an influence, and, together, they shape the people in face and habit till they walk the earth with a new stride and look out on the world with different eyes from those of any people elsewhere. But the supreme thing about a nation is that it happened. A certain group of people developed affinities and aspirations, cohered and became an organism, fought its way to independence, and remembered the blood it had spilled. That tradition of common experience and sacrifice in victory and defeat is the cord that binds the generations. It is a spiritual ancestry that colors every thought and governs every action. An English historian, Professor Ramsay Muir, has stated this aptly. He writes:

"The most potent of all nation-molding factors, the one indispensable factor which must be present whatever else be lacking, is the possession of a common tradition, a memory of sufferings endured and victories won in common, expressed in song and legend, in the dear names of great personalities that seem to embody in themselves the character and ideals of the nation, in the names also of sacred places wherein the national memory is enshrined."

Gilbert K. Chesterton said to me:

"Certain people like the arrangements under which they live. They prefer to die rather than to let other people come in and change things. Even if their nation decides on a policy that is suicidal, they would rather die with her than live without her. That is nationality. When the call came, the citizens of the nations answered with what was deep in their subconsciousness. All resolutions to act as 'workers,' as members of an 'International,' fell away. If pacifists of the ruling class, like Miss Hobhouse and Bertrand Russell, would analyze what is really in their mind, they would find that what they dislike is the spectacle of democracy enthusiastically and unanimously agreeing to do something. They distrust democracy on the march. It is their artistocratic sense that disapproves. Just now, it is the Kaiser whom the democracies are marching out to find, and the people are not behaving as the pacifists would like to have them."

This idea of nationalism, instead of being an early and now obsolete idea, is a recent and a noble idea. What the common life of the home is to the father and mother and children, through poverty and childbirth and fame, that is the life of a nation to its citizens. In the blood of sacrifice it is welded together. Mixed races cannot dilute it, a doctored border cannot suppress it, a stern climate cannot quench it, an oppressive government cannot enslave it. Only one thing can destroy it and that is when it annuls its past and weakens at the heart. When it ceases to respond to the great ideas that once aroused it, then it is time for those who love it to look to the influences at work that have made it forgetful. The denial of that common experience, the refusal to inherit the great tradition, the unwillingness to continue the noble and costly policy – these mark the decline of a nation. These are the signs of peril we see in the unwieldy life of our immense democracy to-day. The call that came to us from France was the same voice that we once knew as the voice of our most precious friend. By our failure to respond we show that we have allowed something alien to enter our inmost life. In our equal failure to safeguard our own helpless non-combatants, we reveal that the old compulsions no longer move us. By the cry that went up from half our nation – not of outrage at stricken France, not of anger for slaughtered children of our own race – but that strange mystical cry, "He kept us out of war," we betray that we have lost our hardihood. We have been overwhelmed by numbers. We have suffered such a heaping up of new elements that we have no time to teach our tradition, no will to continue our race experience.