is current in our so-called "intellectual" life. Shallow
men have, for the time, in the United States, pre-
empted these rich concepts. The meanings of the
Great Tradition,
of culture, of American culture,
Marxism-and
above all, of Man-have
been flat-
tened by these men to their own mean dimension,s.
They have reduced revolutionary and cultural criti-
cism to a sort of. solipsistic and onanistic activity
which, of course, affects no one but themselves.
WILLIAM TROY
THE main assumption behind your questionnaire,
as I understand it, is that if a reconciliation between
Marxism and Americanism could somehow be ef-
fected the whole problem of our culture would im-
mediately be solved. You begin quite rightly, in my
opinion, by asking for a definition of what is called
Americanism;
but in this initial effort, I am afraid,
you are going to encounter certain disappointment.
The difficulty is that Americanism is one ot those
terms which are at once too simple and too com-
plicated to define with satisfaction.
It would perhaps
be wiser to recognize at the outset that it corres-
ponds not so much to a clean-cut intellectual notion
as to a set of emotional
attitudes.
Undoubtedly
these attitudes themselves are traceable to an an-
terior set of ideas-
religious, political and socio-
economic. Thus the well-known "sdf-reliance"
of
the American character,
celebrated by Americans in
other respects as distinguishable as Emerson and
Herbert
Hoover,
might be traced to the dominant
theological implications of the Protestant
Reforma-
tion. The sentiment of liberty and equality has been
convincingly traced, even by conservative historians,
to the influence of the eighteenth century political
philosophers.
And what is the worship of success
for its own sake but an attempt to discover a moral
value in the application of the laiss~z-faire theory
of business and government
to individual
living?
But the result of tracing the ideological pedigree of
the various emotional attitudes in the term Amer-
icanism is not definition but dissolution into some-
thing that has been common to Western European
culture for so many centuries that it has determined
not only our language but our very manner of think-
ing. This something is the Renaissance conviction
that the individual is capable of working out his
own salvation-spiritual,
moral,
and economic-
without any assistance from the outside. It is because
of the vague simplicity of this underlying belief that
we have had so many different varieties of Amer-
icanism-Jefferson's,
Thoreau's,
Jim Hill's,
Whit-
man's, Theodore Roosevelt's,
and Hearst's brands
of Americanism.
If you begin with a broad enough
notion, like the notion of the sacrosanct individual,
12
there are no limits to the areas in which it may be
applied. Self-reliance may express itself in political
theory,
in transcendental
ethics, in business enter-
prise, in physical action, or in propagandist
journal-
ism. Liberty may mean the liberty to ascend the skies
or to steal one's neighbor's land, to shoot tigers or
to disseminate lies. Such precisely is the kind of
notion behind Americanism;
and if one notes con-
tradictions among its proponents these are due to
differences between the areas of reference.
The
checks on individual liberty imposed by governments
are at best precarious checks; for government
itself,
as we have learned from history,
becomes one of
these areas. :Moreo\7er, such a notion adjusts itself
easily to historical exigencies, and while at one time
it may attach itself to the idea of revolution,
at an-
other time it may become identified with reaction.
It makes a great deal of difference not only
whose
Americanism is in question but at what stage in our
history it is being used. For these reasons it seems'
to me that the term, despite its common emphasis,
is too fluid and variable to be used satisfactorily in
any discussion.
In the current effort to identify it with Marxism,
for. example, I believe that we can detect a sophistry
which consists in reviving the earlier and forgotten
associations of a·term in the attempt to confuse it
with a later term based on a fundamentally different
assumption.
Revolution has been associated with
Americanism,
but revolution is not inherent in the
notion of individuality,
which is the essential notion
behind Americanism.
As in all sophistries,
some-
thing is left out; and what is left out here is some
,hundred-odd years of history.
Unless I have been
badly misinformed,
Marxism is a revolutionary
movement based on the assumption that economic
forces and not individual men are responsible for
historical change. It stresses the collective as against
the individual will. For this reason I am at a loss to
understand how a psychology fashioned by the be-
lief that man can lift himself by his own boot-straps
can be reversed overnight to one involving, before
all else, a profound humility.
I consider N aphta's
fusion of communism and medieval scholasticism in
Mann's
Magic Mountain
a much more plausible
sophistry.
(It is true that Marxism as a militant
revolutionary movement
does give scope to the
heroic individual will, as the novels of Malraux have
demonstrated.
But in the ultimate description of his
role that it offers the individual,
it leaves no place
for the moral imagination).
If one does not believe in an autonomous Amer-
ican tradition,
except as a convenience'
for writers of
literary histories,
there can be no problems con-
nected with "the growth of a revolutionary litera-
ture" in this country that are separable from those
to be encountered elsewhere in the world at present.
In literature,
which deals always with the personal,
the immediate,
and the concrete, there is unques-
APRIL,
1936
