well to fit itself to such an adaptable form-our
revolutionary tradition-even if it has to lose its
own identity.
As for revolutionary literature in this country, I
think it is sadly lacking in anything comprehensive
enough to suggest the combination of a present-day
social revolution with a large and broad view of
Americanism in art forms, which would have the
widest effect and most powerful appeal. I object to
the absolutist reform type in writers, as this charac-
teristic is limiting to the artist and antagonizing to
the reader. Revolutionary writing certainly might
well include a favorable view of, and in fact a sy'n-
thesis with, Americanism.
NEWTON ARVIN
OF COURSE "Americanism" is an abstraction and
may legitimately mean many things; but when you
grant this, I see no reason for saying that Marxism
is more irreconcilable with Americanism than with
any other national culture predominantly middle-
class in its development. Those who say it is, do so
either with interested motives, which are easy to
understand, or because they are less well acquainted
with American history than they could be. Naturally
a socialist culture anywhere will represent a great
advance over anything that has preceded it and re-
quire many breaks with the past; but all this should,
if anything, be less true in America than in many
European countries, if only because feudalism never
left a real stamp on American society. It is true, too,
that the most aggressive and articulate elements in
the middle class imposed their values on American
culture with a freedom and a thoroughness that they
never enjoyed in Europe; and this is why supercilious
Europeans can, with a show of reason, identify phil-
istine acquisitiveness with "Americanism"-though
of course the philistines have had a lively career
throughout Europe, especially in the West.
Even in America, however, they have never car-
ried everything before them, and all the humaner,
finer, and more creative energies in the early middle-
class movement expressed themselves strongly and
beautifully in American history; the tradition, there-
fore, of enlightened thought and action which was
thus begotten, born, and nourished to full growth,
is there to be mastered and preserved by those who
are capable of understanding and prolonging it. The
spirit of this tradition seems to me to be a raclically
democratic and secular individualism, and, in that
confessedly partisan sense, I should say that this
spirit is more truly what one means by "A~ericari-
ism" than any other. Only socialism now promises
to make possible a democratic and secular culture in
which all individuals may be genuinely free and
genuinely human, and far from spelling an abrupt
4
break with the American past, it will to this extent
be the only conceivable realization of it.
Even more specifically than this, there is a per-
fectly real line in native American thought, the work
of as true Yankees as ever existed, that moves on
toward Marxist socialism as toward its culmination.
The old democratic radicals-Paine,
Samuel Adams,
Freneau, and their like-had envisaged an individu-
alistic, but quite classless, republican society; and
when their natural successors, in the thirties and for-
ties, came more and more to see that economic in-
dividualism was rapidly driving the country toward
the class arrangements of contemporary England
and France, with the evil results already apparent
in those countries, they applied themselves to the
social problem thus impending and, taking their deep
equalitarian sentiments as a point of departure, made
sketches toward a social philosophy in which full·
fledged socialism is already germinant. Men like
Thomas Skidmore, Albert Brisbane, Orestes Brown-
son, George Ripley, W. H. Channing, Parke God-
win, and J. H. Noyes may have owed much to Owen
or to Fourier; but they gave as good as they got,
and their writings are as richly local and relevant,
for the most part, as anything in American literature.
On the surface, this movement of thought was
confused and interrupted by the all-absorbing Anti-
Slavery agitation and the Civil War; and when it
reappeared later in the century, its continuity was
evident to almost no one. That below the surface
the continuity was perfectly real, however, is indio
cated to all but the hopelessly biased by such tokens
as Wendell Phillips's immediate plunge into the po-
litical labor. movement, or Henry Adams's remark
that "by rights, he [himself] should have been also
a Marxist," or the activities of the former Abolition-
ist, John Swinton, or the books of Edward Bellamy,
or the naturalness with which Howells (an old-
fashioned American if there ever was one) rather
promptly-once he got started-adopted a utopian
socialism as his creed.
All this of course is on ,but one level, and the
whole story can only be told by taking in many other
things: the general tone and color of American lit-
erature and non-political thought, for example, and
(too largely removed from this) the actual struggles
of American farmers, artisans, mechanics, miners,
and industrial workers from the last days of the
eighteenth century on. When one puts oneself in
mind of these things, one feels something like an
atavistic horror, as at some shameless blasphemy,
of the vici,ous fools who use the name "American"
to signify all that is regressive and corrupt.
As for the younger American writers of prole.
tarian fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism, they are
the present representatives, not of some absolute
and mythical "Americanism," but of what is best
and strongest in our inherited national culture, and it
is they who are both sustaining and enrithing it.
APRIL,
'1936
