This they seem bound to do, whatever happens; if
anything on this plane is still to be desired, it is that
more of them should do it in a clear and conscious
manner: in such a manner as to suggest that our
Yankee culture is not a word in a book to them, but
a profoundly personal,
imaginative,
emotional real-
ity. For this it is wholly unnecessary-does
it need
to be said ?-that
their own racial or national mem-
ories should be natively American; as unnecessary as
that Lucian should have been a native of Athens
or Seneca a native of Italy. To the former,
Greek
culture, and to the latter, Roman culture, were far
more living things than to many Athenians or many
Italians of their time; and the best Americans are,
as often as not, the Syrians or the Spaniards,
so to
say, of this age and place. A seedy cosmopolitanism,
however-the antithesis of true internationalism-
and a careless incuriosity about the American past
have hung over from the Age of Eliot; and like the
Bohemianism of the Age of Mencken, have not yet
quite ceased to infect the minds even of proletarian
writers, both some of old native stock and some
whose "Americanization"
is more recent. Just so
long as this is true, their writing will be either thin
and poor or, at the best, less full-fleshed, less robust,
and less rich in harmonies than its own seriousness
and distinction entitle it to be.
The tide, it is only just to add, seems to have set
unmistakably the other way, and some of the most
intensively localized and "nativized" books of the
last two or three years have been the work of left-
wing writers. To those who had given the whole sub-
ject any thought, there was not only nothing surpris-
ing in this, but it was the thing that was certain to
happen. It was always true that when American
writers thought radically they became, not less but
more-and more significantly-American.
JOSEPHINE HERBST
IF THE term "Americanism" means anything,
it
must be in the interpretation that masses of Amer-
ican people have given it, the free and equal right
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That
this conception has been a dream rather than a
reality does not change its validity for purposes of
discussion. Anyone speaking of Americanism may
speak from the limitation of his prejudices and in-
terests. Ford may say in the
Saturday Evening Post
that "Americans want to be secure in opportunity."
Whose opportunity and for what? The workers shot
Jown at Ford's wanted to be secure also. Certain
events become in time accepted by all as "American."
Lincoln and his shovel are sacrosanct, but in his life-
time Stephen A. Douglas was the more respected
man. "The rabble of disorderly farmers" fighting
Shays's Rebellion become with time brave fellows
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
struggling against tyrannous taxes. John Brown was
a horse thief alive; now his soul goes marching on.
Farmers holding Sears-Roebuck sales today to out·
wit a mortgage foreclosure are subversive reds to
the New York Insurance Company owners, but to
fellow farmers they are sober men standing up for
their natural born rights. Americanism from its con-
ception has always been open to many interpreta-
tions, and yet it has been an article of faith. The
country was opened, developed, and exploited on the
belief of the American people in equal opportunity.
This drive for life laid waste as much as it created.
A world quite different from any that most men
would want rose on the slogan of "opportunity for
all. "
I have lived in many parts of this country. My
family provided me with an extensive laboratory
record of American life. The first of my people had
a grant of land from 'William Penn long before the
American Revolution.
The family were inveterate
letter-writers and diary-keepers.
They left a fine
chain of written evidence. They branched out and
followed every opportunity.
From big landowners
they became little landowners;
then landless. They
risked life to get into Deadwood when gold was
struck, went into the South with the carpetbaggers
after the Civil War. Some fought in the Revolution,
some were Quakers and hid in the hay. Some pio-
neered in Wisconsin,
and some went insane. Many
children never grew up. Many grew, up to work on
railroads and get typhoid.
Some surveyed for the
Government
through the Rockies and wandered
down into Oregon.
One got rich. With time and
events their attitude toward certain things changed;
the deep religious note vanished. The duty toward
political life before the Civil War turned to cyn-
icism and get-what-you-can after the war. Darwin
was discussed, the Haymarket
murders put a mark
on them all. When the big railroad strikes of the
1880'S came, this family was also scorched. Later
days were to show the influence on those who went
to the Middle West of the populist movement and
the LW.W.
Popular songs alone do not sink into
the consciousness of a people; martyrs have a way
of living long. The conception of the family duty
changed with time. Distances helped widen breaches.
Science became a substitute for religion, for some.
But the expectation that all of them had of Amer-
ica was fairly uniform.
They were not eaten by
greed for wealth. Only in the last two decades has
a change come into the form of belief. A young
niece writing to me from Iowa wants to escape, not
to "make a fortune" as my uncle prospecting in the
Black Hills did, but "to live." She doesn't mean
money by living, she means rich experience. She is
only sixteen years old, but the urgency of this letter
is as unmistakable as a letter written by an uncle in
the eighties from an academy in Philadelphia,
wail-
ing that he had to leave this stupid town and go
5
