west where there was a chance to make a fortune
or he would die. The East was "too small" for him.
There are no more frontiers;
my niece wants to
come to New York. The mobility that was peculiarly
American has shifted gears, that is all. Jobless youth
still wanders the face of the country but remains
jobless. Families are footloose but hungry. Farmer-
owners do not become owners of new farms, but
tenants shifting uneasily year after year. Six hun-
dred sober Vermont marble workers out for months
on strike show pay checks held as evidence,
twenty cents for a week's work. Such checks taunt
them. They ask, can men buy homes on twenty
cents? Yet politicians continue to speak of America
as a country of home-owners.
Even in the days when
men talked breezily of fortunes, their actual desires
were peculiarly simple and pure. They wanted "good
times," education for their children, nice homes, and,
as cars and mechanical contrivances multiplied,
they
wanted these also. But to speak of the "brutal strug-
gle for individual riches" seems to me a warped no-
tion. Brutal struggle there has been; a definite his-
torical development
was relentlessly unrolling,
but
so far as masses of people are concerned, greed did
not rust them. Certain elements cannot be isolated
and judged as general. As well say that Mrs. Mc-
Lean and her Hope diamond are American, and Ella
Reeve Bloor is not. I recognize Ella Reeve Bloor in
one glance to be as authentically American as the cov-
ered wagon, but unfortunately I also recognize Mrs.
McLean.
Angelo Herndon and Morgan both are
American.
The field of cotton carries the boll wee-
vil. The whole struggle of mankind is to throw off
the parasite; of science, to kill the germ and let the
vital organism live. The Morgans of the world
played a part in a development
which laid waste as
much as it built; now they are gumming up the ma-
chinery. The machinery is here to be used, the coun-
try to be ~sed. The quarrel is one over use-values.
The term "Americanism" has a bad odor at pres-
ent, as it is popularly used to indicate something not
fascist or communist, we are told, but American.
It
has therefore become an evasive, reactionary term,
divorced from its original usage,
which
had value
as indicating a dream wish. This dream wish is as
vital as ever, but it is not peculiarly American. The
farmers of mixed Haitian,
Jamaican,
and Cubw
blood in Realengo 18 in Cuba were so close in their
desires and problems to the American farmer of
the Middle West that I lived in their palm leaf huts,
slept in their beds filled with the sweet-smelling
veliver,
talked with them about the same basic things
that I talked about with farmers in Iowa or Dakota.
The tragedy of the triumph of Hitler in Germc.ny
is that masses of people believed in his revolutionary
slogans. Those German masses today still believe
in those slogans. They a-re not interested in cutting
off ears and noses. They want to live, to educate
their children, to have dignity of human life.
6
I do not want to oversimplify this problem, to
make it appear as too directly responsive to eco·
nomic forces alone. In fact, the longer one examines
the questionnaire the more difficult it is to find sim·
pIe answers. I cannot see Americanism cut into pieces
and ending at any given point. The country has de·
veloped in a steady, onward rush. If I may isolate
one family for experiment I am able to see how con·
tinuous the line is, how important
the past is for an
understanding of the present.
Without
question I
would carry that past beyond the American shores
to Europe. The early settlers brought heritages and
beginnings that are with us yet. On the cultural side,
that heritage haunted us for a long time. What we
sometimes mean by Americanism are the rich qual.
ities of geography and condition that are national
but not basic for the understanding of human life.
The buffalo grass has been ripped up on our prai.
ries, dust storms threaten as the oncoming desert
breeds grass-hoppers and hunger, but man still seeks
I
a home. The exaggerated richness of the early coun·
try led to exaggerated hope. That very attribute
will provide a national
form for whatever move
Americanism may take, but I cannot see the future
of America if it continues to retain hope as divorced
from l'vlarxism. It is a simple question of use-value,
and that a people building on confidence of their
powers will finally use those powers for themselves
in the only way that can guarantee them "life, lib·
erty, and the pursuit of happiness," is in my opinion
the final way. The seed was planted here long ago;
it will grow for a time, then need new soil.
But
what human beings want is fuller life.
Arguments
about "human nature" are nearly always grim.
¥/hose human nature? Iowa farmers on strike on
the roads in 1932 were showing the same human
nature that we saw in 1776, yet pessimists always
argue that human nature withers the world.
It is
to them a tight, grasping fist waiting to clutch the
penny.
Just as often, it is the open hand.
The
reflection of all these complicated forces, with an
understanding of their direction, should be the busi·
ness of revolutionary literature.
A story may be con·
fined to a simple incident and yet do this thing. What
revolutionary literature we may be said to have is
only beginning. It springs out of the literature of the
past at its best. I see no conflict between a truly revo·
lutionary literature and what I have termed "Amer·
icanism." Our revolutionary literature has been too
confined in its beginnings to isolated substances. It
seems to me, the pattern is too tight. All of the
qualities that we term "American" are rich and use·
ful-themarvelous
idiom, the variegated pattern of
events almost overpowering in their diversity. Amer·
ica to me is a country that has never fulfilled itself;
it will only do so through the processes of revolu·
tion. I am no prophet.
I do not know how or when.
I do know why. My grandfather
went to the legis.
lature from Pennsylvania as a Democrat.
My father
..\PRIL.
1936
