never voted anything except the Republican ticket.
In 19
2
4 my mother and two older sisters bolted and
voted for La Follette. The men voted Republican.
I
was a cynic about the usefulness of the ballot until
193
2 ,
and in that year with fifteen farmer neighbors
in Pennsylvania I cast a ballot in a little hotel on the
Delaware river that was standing when Washington
crossed the ice ten miles below, for a straight Com-
munist ticket.
ROBERT HERRICK
FOR over a year as Government
Secretary for the
Virgin Islands, I have had an experience of adminis-
tration in a small community,
removed from the
larger currents of life in the continental
United
States, which has left me little opportunity-or
in-
clination-to speculate on the theoretical
problems
raised in your questionnaire.
An intimate and con-
stant acquaintance with the complex process of gov-
ernment, even in such a small sphere as this one, has
unconsciously affected my preconceptions
of pos-
sibilities in social experimentation.
I have found
government a
more
baffling and uncertain affair than
what it had seemed to be from the outside, at a
distance;
and intimate contact with a society of
human beings in the process of being governed has
modified my previous ardor for rapid and spec-
tacular transformations
in the process. Under res-
ponsibility
one becomes pragmatic,
suspicious of
theory. The one safe refuge is to ignore all catch-
words and categories, such as "proletarian," "Marx-
ian," "fascist," "liberal," etc., etc., which are open
to as many interpretations
as there are tempera-
ments, to cling to the world of fact where nOne of
these terms exist in pure essence, and attempt
to
solve each problem thrown at the administrator
ad hoc ....
For
all the years of my conscious life I have be-
lieved
in
what used to be called, fondly if rather
vaguely, "the American tradition"
(or
in the ver-
nacular,
"Americanism");
that is, a cultural base
differing from that of all other peoples, due to the
physical environment,
racial inheritances,
and his-
torical development
of the American people. This
tradition was best exemplified in the words of
Emerson,
of ':Vhitman,
of rvIark Twain,
and less
completely of many other writers. Also in the careers
of many "typical" Americans,
from Franklin,
Jef-
ferson, Lincoln to Cleveland;
from Edison to Ford,
from Barnum to Rockefeller,
etc. The determining
characteristic of this Americanism was an exagger-
ated emphasis on the values of individuality,
in-
dependence,
self-assurance,
adventurous experimen-
tation.
These admirable qualities,
unfortunately,
encouraged the predatory development
of American
PARTISAN
REVIEW
AND ANVIL
character quite as powerfully as more attractive
spiritual aspects-as is becoming disastrously evident
with every turn of the economic wheel. Reckless,
ruthless, materialistic,
or idealistic and self-sufficient,
one felt that any "American" of any social class was
a quite different entity from any Western European,
sometimes to his advantage and often not. I do not
feel today that this vigorous American tradition has
survived the shock of the World War and its econ-
omic convulsions,
and the still greater shock of be-
wildered disillusionment
at the partial collapse of
the economic structure-at
any rate, it is for the
present submerged.
It is each day becoming more
doubtful whether American character can retrieve
those fine qualities which once were associated with
the American tradition.
A deterioration of fibre due
to the relentless pressures of machine civilization
plus an incessant and ingenious exploitation of econ-
omic advantage by those in privileged positions, an
increasing disregard of all values but the money one,
have obviously undermined the entire structure of
our older society. How long the foundations will
stand the stresses and strains, whether months or a
few years, is a matter of individual speculation.
If
American civilization survives, without taking either
extreme of left or right-if
it can regain its old
median course which released the energies of the in-
dividual while trying to restrain his predatory lusts
(often unavailingly,
alas!)-the
enduring and in-
trinsic value of "the American tradition" will have
been demonstrated.
That tradition is now in the
crucible. The world awaits the outcome.
I do not consider that literature can or should be
all of one impulse, either "proletarian" or "author-
itarian." The novels dealing with social conditions in
the United States that I have read recently are quite
as mixed in their implications as the more conven-
tional literature of an earlier period when I myself
began to write. (But, fortunately,
they are written
by persons with a real knowledge of the life they
attempt to present, as was often not the case with
older writers!)
They contain elements suggestive
of a new social order and other elements obviously
derived from the older tradition.
Nor would it be
desirable,
either,
for the literature or the social
future of the United States that our imaginative
writers should be all of one kind or should devote
their talents to proselytising for one social pattern
or another.
The more distinctively "Marxian" our
literature becomes the less actual and distinguished
it will be as literature.
This simple fact seems to be
recognized today by the younger Russians, who ?ave
learned that literature cannot be created entirely
out of social theory or be entirely expressive of any
theory and remain literature.
The less consciously
our writers endeavor
to mould their work in
formulas of any kind, and the more they stick to
their proper task, which is representation and inter-
pretation,
not propaganda,
the better chance they
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