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PARTISAN REVIEW
reason it no longer makes demands, then it has lost the elan which
can attract new forces.
It
can only hope that the institutions and
battalions that have been built up by the vanished elan of the past
are large enough to withstand the onslaught of those who do make
new demands.
VI
It is not only the dilemmas of policy that have been re–
sponsible for the decline of enthusiasm and vitality among the liberal
intellectuals in the last decade or so. Another factor is hard to discuss
without sounding like E.
A.
Ross, Henry Pratt Fairchild, and other
pre-World War I opponents of immigration from Eastern and South–
ern Europe; yet it seems evident to us that the American crusading
spirit has been sustained in considerable measure by the non-conform–
ist conscience of New England and its offshoots in the Western Re–
serve and the Far West.
7
As long as the new immigrants looked up
to this model, they tended to imitate the benign as well as the sharp–
shooting doctrines and practices of the Yankees, but in a cumulative
process which is only now reaching its end the New Englanders them–
selves have run out of confidence and prestige : their land is now Va–
cationland' rather than the source of Abolitionist and other gospel;
in the home territory, surrounded by Irish, Italians, Poles, French
Canadians, Portuguese whom they have influenced more than either
party will admit, they feel defeated and out of control of the charter
institutions.
This is not the place to trace the complex relations between
the New England conscience and pragmatic reform. The remaining
possessors of that conscience are still a national asset, but there are
fewer of them proportionately; their wealth is smaller proportionately;
and, scattered throughout the country, they are more remote from
the centers of ideas. New ideas have their headquarters in New York.
They often originate with, or are mediated by, J ews who have more
reasons for hesitation and are perhaps psychologically as well as so–
ciologically more vulnerable to pressure than the New Englanders-
7 In addition, the Southern Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, such as Woodrow
Wilson, have played a great role, especially in the D emocratic and in splinter
parties.
