As to the death and destruction ahead and all around, few of us are deeply concerned. America is playing golf, bridge, or "Handies"; struggling for more money, or less work, or both; wearing paper caps and blowing tin horns on week-end cruises; drinking too much; thinking too little; getting excited about Mrs. Simpson, and Mary Astor's diary, and the Dionne quintuplets, while whole nations revert to barbarism, liberty disappears from the face of the earth, and white civilization crumbles about our ears. "Staggering" or not, this is certainly the most alarming aspect of the present debacle. A people capable of righteous wrath - or even of unrighteous wrath ~ may save themselves on the brink of the precipice.But every people satisfied with bread and circuses have fallen into the hands of a Caligula, a Mussolini, a Hitler, or a Stalin. Apathy is the most unmistakable symptom of physical, mental, and national breakdown. Men die of hardening of the arteries; nations of softening of the spine. The process is always the same - a simple, vigorous race fighting for existence, acquiring luxury, becoming enervated and decadent, learning to live without labor, bartering its liberties for governmental largesse, and finally passing from the hands of domestic tyrants into those of foreign tyrants. This is the history of Rome, of Athens, of Carthage, of Persia, of Spain; the age old record forever being played on new phonographs.
As tribute brought ease to Rome, the contributions of the Ionic League luxury to Athens, and the discovery of the New World dolce far nienteto Spain, so the wartime payments of the Old World brought lush years to us. We were already fortunately rich through the development of natural resources and individual resourcefulness; we became most unfortunately rich with the end of the WorId War. Before then, most of us did very nicely with what our jobs paid. We hoped to get more someday, of course, but most of us hoped to get it by working - not by voting, or picketing, or buying on margin.
By 1928, from sixteen to twenty dollars a day was a commonplace wage for truckmen or bricklayers. The farmer's wife, who sold my wife eggs, had two house servants and a superheterodyne radio. When my bungalow in the country was rebuilt, I could never get my Buick into the garage without moving the carpenter's Cadillacs and the plumber's Packards. In town, my colored cook preferred her apartment to mine, and came to work in a taxicab. Long after the crash, the Treasurer of the United States reported of his tenant farmers: "Nary a one has a cow, nary a one has a pig, nary a one has a vegetable garden, but every danged one of 'em has an automobile." We had come to assume that the world owed us that kind of living.
When, suddenly, it began manifesting inability to support us in the style to which we were accustomed, we borrowed, bought on the installment plan, and, finally, repudiated our debts. If we all couldn't pay $2 a pair for silk stockings, something was wrong with the social system. But so long as we could, nothing was wrong with anything. As that observant historian, James Truslow Adams, wrote: "Every year brought new goods, of which we had never thought before. The need for more, and ever more, had grown to be irresistible. It became necessary to make money at any cost of effort or principle."
Among increasing numbers, it became desirable to make money without effort or principle. Public and private morality went into a state of eclipse. It is expedient now to rake up the sins of our bankers and big businessmen, but some of us remember when no apartment-house dweller could buy a bottle of milk, or a newspaper, or get a suit of clothes pressed if he didn't pay tribute to the janitor. A New York department store announced that it had declined to bribe its patron's chauffeurs. Every trade and labor union.had its own racket. The bankers and big businessmen have reformed somewhat; the janitors, chauffeurs, and labor union leaders are about as usual. The politicians, of course, are always as usual. For nearly four thousand years, politicians have remained the lowest form of animal life.
Before these "high standards of living", all other standards went down - not only standards of efficiency and thrift and ambition and honor, but of little things like courage, courtesy, loyalty, and what we used to call common decency. The change was reflected in our literature and drama, in our schools and universities, in our attitude toward law and order and discipline. Our admitted supremacy in crime has been attributed, and in some degree correctly attributed, to Prohibition, to the stupidities of our statutes, and to the link between politicians and other criminals, but, immeasurably more, it is due to public sympathy with the criminal. We cannot abhor a man who sins to satisfy our own desires. The chief probation officer's report to the New York Supreme Court described "Lucky" Luciano, recently convicted of compulsory prostitution in Manhattan, as one whose ideals of life were:
money to spend, beautiful women to associate with, silk underclothes, and places to go in style. His freedom of
conscience springs from his philosophy, "1 never was a crumb, and, if I have to be a crumb, 1'd rather be dead."
He explains a "crumb" as a person who works and saves, and indulges in no extravagances. Lucianois a shallow and parasitic individual, considerably wrapped up in his own feelings. His social outlook is essentially childish. He manifests a peasantlike faith in chance. His behavior patterns are essentially instinctive andprimitive. His manner is easy, copious and ingratiating.
How many of your friends and fellow-citizens do you find accurately psychoanalyzed in that report? None of us wants to think of these things. That's one of the symptoms.
Dwelling on them, I find myself again in an unpopular company; much the same company that was hooted down when first it pointed out the impracticability of Prohibition- Nicholas Murray Butler, James Truslow Adams, Henry L. Mencken, George Barton Cutten, and others of my betters. But the vision and courage and indomitability of these are almost our only hope - or would be, if any considerable number of us paid the slightest attention to them. Nobody does - nobody who hasn't an ax to grind, anyway. We want to dance. We want to laugh. But we shall die laughing. To live, we must think, and think quick and hard. To live, we must act, and raise and follow national leaders who have nothing to gain for themselves, who fear nothing, and are concerned with nothing but the salvation of their country. There are still such men. The tragic aspect of the universal catastrophe is that almost any unselfish, unprejudiced, and keenly intelligent person on earth could get us out of it, if he were omnipotent - or if any considerable proportion of our citizenry cared a damn.
Our difficulties are not with a social system that won't work, but with a society that won't work; not with philosophies of government that need changing, but with philosophies
of life that arechanged; not with soil erosion, but with soul erosion. None of the world-wide revolutions in system or government has accomplished anything, because nobody can make a machine better than its component parts. Our greatest danger, perhaps, derives from the self-seeker who would snatch power by promising the people an improvement independent of themselves. A people no longer willing or able to do for themselves, naturally jump at a leader "who does things" for them. It is the first instinct of the feeble and careless to seek someone who will control their destinies. The extent of our present feebleness and carelessness is indicated in our blindness to the consequences of changed systems all about us. Are the· Germans so much better off than they were under the Kaiser, or the Spaniards than they were under the King? Is there now so much less hunger, and more happiness, in France, and Italy, and Russia, and right here in the United States?
