10. Thoughts on Revolution

Thoughts on Revolution

I

ONE afternoon last December as I was passing by a café in Paris I got a jovial hail from an old friend whom I had not seen for years. He was about the last person in the world that I should have expected to turn up in Paris, for I thought he was in Russia, where, indeed, he had been for two years, and was but just out; he had come straight from Petersburg to Paris the week before. I was a bit pressed for time at the moment, so we agreed to meet at noon on the day following; and he left me with the remark, which struck me as a little odd, though I did not pay much attention to it at the time, that if anything interfered I could always find him at that café, “rain or shine, sick or well, drunk or sober.”

Next day, in the course of conversation about Russian affairs, he said, “What I told you yesterday was literally true. I haven’t stirred out of that café, except to sleep, since I came to Paris. I don’t want to go to the theatre, see sights, or hear music. Plenty of all that in Russia. But to be surrounded by people who are just talking, talking at leisure, talking about all sorts of matters of common social interest—that’s what I haven’t had for two years.

“I’ll tell you how it is,” he went on. “There is plenty of good in modern Russia, and a great deal to be said for the Government. Any student of history can see that. They have the same old stupid, exasperating bureaucracy that they have always had, but at that, it isn’t any worse than bureaucracy anywhere else, at home, or here in France, or——”

“Are they disinterested?” I broke in.

“Absolutely, I believe,” he said. “I am sure of it. They do a lot of stupid things. Their terrorist policy, for instance, is silly and unnecessary—they are safe enough. But again, like us Americans, or like the French, or any other of the old-line governments, it’s the only method they seem to understand. I can’t put on any airs about them, the Lord knows, when I think of Palmer and Burleson, Funston and Hell-roaring Jake Smith, and all the rest of our thin Tedline of heroes. I only wish they wouldn’t do it, for, as I say, they don’t need to. They have been smart enough to drop most of the old-line fool methods, and found there was no end of popular prestige in it, so I should think they would drop them all. In diplomacy, for instance, I suppose you noticed how Litvinov stood the League of Nations on its head at Geneva the other day, by calling its bluff about disarmament. The press and politicians of the other countries could only blackguard him—they knew he was showing them up, and all they could do about it was to lose their temper. But I have lived close to the Russian Government for two years, and while they do a good deal that I don’t like, I am sure there isn’t a man in it who is not bent solely on doing his level best for the masses of Russia.”

My friend paused a moment to discourage a fat crop-eared cat that was sharpening its claws on his trouser-leg. Then he proceeded:

“However, it isn’t particularly Russia that I am thinking about, but revolutions in general. I am all for them, you understand. We ought to have a lot more of them than we do. Thomas Jefferson struck twelve as usual when he said, God forbid that America should ever go twenty years without some such blow-up as Shays’s Rebellion. He could see the future as well as we can see the past. Who couldn’t see it? An enormous territory, rich as soap-grease, a scrawny thin population bent on looting it to the limit, a small fraction of the population blessed with the low sagacity to manage the Government into letting them get all four feet in the trough to crowd out the others—and there you are! I tell you, Thomas had his head properly screwed on when he said that once in twenty years would be about right, though if I had been in his place, I’d have taken a chance and made it ten.”

“Have a drink, Jim,” I suggested. “Don’t be so blue. Remember the American Legion met here the other day—this is hallowed ground! Take a hooker of this French beer, and cheer up!”

We compromised on some French coffee, and my companion took up his parable again:

“I am not so bloodthirsty as you think. I’ll explain all that presently. But getting back where we started, I don’t doubt that society has made some progress in the technique of revolution. There isn’t nearly so much bloodshed, for one thing. Compare the Russian Revolution with the French, or with any of its major predecessors in history, and you may almost say it was bloodless. Again, I think that in any future revolution the works of art will be safe, the temples of art and science, the interesting vestiges of antiquity. The Russian Revolution carefully spared all those, carefully kept them out of harm’s way. We shan’t have any more vandalism like that of Cromwell’s soldiers, or like what took place in Northern Flanders, or during the French Revolution itself. When you think of what those fellows did to the whole tangible apparatus of beauty, and to the romance and poetry of life, you have to cut the cards with yourself to decide whether the French Revolution was worth the price. But from now on, as I say, I believe all those things will be safe.

“But will the cafés be safe?” My friend suddenly shook the forefinger of emphasis under my nose, and then gave his arm a wide sweep to include all the little groups of chatting fellow-loungers about us. “Will all this be safe? This leisurely free conversation on any topic that the human mind is heir to, the quiet infiltration of ideas and notions, not very important, maybe, but not so unimportant either when you understand how humanizing the process is and how much it has to do with building up the social sense. Look at all these people here, all talking, and probably no two groups talking about the same thing. I dare say none of it is of the kind that moves mountains exactly, and yet would you say that all this talk makes for inefficiency? Well, yes and no. It does for robots, but not for human beings. It may not help build up the Industrial State, or round off a Country Fit for Heroes to Live in, but it goes a long way to make life a lovely reality.

“Well, will that be safe? It wasn’t safe in Russia. All that kind of thing is dead and gone—hopelessly busted, like the old Flemish stained glass. There you get the real savagery of a revolution! When you have a revolution on, or when you are consolidating the gains of a revolution—worse then, because it takes longer—you have an utter wreckage of the human spirit and of the humane life, even if not a drop of blood has been shed, or a dollar’s worth of property destroyed.

“It is the old story in Russia. Nobody can think or talk about anything but the Revolution. Science, literature, music, drama, painting, poetry, religion, social life, all follow the flag. You bet they do, just as they did in France in 1789. In other words, every blessed value in human life is adulterated. Speak to anyone about the permanent unchanging values in any activity of the human spirit, and he will come right back at you with his infernal little set of arbitrary values, as prompt and smug as a Kansas prohibitionist. Where two or three are gathered together you’d think you were at a committee meeting of the Anti-Saloon League. There is wonderful art in Petersburg—Moscow, too—by George! you ought to see what they’ve got! But they don’t put their mind on it, you know. They merely salvaged it. Talk about it, and they sidetrack you right away on the Art of the Revolution. So you get the Music of the Revolution, the Literature of the Revolution, and so on—every avenue of excursion for the human spirit is cluttered up with flubdubbery about the dam’ old Revolution. It gives one a bright idea of what life must have been like amidst all the rabid nonsense that was uttered in Philadelphia in 1789 by noisy numskulls who called each other ‘citizen,’ and wore cockades. Revolution simply defiles the spiritual atmosphere of a country, and no social life worthy of the name—nothing that is any life at all—can flourish.”

“In other words,” I said, “any kind of social life that commands a civilized person’s respect is possible only in a fairly stable order of things.”

“Just so,” he said. “It’s no discovery; it has been observed before. But the fact has slipped down so far out of sight that if it isn’t dragged up and posted as a warning pretty soon, civilization-building will become a lost art.”

“But that’s just where our country comes in to make the world safe for civilization, don’t you see?” I replied. “There’s a stable order of things for you!—rich, powerful, influential, unshakable! We have a benevolent, far-seeing plutocracy and a prosperous, contented proletariat. Can you imagine greater stability than that? Didn’t Mr. Hoover report to the President the other day that real wages were never so high at any time or any place in the world? I assure you that the very last bulwark—if it comes to that—against world-wide revolution will be found in the Mississippi Valley. So we are free from all those preoccupations, and we can help restore the art of civilization-building in those less happy regions where its exercise is temporarily suspended. I make no doubt that this is our destiny, our great mission.”

My companion had been sitting with his chair a-tilt. While I was speaking, he slowly brought it down on all-fours and looked at me steadily in the face with an expression of the blankest amazement, for what seemed to me several minutes. Then he turned his gaze away, and was apparently lost in thought; and presently he said, as if to himself, “What an astonishing idea!”

II

“Come,” he said, finally, dispelling his reverie and reverting to me with a friendly smile. “If all that is pleasantry, I don’t mind being the goat. Really, don’t you know that the United States is the most revolution-cursed country in the world? Why do you suppose that spiritual activity in America is virtually non-existent? Simply because we have never yet had that stable order of things which you speak of. Every year of our life for a century and a half we have either been cleaning up after one revolution or getting ready for another. Don’t you know that?”

“Well, I don’t exactly,” I replied, “but I seem to know that either you or this poisonous French coffee has got my brains on the run. A few minutes ago you said we didn’t have revolutions enough, and now you say we’ve had nothing else but. Don’t we schedule our revolutions to suit you?”

“We’ve had only two, but they were big ones,” he said, impatiently. “I am for a lot of little ones, and I’m for it because I’m more for getting along without any. Don’t bother your head about that paradox; I’ll clear it up for you in a moment. First, let’s clear up our history in the matter of those revolutions. Remember, to begin with, that a revolution is not always contemporaneous with the rattle of muskets and the roll of drums. These may come before or after. The real revolution takes place when the shift of economic power is effected from one class in society to another. Don’t forget that. Well, then, in the colonial days we had a fairly settled order of things and, considering our isolation and the poverty of our cultural apparatus, our spiritual activity gave a mighty good account of itself. Compare our social life and its cultural product with those of any other colonists anywhere in the world, and they are nothing to be ashamed of. We had a line of men, you remember, who could have held their end up with pretty much anybody if the First Revolution had not come along to upset them and divert their energies.

“But the First Revolution did come along, and when it was over its gains had to be consolidated. That’s a nice orthodox phrase, and I like to use it. What it really means in this instance is that the issue had to be fought out whether farmer-labour-planting interests should get all four feet in the trough and subordinate the bankers and industrialists, or whether the bankers and industrialists should get all four feet in the trough and exploit agriculture.

“This took almost a century. The financial and manufacturing interests got first innings. They drafted the Constitution, put it through to ratification, and got complete control of the Legislature and Administration for the first ten years. Then they were dislodged in 1800 under Thomas Jefferson, but they still held control of the courts. This leverage, combined with many circumstances, gradually increased their power, but they were put on their back again in 1828 by Andrew Jackson. They got up, dusted themselves off, went at it again, and in the Second Revolution in 1860 they flattened out the agricultural interests for good and all.

“Then the ‘consolidation’ process had to begin all over again. This time the pious phrase means the arrangement of the terms of exploitation by a victorious social group. Well, I needn’t go into details of that period; you have lived through most of it, from the Grant-Belknap—Gould-Fisk—Northern Pacific-Credit Mobilier kind of thing, down through the South Improvement Company to Fall, Denby, and Sinclair. I don’t meant to blow you to a free lesson in American history, but just to bring out the fact that after Britain, the foreign master, was thrown out on his head at Yorktown it took almost exactly eighty years to decide which of two contesting domestic groups should master the other; and after one of the two was pitched out for good and all in 1864 it has taken all the years since then to establish the victor’s terms of indemnity and guarantee, and they aren’t settled yet.

“I simply want to show you why the United States, spiritually, is in exactly the condition of Soviet Russia, and why the people who look to either country for some great outburst of light and leading are putting down their hopes on a dead card. The Americans eat right, and the Russians don’t—not yet. That’s the only difference; and the Russians are fast getting around to the American idea that a people who can afford to eat right is a great people. That’s the idea behind your precious Mr. Hoover’s report on wages.”

“But surely,” I said, “you won’t deny that a diffused material well-being is the basis of all civilization.”

“Surely I won’t,” he replied, “but the basis isn’t the structure. You’ve got forty-seven stories yet to build, and you have to lay out and shape your foundation with reference to your structure. You and I know that, but Mr. Hoover doesn’t, and not one American in ten thousand knows it, and the Russians, if they ever knew it, are in a way to forget it as fast as they can.”

He took a notebook from his pocket, and leafed it over.

“Here it is. Here’s what Walt Whitman wrote, somewhere about 1870, I think it was—before you and I were born, anyway. He was the Good Grey Poet of Democracy, you understand. Read it aloud, so I’ll be sure you get it.”

I took the notebook, and read as follows:

“I say that our New World Democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and æsthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal.... It is as if we were somehow being endowed with a vast and thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.”

“Exactly,” said my friend, when I had finished reading the extract, “and if I were Lunacharsky, I should translate that, print it at the head of an abstract of United States vital statistics, and keep it posted in every Russian household.

“ ‘An almost complete failure in its social aspects.’ Now, why is that? It is because our whole culture has followed the flag, followed it every day of our national life. First, the flag of the revolutionary colonists, then the flag of consolidation, then of revolution again, and now of consolidation again. At this moment every cultural interest in the United States is crowding the flag of consolidation so close that its head is run stone-blind in the folds of it.

“I read the other day that Columbia University had enrolled 35,000 students this year. Now, just ask yourself the one question, What for? You can make your own answer—no, you can’t, either, for you will be laughing your ribs loose. Then you will go back to Ernest Renan who said, quite a while before Whitman, ‘The countries which, like the United States, have created a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher education, will long have to expiate their fault by their intellectual mediocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit, their failure in general intelligence.’

“A considerable popular instruction, you understand, in whatever is necessary to sell bonds or motor cars, run a bank or a law office, keep store, build bridges, and the like—that is, instruction in following the flag of consolidation, the kind of thing Columbia does so well, none better. I’m a Columbia man myself, a sort of black sheep, maybe, but I can still give honour where honour is due. Education follows the flag, the arts follow it—think of Pennell and George Bellows, for instance—literature and criticism follow it, and so do social life and manners. The reason why there is no such thing as social conversation in America is only that every man-jack of us has his mind’s eye constantly fixed on the flag and can’t think about anything else. How many men do you know among us who can talk with you for an hour about something that is not personal and yet not symbolized by the flag? I was interested the other day by something that purported to have been written by a precocious little brat of a girl in one of our schools. It is sophomoric and affected, certainly, and if she were my daughter, I can see how she’d have had her behind royally tanned about twice a day from birth. But she did exactly hit on this point that I am making, that all our social life is degraded to practical barbarism by following the flag of consolidation:

“We are called the pampered, unruly children of the jazz age, but in reality we are the offspring of the machine age, and the cacophony of the band to which we dance is the nerve-tearing bore of electric riveters, the hiss of puddled steel, the almost inaudible whirr of revolving wheels. The machine is turning out dollars and comfort and Ford cars and radios—and the younger generation. Can you stop it—or us?

“There, you see, you have it—the tone set for a complete social life by industry, banking and real-estating, all moiling in the process of consolidating the gains of the Second Revolution.”

“Poor old devil!” I said. “No use recommending a drink to a man in your condition. It would take more than French beer to make you see daylight again.”

III

“You needn’t worry about me,” he rejoined. “If anybody doesn’t care for that sort of thing, either in America or in Russia, he can mighty easily move out. But we were talking on an impersonal topic, I believe, weren’t we?—revolutions and their social effect, I think it was. Well, now I seem to be brought logically down to the paradox of more and better revolutions, so I’ll say a word or two about that before we go.

“I know a country that doesn’t have any revolutions,” he said, tilting his chair back and stretching out comfortably at full length. “The reason why they do not have them is that they are on the brink of one all the time. They make their politicians walk a chalked line. You know, those swine are the same in all countries. They go as far as you let them, but they are the world’s prize cowards. Well, in that country the people don’t let them go any distance at all. The politicians have got to show ’em, every time, in small things as well as great. I never knew there were so many Missouri people in the world. I remember, fifteen years ago, a friend of mine told the mayor of their biggest town, a fine city of a million or so, that he ought to turn a certain busy thoroughfare into a one-way street. The mayor just threw up his hands, and said, ‘If I did that, there would be a revolution!’ There would, too, and that mayor wouldn’t have lasted as long as a pint of Prohibition busthead at a camp-meeting. He knew the populace would adjourn right down to the City Hall in a body, search him out, and swing him to the handiest lamp-post, and leave him there as a sort of friendly suggestion to his successor to go slow, and not crowd the mourners.

“They are a reasonable people too. It took ten years to introduce traffic regulation in that town. They weren’t against it—perfectly intelligent about it and willing to see it tried—and they like it first rate now. Indeed, they were the first people I ever heard of who finally went beyond the authorities, and made them regulate pedestrian traffic, too. But, as I said, they had to be shown every step of the way, and the officials who did the showing handled the job as gingerly as snake-charmers, for fear that the people might take sudden notions. That’s the way everything goes in that country, and it is the best place in the world today for a human being to inhabit. They have the finest culture and the most interesting social life that I know. I could spin you yarns by the hour about them—things you simply wouldn’t believe. I shan’t tell you where all this is, for I don’t want Henry Ford to go there—shouldn’t mind at all if he’d go himself, you know, but he wouldn’t. He’d only send out a lot of poor devils of dependents, and I don’t want their blood on my head.

“Think of the Germans and Italians! The Germans are the most admirable of people and very delightful, the Italians the most delightful of people and very admirable. But would you live in either country? Some ignorant bullfrog of a banker comes back to Wall Street all swelled up, and tells us how stable Italy is. Well, so it is, for a banker or a tourist. The trains run on time, the hotels are cleaned up, and all that sort of thing, but nobody’s head can hold anything but Fascism. Again you get Fascist art, Fascist social theory, Fascist literature, Fascist music, on the assumption that Fascism is bigger than the human spirit—exactly the counterpart of the assumption that overwhelms you in Russia.

“No, the only intelligent revolution is one that you keep brewing all the time. Why do you suppose Aaron Burr did not contest the election of 1800? Because he knew it wasn’t healthy—practically certain to bring on throat trouble. Marbury vs. Madison would have looked different to John Marshall if he had known there was a rope at the end of it. It’s exactly like house-cleaning. Don’t you remember how every April the women folks used to turn in and raise the devil for a week, so you couldn’t live on the premises? I suppose there is hardly a household in America now that has an old-fashioned spring house-cleaning. They hoe out a little every day, and keep the vacuum cleaner and the disinfectant where they can get their hands on them right away whenever they want them. They don’t clean things up, in short; they keep them clean. They are continually organized for quick action, and so they never have to take any.

“That’s the way it is with those people I spoke of, who don’t have revolutions. They keep themselves perpetually framed up to hang somebody, no matter who, and hence nobody ever gets hanged, and the human spirit enjoys its due degree of freedom. The spiritual atmosphere is not stifling with the filthy miasma sent up by revolution or consolidation. There’s no escaping it, you know; no matter where you are in America, Russia, Italy, it gets you. The country I mentioned has the party system in politics, and you would be amused to see how carefully the party collisions are localized. The people know that all hands in all parties are scoundrels, and they sort of sequestrate the whole herd, like an old-fashioned red-light district. Inside the stockade the politicians can cut up what obscene gyrations they like, but anyone caught off the reservation gets it in the neck.”

“Pooh!” I said. “This perfectionist tribe of yours is just like anybody else. People don’t differ.”

“Right enough,” he replied. “That tribe, as you call it, has had all this drilled into them by a long and very special experience. Human beings learn the art of living only by the indelicate means you use when you housebreak a pup. These people have no peculiar virtues, except those that were accidentally hammered into them. But that’s neither here nor there. We were talking about the social effect of revolutions; and I just brought them in for purposes of illustration.

“That social effect is the same everywhere. All sorts of wiseacres are asking what’s the matter with Russia, or with America, and are giving us all sorts of answers, mostly wide of the mark, and telling all sorts of stories of what we can expect from the Russia or America of the future, mostly preposterous. Some of them get impatient and scold because they look for the impossible and don’t get it. It is no trouble to find out what the matter really is, or to forecast what one can expect, when one gets beyond the mere conventional history of a country’s development.

“What on earth is the use of hammering the present generation of Americans and Russians, or poking fun at them for their limitations? Fundamentally, their social philosophy is exactly the same. In a somewhat transfigured sense, their god is their belly. Hence I’m not keen to live among either of them. I am not taken in by that ‘certain highly deceptive superficial popular intellectuality’ that Whitman speaks of. I know the depth of being from which the cultural life of both countries is lived, and that’s enough. But I also know the actual history, the social history, of both countries, and what it leads me to expect is exactly what is before my eyes. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, their people may learn what revolutions really are, and what their social effect is, and how to dodge both. But I shan’t be here then, so meanwhile “

But by this time I had had quite enough of my friend’s vagaries, and I went my way, wondering rather sadly at the debility produced upon a really brilliant intellect, as he was in the old days, by two years’ sojourn among the poor brainsick creatures of the Soviets.