The Spirit of America. Henry Van Dyke
blended strains of blood which made the American people in the beginning are still the dominant factors in the American people of to-day. Men of distinction in science, art, and statesmanship have come from abroad to cast their fortunes in with the republic—men like Gallatin and Agassiz and Guyot and Lieber and McCosh and Carl Schurz—and their presence has been welcomed, their service received with honour. Of the total population of the United States in 1900 more than 34 per cent were of foreign birth or parentage. But the native stock has led and still leads America.
There is a popular cyclopædia of names, called Who’s Who in America, which contains brief biographies of some 16,395 living persons, who are supposed to be more or less distinguished, in one way or another, in the various regions in which they live. It includes the representatives of foreign governments in the United States, and some foreign authors and business men. It is not necessary to imagine that all who are admitted to this quasi-golden book of “Who’s-who-dom” are really great or widely famous. There are perhaps many of whom we might inquire, Which is who, and why is he somewhat? But, after all, the book includes most of the successful lawyers, doctors, merchants, bankers, preachers, politicians, authors, artists, and teachers—the people who are most influential in their local communities and best known to their fellow-citizens. The noteworthy fact is that 86.07 per cent are native Americans. I think that a careful examination of the record would show that a very large majority have at least three generations of American ancestry on one side or the other of the family.
Of the men elected to the presidency of the United States there has been only one whose ancestors did not belong to America before the Revolution—James Buchanan, whose father was a Scotch-Irish preacher who came to the New World in 1783. All but four of the Presidents of the United States could trace their line back to Americans of the seventeenth century.
But it is not upon these striking facts of physical heredity that I would rest my idea of an American people, distinct and continuous, beginning a conscious life at some time antecedent to 1764 and still guiding the development of the United States. I would lay far more stress upon intellectual and spiritual heredity, that strange process of moral generation by which the qualities of the Spirit of America have been communicated to millions of immigrants from all parts of the world.
Since 1820 about twenty-six million persons have come to the United States from foreign lands. At the present moment, in a population which is estimated at about ninety millions, there are probably between thirteen and fifteen millions who are foreign-born. It is an immense quantity for any nation to digest and assimilate, and it must be confessed that there are occasional signs of local dyspepsia in the large cities. But none the less it may be confidently affirmed that the foreign immigration of the past has been thoroughly transformed into American material, and that the immigration of the present is passing through the same process without any alarming interruption.
I can take you into quarters of New York where you might think yourself in a Russian Ghetto, or into regions of Pennsylvania which would seem to you like Hungarian mining towns. But if you will come with me into the public schools, where the children of these people of the Old World are gathered for education, you will find yourself in the midst of fairly intelligent and genuinely patriotic young Americans. They will salute the flag for you with enthusiasm. They will sing “Columbia” and “The Star Spangled Banner” with more vigour than harmony. They will declaim Webster’s apostrophe to the Union, or cry with Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
What is more, they will really feel, in some dim but none the less vital way, the ideals for which these symbols stand. Give them time, and their inward allegiance will become clearer, they will begin to perceive how and why they are Americans. They will be among those wise children who know their own spiritual fathers.
Last June it fell to my lot to deliver the commencement address at the College of the City of New York, a free institution which is the crown of the public school system of the city. Only a very small proportion of the scholars had names that you could call American, or even Anglo-Saxon. They were French and German, Polish and Italian, Russian and Hebrew. Yet as I spoke on the subject of citizenship, suggested by the recent death of that great American, ex-President Grover Cleveland, the response was intelligent, immediate, unanimous, and eager. There was not one of that crowd of young men who would have denied or surrendered his right to trace his patriotic ancestry, his inherited share in the Spirit of America, back to Lincoln and Webster, Madison and Jefferson, Franklin and Washington.
Here, then, is the proposition to which I dedicate these conferences.
There is now, and there has been since before the Revolution, a Spirit of America, the soul of a people, and it is this which has made the United States and which still animates and controls them.
I shall try to distinguish and describe a few, four or five of the essential features, qualities, ideals—call them what you will—the main elements of that spirit as I understand it. I shall also speak of two or three other traits, matters of temperament, perhaps, more than of character, which seem to me distinctly American. Then because I am neither a politician nor a jurist, I shall pass from the important field of civil government and national institutions, to consider some of the ways in which this soul of the American people has expressed itself in education and in social effort and in literature.
In following this course I venture to hope that it may be possible to correct, or at least to modify, some of the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the popular view of America which prevails in some quarters of Europe. Perhaps I may be able to suggest, even to Americans, some of the real sources of our national unity and strength.
“Un Américain” says André Tardieu, in his recent book, “est toujours plus proche qu’on ne croit d’un contradicteur Américain.”
Why?
That is what I hope to show in these lectures. I do not propose to argue for any creed, nor to win converts for any political theory. In these conferences I am not a propagandist, nor a preacher, nor an advocate. Not even a professor, strictly speaking. Just a man from America who is trying to make you feel the real spirit of his country, first in her life, then in her literature. I should be glad if in the end you might be able to modify the ancient proverb a little and say, Tout comprendre, c’est un peu aimer.
II
SELF-RELIANCE AND THE REPUBLIC
II
SELF-RELIANCE AND THE REPUBLIC
The other day I came upon a new book with a title which seemed to take a good ideal for granted: The New American Type.
The author began with a description of a recent exhibition of portraits in New York, including pictures of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. He was impressed with the idea that “an astonishing change had taken place in men and women between the time of President Washington and President McKinley; bodies, faces, thoughts, had all been transformed. One short stairway from the portraits of Reynolds to those of Sargent ushered in changes as if it had stretched from the first Pharaoh to the last Ptolemy.” From this interesting text the author went on into an acute and sparkling discussion of the different pictures and the personalities whom they presented, and so into an attempt to define the new type of American character which he inferred from the modern portraits.
Now it had been my good fortune, only a little while before, to see another exhibition of pictures which made upon my mind a directly contrary impression. This was not a collection of paintings, but a show of living pictures: a Twelfth Night celebration, in costume, at the Century Club in New York. Four or five hundred of the best-known and most influential men in the metropolis of America had arrayed themselves in the habiliments of various lands and ages for an evening of fun and frolic. There were travellers and explorers who had brought home the robes of the Orient. There were men of exuberant fancy who had made themselves up as Roman senators or Spanish toreadors or Provençal troubadours. But most of the costumes were