The Great American Inheritance

Improvement Era Vol. XXXII DECEMBER, 1928 No. 2 The Great American Inheritance By Elmer G. Peterson, President Utah Agricultural College T ^HE American republic is the immediate offspring of European civilization and the inheritor of much that has crystallized from the world-old upward struggle of all humanity. We are the recipients of many of the weaknesses of the old world and yet embody ideas and ideals seemingly impossible of realization in Europe or elsewhere. I am conscious of the fact that it is customary, particu- larly in what is sometimes called intellectual circles, to condemn America and point with pride to the beauty of other parts of thi' world. There is a school of near-intellectuals who try to make almost everything in America ugly. They glory in discovering odd and abnormal or diseased features of our life and in the name of literary freedom or realism exposing and prodding about in these sores, revel- ling in the very ugliness and odor which they uncover. But while these people occupy considerable attention they probably will give way to more creative and enduring thinkers who try to record the charm rather than the ugliness of life. America embodies many praiseworthy features in her political and social life which she has inherited from the past or developed out of her own experiences. There are, indeed, so many that it is difficult to say off hand what the great American inheritance is, what is of greatest importance that her children inherit as a result of their fortunate birth on her soil. There is the item of natural resources which has given to Amer- ica the privilege of extraordinary industrial development. This is a tremendous force in our advancement and many would undoubtedly name it as the great inheritance. America, with only 6 per cent of the world's population, now produces 50 per cent of the world's re- sources in basic products of iron, steel, copper, timber, cotton and oil. It is estimated that we are now producing 55 per cent of the world's iron ore. 55 per cent of the world's pig iron, 66 per cent of the world's steel, 5 1 per cent of the world's copper, 62 per cent of the world's pe- troleum. 43 per cent of the world's coal, 52 per cent of the world's timber output, 65 per cent of the world's naval stores, 42 per cent of

92 IMPROVEMENT ERA the world's phosphate, 80 per cent of the world's sulphur, 63 per cent of the world's mica, 62 per cent of the world's lead, 64 per cent of the world's zinc, 60 per cent of the world's talc soapstone, 45 per cent of the world's barytes, and 55 per cent of the world's cotton. We now have 50 per cent of the world's railroads, 75 per cent of the world's telephones and telegraph, and 90 per cent of the world's automobiles. This marvelous store of products has made possible the development of engineering and of mechanical power to a point unheard of previously in world history. Taking land as a basis of individual opportunity, the following table indicates the overwhelming advantage possessed by the American citizen in comparison with other citizens: Pec Capita Wealth in Land United States 16 acres India 1.9 Ireland 4.6 Italy 1.7 France 3.1 Japan 1.7 Germany 2.0 Great Britain 1.4 Belgium .9 Such wealth of course may become, if improperly used, a mere expression of our vulgarity. A nation cannot ascribe greatness to natural resources. Here, however, is a strong and incomparable physical foundation upon which greatness may be erected. And this can be said for land, crops and mineral wealth; they provide for a properly nourished population. Well fed and well clothed people are, one would think, more likely to think and act normally and in- telligently. National sanity is not so likely to obtain with an impoverished people. While we would not wish to designate natural resources as the great American inheritance, at the same time such resources should rank high in our classification of blessings. Free education is assuredly one of the important American in- heritances. Our social and political system is based upon the idea of universal education. Every young man or woman, no matter what the social or economic status of the family, is encouraged to secure an education. In order to guarantee a certain equality of op- portunity, attendance at school is made compulsory up to 18 years of age. Books are free in most states and busses are provided out of the common purse to carry children to and from school when distances make such transportation necessary. Colleges are free, many states specifying that there shall be no charge for tuition. Entrance fees only are required. In American colleges the state spends from 200 to 500 dollars, and even above this figure, in certain technological work a year upon the education of each student. The fees re- quired to enter these schools vary from fifty or sixty dollars up to 1 50 or 200 dollars for general education. Thus the state and nation deliberately levy taxes in order to give even higher education to the

THE GREAT AMERICAN INHERITANCE 93 youth who render themselves worthy of it. The movement to make the recipient of higher education pay substantially the cost of the same is not receiving very enthusiastic support in America. Free edu- cation is one of the most deeply rooted of our conceptions and we shall depart from it very slowly. Geographical and political isolation has been one of the major blessings of America and may be called an inheritance of great value. Previously in world history the English Channel served to protect England while the nation built up its liberties. Later, when trans- portation practically overcame such minor distances, the Atlantic ocean served us in a similar way. This isolation protected England and later the United States from physical disease and pollution and equally from political and social contamination. Fast steam ships, the cable, radio, and the aeroplane and dirigible have now almost eliminated the Atlantic as a barrier. Yet it has served its pur- pose to protect American institutions until they developed sufficient strength, it is hoped, to protect themselves. Our developing civiliza- tion has been a migrating one. Indeed, development seems to have necessitated new areas. The pioneer who has carried out with him many of the finer attributes of which life is made up, which threatened periodically to be suffocated in the regions which had established themselves, may in this important sense be thought of as one of the saviors of civilization. One of the great American inheritances is freedom. Freedom, as now in mind, does not mean the license to do anything one desires. There must be rules and regulations for the guidance of any orderly government, community, group or institution. Freedom in this negative sense consists in the right of any person to withdraw from the society whose rules he or she does not approve. This may be called the age of freedom. Many of the old re- straints are removed. Reverence has measurably disappeared for things once thought sacred. Religious authority, except that of the inner conscience, has largely broken down. Political authority has in measure broken down. Kings and priests who once ruled the world no longer do so. Documents, such as the Constitution, which were once, and still are by many, considered almost holy are now fre- quently ridiculed. Respect for age has weakened. Conduct based upon the idea of freedom is now frequently so loose as to be a menace. The respect which once was gallantly accorded to women has in part disappeared. Marriage and the family relationship is in jeopardy because people are construing freedom in terms of utter license. America, however, is dedicated, beyond recall, to freedom in all its legitimate forms. We must survive or perish as the result of the exercise of it. Freedom, in a political sense, may be said to be our national

94 IMPROVEMENT ERA birthright. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalien- able rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- ness" may turn out to be the holy of holies in political literature. It has almost taken its place with holy writ. There are suggestions in modern psychological research that the statement that "men are created equal" is more literally true than we once thought. It would be a remarkable thing if modern science should prove that the foun- ders of the American republic were as correct in a biological and psy- chological sense in their statement as to human equality as they were correct in respect to legal rights and opportunity. How many thousands of years it required to destroy the idea that men were not free and equal, it would be hard to say. Certainly it required a long time for men to demonstrate their right to think and act as they chose, limited only by the effect of their action upon the welfare of others. The story of the kings is one of the pitiable stories of history. The defense of the Divine Right of kings for thousands of years drenched the earth with blood. It would be fruitless to have political independence without economic freedom. To be spiritually subservient to a boss is as bad as to be subservient to a king. To be rendered impotent because of our economic servitude is to nullify our political freedom. For many years it was thought that the vast accumula- tions of capital in a few hands would produce this economic slavery in America. Apparently quite the opposite is happening. The workers themselves are coming to own, to a large extent, the corporations for which they work. This, in the opinion of Professor T. N. Carver, of Harvard, is probably the greatest actual revolution now taking place in the world. Then there is social slavery and slavery to tradition. England with all the glory which is justly hers because she is the author of the Magna Charta and other great contributions to freedom, nevertheless has by custom stratified her society into hard layers of servants and those to be served. The English servant is by social usage taught his place and no encouragement is given him or his children to rise above it. America, on the other hand, has no unbreakable horizontal strati- fication socially or in any other way. We recently had the choice of a blacksmith's son or a former New York newsboy for president of the United States. The American social conscience is in some ways the most powerful impulse in America. Millions of each gen- eration of our youth have at their mother's knee and in the school room been deeply impregnated with the ideal of social justice. It is the American passion; the American voter will deliberately vote it to his own economic injury. America has won the war for religious freedom. We no longer

THE GREAT AMERICAN INHERITANCE 95 question the right of any man to worship God according to the dic- tates of his own conscience. In achieving religious freedom many think we have eliminated religion. I do not think so. Coercion is unholy in any form in which it attaches itself to the human con- science. "Kingcraft and priestcraft have been the twin evils which mankind has been forced to conquer."* The question of the right of a religious officer to dictate the nature of the belief of another has caused incalculable bloodshed and suffering. America made such an assumption forever impossible, at least within the confines of our own country. The religion of Jesus Christ as we are able to discern it in the Gospels is the religion of freedom. Jesus never sought to coerce the human mind. His bitterest criticism was of those Pharisees who thought that religion consisted in the formal observance of ritual and ceremony and that it permitted vicious selfishness if only these forms were observed. The result was a gross hypocrisy which Christ ab- horred. He taught that love was the heart of religion; and love and charity are impossible except where the mind and spirit are free. As a result of breaking these shackles which have bound the energies of the world for so long, America is achieving a material competence hitherto undreamed of in the world's history. Herbert Hoover, in his Newark, New Jersey, speech on September 1 7 called attention to what is in reality an almost miraculous manifestation of the American ideal of equality of opportunity, the condition here revealed being a direct expression, I believe, of individual initiative which is a manifestation of freedom. "If we say that 5 per cent of butter and 95 per cent of flour form the basis of that useful mixture called 'bread and butter,' then the weekly earnings in each country would buy at retail in those countries the following total of this useful compound. Please note these figures carefully: Weekly wages if applied to the purchase of composite pounds of bread and butter (Each pound 95 per cent wheat flour and 5 per cent butter) m W S ^ e § 5 « J £-r P- - It. "3 £ S $ 3 | a oiuj u w u :> Q United States 717 731 778 558 323 259 United Kingdom 367 262 267 267 136 160 Germany 217 173 158 133 106 112 France 269 94 123 136 73 68 Belgium 150 96 76 94 94 65 Italy 166 151 152 95 95 119 Sweden 261 256 224 180 155 162 Japan 164 125 96 60 83 66 *From an address by President A. W. Ivins.

96 IMPROVEMENT ERA "Of course, the American employee does not use his higher income to buy unnecessary pounds of bread and butter. He uses it to diversify and expand his consumption of all things. It spells better homes, automobiles, radio and a thousand things for the family that were unknown a generation ago, and are utterly unknown to the average citizen in most countries of the world. "The fear of poverty has been reduced. Fear of loss of employment has been lessened by stability. Fear of old age and for the future of the family has been lessened through increased payments to the savings banks and to the insur- ance companies and to our labor union benefit societies." The comparative labor output per inhabitant in the various countries is as follows: China 1 British India ._ 1J4 Russia 2 J^2 Italy iyA Japan 3 Y2 Poland _ 6 Holland '. 7 France 8 '/£ Australia . 8]/2 Czechoslovakia 9 Yi Germany 1 2 Belgium 16 Great Britain 18 Canada 20 United States 30 We now have, engineers estimate, through the utilization of machinery, the equivalent of 35 invisible slaves at work for each man, woman and child in the country. This makes a total army of 3,500,000,000 slaves, beyond comparison the largest army of workers ever brought together by a people. Freedom of mind and conscience has released human energy and initiative. Invention and progress and power are the result. After everything else has been given its indisputable place of importance, Christianity remains as the great American inheritance. Possibly the pioneering of our country, our intimate contact with nature, and the hard struggle itself, but equally, I believe, freedom for the time from the corrupting forces which seem to set in after people become established and attain wealth and luxury have saved us, temporarily at least, from the fate of Europe and the predecessors of Europe. That we are now at this dangerous point goes without saying. The degeneration of ideals which has periodically broken down nations has not yet fully overtaken us. It is interesting to note how closely the earlier European and our American civilization have been correlated with the Christian ideal. Most of what the modern world has by way of civilization is the result of Christ's teaching and the measure of our acceptance of the same. The disintegration of

THE GREAT AMERICAN INHERITANCE 97 nations and civilizations of the past and of our own time can be closely connected and correlated with their departure from the stan- dards taught by the Savior of the world. And the tragic lack of development of peoples, expressing itself in century after century of needless ignorance and misery, may be accounted for by their failure to accept ideals and standards of conduct for the establishment of which Christ gave his life. Modern science, the free school, and the great industrial development which we associate with modern America are traceable, I believe, to the teachings of Jesus Christ. The development of Europe, as distinguished from the backwardness of much of the rest of the world, particularly Asia and Africa, was a development initiated by and definitely associated with the same basic teaching. The safety of the world and the peace and happiness of its people is irrevocably bound up with observance of his doctrine. Let me say here a word about the Bible. It is a record of God's dealings with man. It is, and desirably so, practically the only vol- ume of Christian doctrine which the publicly supported institutions can use in the instruction of American youth. Its delineation of the nature and attributes of God, as conceived by Christian people and their forebears, and its record of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ make it the world's most valuable religious possession. It is much abused in this age of advanced criticism. It does not come down to us without imperfections; and it contains much that is primitive and sometimes revolting in its recital of human weakness; at the same time it embodies many of the most sublime records in existence. As literature it is, of course, the one indispensable volume. I am now emphasizing its value, however, not as literature, but as a human record revealing the most essential human ideals. It has contributed more to the world's welfare than all the philosophy from all other sources in the world combined. I say this with a full knowledge of the abuses which have been practiced in its name. These inheritances, of which we speak, are not, of course, en- tirely separate or distinct. They are closely related and interwoven. Public schools were the inevitable result of freedom; they were not separately operating forces. The passion for freedom and new op- portunity drove men to America and they acquired isolation in com- ing here. Christianity cannot be made up of servants and masters except as acquired worthiness entitles men to dominion. But this dominion can never justly interfere with the opportunity of others. A brotherhood of all men, which is the great objective of Christi- anity, by its very name makes brotherly equality the first necessity. The select and privileged two per cent who get into college should be the exemplary youth of the land. I would not have colleges dismal and cheerless institutions; on the other hand, it would be regrettable to see them sink to the low level of a back-street public

98 IMPROVEMENT ERA dance hall. To lift up the minds and spirits of its students to an eager interest in life and to develop a vision of the beauty and the majesty of life is the business Of this college as of every other similar institution. We have watched the students of the college during these interesting recent years with growing respect for their essential wholesomeness in this generation of free thinking for which all in- telligent people are thankful. Along with the abuses which always follow in the wake of progress, there has come to many of our youth, we sincerely believe, self-control self-imposed. Out of it is coming to those worthy of the freedom something infinitely finer by way of thinking and conduct than could possibly be the result of allegiance to an outside authority no matter how formally right such an au- thority is or seeks to be. The Kingdom of God is within us. It cannot be imposed upon us from without. It is a part of the eternal plan that men should be free and held responsible for their freedom: judged according to the deeds done in the flesh. These American inheritances should make American youth the most appreciative in the world. Here in America, based upon and resulting from freedom and the Christian ideal, is a veritable material millennium; a spiritual millennium can come only out of the hearts of men. And now even this great dream of the ages is possible of realization if men will construe their freedom and their material power in terms of opportunity to live righteously. The Real Trouble An old-fashioned philosopher, meditating on what ails the world, gave the following list of ills: "Too many diamonds and not enough alarm-clocks. Too many silk shirts and not enough red-flannel ones. Too many pointed-toed shoes and not enough square-toed ones. Too many serge suits and not enough overalls. Too much decollete and not enough aprons. Too much of the spirit of 'get while the getting is good,' and not enough old-fashioned Christianity. Too much discontent that vents itself in mere complaining and too little real effort to remedy conditions. Too much class consciousness and too little common democracy and love for humanity." — By Frank Herbert Sweet. Waynesboro, Virginia. "I congratulate poor young men upon being born to that ancient and honorable degree which renders it necessary that they should devote themselves to hard work." — Andrew Carnegie. "Do not keep the alabaster boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them and while their hearts can be thrilled by them." — Henry Ward Beecher.