Survey Graphic (Vol. XXII, No. 2) p. 98-101

Feb. 1933

The Social Deterrent of Our National Self-Righteousness

With Correctives Suggested by the Courageous Life of William Penn

For a long time Miss Addams had wanted to point out "the useless miscarriages of good intent" due to what Viscount Cecil recently described as that "nationalism which grew up in the nineteenth century to become an intense and dangerous force in the twentieth." The chance came with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the landing of William Penn. "As doughty explorer of the human soul," she writes, "I felt that Penn would prove a fine protagonist of my theme, and perhaps not only afford illustration but, as was his custom, actual illumination." Miss Addams was in fact so emboldened by his life and letters that she ventured to imitate him in another matter. Penn used very long captions for his numerous books and tracts. Hence the seventeenth-century title of her Founders' Day address.

By Jane Addams

Our national self-righteousness, often honestly disguised as patriotism, in one aspect is part of that adolescent self-assertion sometimes crudely expressed, both by individuals and nations, in sheer boasting, which the United States has never quite outgrown. In another aspect it is that complacency which we associate with the elderly who, feeling justified by their own successes, have completely lost the faculty of self-criticism. Innocent as such a combination may be, it is unfortunate that it should have been intensified at this particular moment when humility of spirit and a willingness to reconsider existing institutions are so necessary to world salvation.

To illustrate, with perhaps the most handsome offer concerning the war debts which has issued from Washington, the one recently made by Senator Borah: He suggests that the cancellation of war debts owed by the Allied European nations to the United States be considered with the provision that the nations taking advantage of the offer shall consent to reduce their armaments. Nothing could be fairer except that the United States makes no proposition to disarm itself. This is doubtless due to the fact that we are so sure that our own intentions are beneficent, that our army is small, and that no one could suspect us of unworthy ambitions. We really are confident of our own righteousness, but that very fact may make the offer unacceptable, although editorial writers and other molders of public opinion remind us that the United States acquired no territory from the final terms of the peace settlement and that we are at least entitled to state the terms upon which our just debts shall be cancelled.

The argument presents the very essence of the spirit we are discussing—falling back upon the righteousness of one act as an excuse for not attempting another. It is as if William Penn, having bought from the Indians every acre of land in his own royal grant, should use as an argument that because other settlements had often obtained their virgin land by force or guile, he was at liberty to use his permission from the king to collect tribute from the very Indians he had treated so fairly. Of course if logic had been substituted for morality, the second line of action would have destroyed the intrinsic moral value of the first.

It is not difficult to trace the historic beginning of such a national self-righteousness. The persecuted religious sects which first settled so much of the Atlantic Coast were naturally convinced that they bore witness to the highest truth and were therefore chosen people. William Penn himself, in his journeys to Holland and the Palatinate, said that he visited the various communities "who were of a separating and seeking turn of mind," and in spite of his insistence upon religious freedom, he was from first to last surrounded by a good many "come-outers." These very separatists, from Plymouth to Philadelphia, who ultimately federated into the Thirteen Colonies, probably achieved it as much through a similarity of temperament as through a common devotion to political doctrines. They undoubtedly bequeathed both to their successors, and certainly the former made a very good foundation for this national trait.

Another historic manifestation of the spirit of superiority so easily turned into self-righteousness, may be discovered as early as 1830 in a national attitude toward the European immigrants who came over in ever increasing numbers until by 1913 the annual arrivals were more than a million. A consciousness of superiority constantly tended to exalt the earlier Americans and to put the immigrants into a class by themselves, until it became an obvious deterrent and was responsible for several social maladjustments.

First, for our tardiness in protective legislation compared with other civilized nations. Naturally every approach to labor problems in the United States had to do with immigrants who formed the bulk of the wage-earning population, and it is quite likely that Americans were less concerned for the well-being of aliens than they would have been for their own kisfolk. By a curious twist, in the course of time it came to be considered patriotic to oppose governmental measures for workmen's compensation, for unemployment insurance, or for old-age security, because such legislation was not needed by the successful self-made American. As our cities developed overcrowded tenements, sweating systems, a high infant death rate—and many another familiar aspect of hastily organized and unregulated industry—all such social disorders became associated in the public mind with the immigrant. We had no such impassioned study of poverty as marked the decade of 1880 in England, by Charles Booth and Rountree; no such social compunction as that produced by the prolonged dockers' strike in East London. The English conscience was thoroughly aroused and during the 80's the House of Commons came to believe that representative government was performing its legitimate function when it considered such matters. During that very decade in the United States we childishly found an alibi for all the disturbing problems of the industrial order and put them off on the immigrant.

William Penn affords an illustration of the antithesis of all this if we are able to envisage ever so poorly the environment in which he tried out his "Holy Experiment." For our first corrective, what could have presented a more direct method of avoiding the difficulties of self-righteousness than his relation to the aliens squarely confronting him—the North American Indians—who for more than a century the New England Colonies had regarded as untamed savages. His 1682 treaty with them was made as between equals and was mutually binding. It was impressively consummated by two self-respecting political entities. When he established his government he assured the non-English settlers in his colony—the Dutch, the Swedes and the Germans—"You shall be governed by laws of your own making and live a free and, if you will, sober and industrious people." All the nationalistic groups at once received the franchise, although in his very first assembly the Dutch and Swedes had a majority of one over the English. He was quite unperturbed by the fact that England had just been fighting the Dutch, and he welcomed the French Huguenots at the very moment when England was at war with France.

The laborers brought to the early Penn colony represented many European nationalities, but each when his term of service expired was to have fifty acres of ground granted to him for a shilling a year, or a ha'penny for an acre. William Penn also made provision for the despised Negro, he was to be free after fourteen years, and provided with land, tools and stock. William Penn himself manumitted his slaves in 1701, apparently convinced that they could take care of themselves, thereby avoiding that most alluring pitfall for the self-righteous who habitually feel that they alone can care for "inferiors." His confidence in his fellow men was exhibited in the constitution he gave to the early settlers in his growing and conglomerate colony, which was the first constitution in the world to provide for its own amendment.

If our national self-righteousness is responsible for our tardiness in labor legislation, it may also be indicted for a second policy towards labor which has developed into national proportions, the widespread belief that differing opinions may be controlled by force.

As part of the national attitude it was gradually assumed that European immigrants held all sorts of subversive doctrines which were responsible for strikes and other industrial disorders. Immigrant strikers were easily charged with heresy against basic American doctrines. On this ground, scattering the strikers by the police and if necessary by the militia and the regulars, came to be considered a patriotic duty. Yet William Penn had reached a conclusion when he was imprisoned in the Tower as a young man, which might be very useful to us. He pointed out the irrelevance of force in all matters that pertain to human relationship, and he stood for this conviction when in the vast wilderness stretching for miles around him in every direction, groups of white settlers were being attacked and sometimes massacred by the Indians; protection, he insisted, lay in mutual under standing and confidence; that "love and persuasion have more force than weapons of war." Instead of making much of the differences in religious belief between the sophisticated Europeans and the untutored Indians, he stressed the fact that the latter also believed in God and immortality and that their social customs and traditions were well fitted to their needs. His tolerance and understanding bridged a wider chasm than any presented later to America by European immigrants.

The third result of our national attitude towards the immigrant is that through our contempt for certain of our fellow citizens we have become indifferent to the protection of human life, sapping the very foundations upon which even primitive governments were built. Our indifference to the killing of foreign gangsters has resulted in a preferential treatment of crime. It was unfortunate that the earliest outbreaks of gang violence in Chicago—more or less typical of those throughout the country—should have been associated with colonies of immigrants. Although we all knew that the men who were bootlegging, racketeering, conducting gambling houses or systematically stealing automobiles, could not have continued unless they had been able to secure political protection, the community was slow to act because so long as the Sicilians who composed the first powerful bootlegging gang killed only each other it was considered of little consequence.

Connivance at murder is a grave charge not to be lightly entered into, and yet during four years, from January 1928 to January 1932, we had in Chicago 232 gang killings in which the law-enforcing agencies failed to bring even one to trial. If rival gangs attempt to exterminate each other, apparently not only the good citizens but the officials responsible for the prosecution of the crime of murder virtually say, "Let them inflict their own punishments." This American attitude towards murdered gangsters of foreign birth may illustrate that hard saying of a wise man, "The essence of immorality is to make an exception of oneself." We cannot rid ourselves of the habit of blaming someone else for our troubles, holding ourselves innocent.

Preferential indifference to crime, an obvious symptom of a breakdown in democratic government, may be an indirect result of an unjustifiable habit which allows us to consider one human being of less consequence than another. Never was William Penn's ideal of religion, founded upon fraternity and righteousness, so sorely needed. Perhaps religion alone can deal successfully with such an immoral situation imbedded in complacency.

This leads quite naturally to the fourth indictment arising out of our attitude to the immigrant, the difficult dilemma in which we find ourselves in regard to prohibition. Because the Simon-pure American did make an exception of himself—what was good for the immigrant was not necessarily good for him—he exempted himself from laws which he would like to see enforced upon others, with the result that the individual often voted for laws which he himself had no intention of obeying. For instance, many Southern men voted for the Eighteenth Amendment because they wanted to keep drink away from the Negro, other Northern men because they needed sober immigrant labor and the elimination of "blue Monday." The result of such voting has been analyzed by an Englishman as follows:

Because law in the past has proved capable of preventing men from committing the more obvious kinds of wickedness, Americans have assumed that it can be used to make men good. And as nearly everyone naturally supposes that he himself is good enough already, the law has come to be regarded as an instrument for making other people good.

And there we reach the very essence of self-righteousness which is doubtless one reason that the present prohibition situation is so abnormally difficult. It is curious that William Penn should have set an example even in the details of liquor-traffic regulation. He did not sell liquor to the Indians because of the terms of an agreement which they had voluntarily entered into with him; and one of the finest temperance lectures on record is that made by an Indian chief, greatly relieved that his tribesmen were to be freed from the curse which the white man had brought to America and which had already decimated the tribes surrounding his own. William Penn once more achieved his purpose by the moral cooperation of those whom he was trying to serve, and of course there is no other way.

Although our habit of blaming the immigrant per-sists during this period of depression, so that hundreds of them are sent back to Europe each month and others to Canada and Mexico on the ground that they are taking the jobs of good Americans, there is still another aspect of our self-righteousness which is much more sinister. The current manifestation of this curious national trait is due probably to excessive war propaganda which registered its effect upon our minds long after its supposed usefulness was over. It has resulted in a spirit of conformity which has been demanded from all of us in the post-war years on pain of being denounced as a "Red" or a "Traitor." Perhaps never before in our history has there been within the framework of orderly government such impatience with differing opinion. The result has been a great temptation to the timid, to the personally ambitious, and to the immature to declare adherence to the opinions considered highly respectable, and to carefully avoid and even to denounce those identified with despised radicals. Such a stultifying situation is more than ever dangerous just now because the nation needs all the free and vigorous thinking which is available in this period of worldwide maladjustment.

The peculiar difficulties of our present situation are rather hard to define. They have been diagnosed by one of President Hoover's commissions as "Inequality in the rate of our social changes." In illustration of the danger of holding fast to a social concept which is no longer useful but which is not yet superseded by the new because the next one is considered dangerous, may I remind you of what Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said not long ago to the students at Columbia that "We are living in a backwash of ultra-nationalism following the Great War,—ignoring the fundamental and controlling fact that the world today is an international world." He quoted the concluding words of a report signed by leading members of the Finance Committee of the League of Nations: "It may be truly said that international trade is being gradually strangled to death. If the process continues, millions of people in this economically interlocked world must inevitably die of starvation." It would be humiliating, would it not, that a world should starve in the midst of a plethora of food because the constructive and collective intelligence of mankind was unable to make a distinction between political nationalism and economic internationalism, and serenely sacrificed the latter to the first? It would seem as if nationalistic frenzy were tearing the world to pieces as religious bigotry threatened to destroy it in the years preceding and including the life of William Penn.

The corrective supplied by him on this point is very clear. Religion was the absorbing interest of the seventeenth century. Dynasties rose and fell upon theological issues, and great families disappeared when they found themselves on the side of the oppressed instead of the oppressor. Nothing more difficult could have been attempted in William Penn's day and generation than his long advocacy of religious freedom—that each man must worship God in his own way. He opposed the pretensions of both the Puritans and the State Church. He took his stand not only for the Quakers—for it is always easy to insist upon freedom for ourselves—but for other sects as well, especially for the Catholics in both England and Ireland, to great cost in his personal affairs.

It is fortunate for us here in the United States at this time of celebration that it is especially in the differing rates of speed in social evolution that the courageous life of William Penn is most edifying and impressive, for he never played for safety nor for mere peace of mind. His far-ranging and anticipatory intellect forecast some of the finest social institutions to be evolved during the next two centuries and must have kept him out of step with his contemporaries most of the time. He constantly ran counter to the assumptions upon which the life of his time was founded. This calm acceptance of the truth as God gave him to see the truth; this putting it to the test of action in the new world as well as the old, and meeting the consequences with invincible courage, are the particular lessons which we need.

It is easy to make a long list of William Penn's advances beyond his contemporaries. In education he came up against a stiff scholasticism, and he was expelled from Oxford at the age of eighteen primarily because the universities saw plainly that the inspirational preacher might quite easily interfere with their craft of producing dull and learned clergy and they utterly failed to see that William Penn was combining both learning and inspiration. In an age when schoolmasters were worshipping the written and printed word, he wrote on the education of children: "We press their memory too soon and puzzle and strain and load them with words and rules," and again, "Children had rather be making Tools and Instruments of Play; shaping, drawing, planning and building, than getting some Rules of propriety of speech by Heart." With slight change in phraseology, these words might have been written by John Dewey or Bertrand Russell. We may well ask ourselves how did he achieve it? Certainly not by timidity nor by following beaten paths nor by fear of public opinion nor by devotion to precedent. In fact he avoided the latter, and once warned his colonists not to live upon the traditions of their founders, "Thereby encompassing yourselves with the sparks of your own fire."

In international affairs we have hardly caught up to him yet. When we recall the long difficulty with which the Thirteen Colonies finally federated, it is all the more remarkable that one hundred years before this was attempted William Penn had worked out a plan for a "Dyet or Parliament of Europe to settle trouble between nations without war." In the International Assembly he proposed in 1693 for preserving the peace of Europe he included the adherents of all religions and mentions carefully "the Turks and Muscovites, as seems but fit and just." If tolerance of religion was a test of seventeenth century liberalism, as nationalism has become ours, he certainly "goes us one better" in regard to the Muscovite. Among other details for his International Assembly he advocated "a round room with divers doors to come in and go out at, to avoid quarrels for precedence."

Perhaps what the League of Nations needs now is such a round room with a central ventilating system which shall blow upon all alike and upon none too much. I once met an English friend as he came from an international conference in the Glass Room of the Secretariat. Affairs evidently had not gone smoothly, for he exclaimed with a worried look: "We got a bad start this morning as we often do. The English got there early and naturally, as the room was stuffy, opened the windows, and when the French arrived with their invisible dread of a current d'aire, they promptly closed them,—and there we were, two national delegations well irritated before we started the day's work!"

Because William Penn appealed from tradition to experience, from authority to life, his most remarkable examples were in Pennsylvania where, in his absorbed devotion to his colony, he probably did not realize and certainly did not care how far he was departing from the customs of contemporary Europe. He calmly followed his own rule, "Though there is a regard due to education and the tradition of our fathers, Truth will ever deserve, as well as claim, the preference." He suppressed the excitement of hunting for witches when the chase was carried on in America as well as in Europe; he declared the spiritual equality of men and women; although two hundred offenses were punishable by death in England, William Penn reduced them to two in his colony; he insisted that all prisons should be workshops, and Pennsylvania had for a hundred years one of the best penal codes then in the world; every owner of a slave was required to pay so high a tax that slavery was finally taxed out of existence.

Such right thinking and courageous action in the life of one man has an enormous liberating power and taps new sources of human energy. It is doubtless what we need at this moment more than anything else, a generous and fearless desire to see life as it is, irrespective of the limitations and traditions which so needlessly divide us. To take an example of our own in which such freedom of the spirit is sorely needed: certain economists declare that the special contribution of the United States to the world depression has been excess profits. Their analysis is that a disproportionate amount of the earnings from production stored in the hands of American employers and stockholders and did not go back to the consumers in wages or shares; with the result that our purchasing power was reduced while the holders of capital seeking investment overloaded the banks, organized too many holding companies and made too many loans abroad. Because surplus capital so invested did not readily pass into the hands of consumers, the ratio of producing and consuming was not equitably maintained, and the United States is squarely confronted with the problem of better distribution.

We find this very difficult because for so long a time we have thought that satisfactory distribution meant only super-salesmanship, and we had developed a system so overwhelming in its ability to deal with mass stimuli that it has almost impaired our psychological freedom. But the radio and other new devices, so useful in the new salesmanship upon which we had depended, do not necessarily help us in the constructive and creative thinking needed at the present time.

Sir Arthur Salter in a recent number of Foreign Affairs, expresses his belief that "The experience of the depression reveals what economic nationalism can do to the world and to the individual countries concerned." The choice before the world today, he believes, is between trying to build up world trade based on a world order, or moving further toward a system of closed units, each aiming to be self-sufficient.

The choice of the United States in this world decision has come to have an undue influence. Yet we all know that there exists an overwhelming danger that America—even from the most patriotic of nations—may leave relatively unaided (and thus may cripple) the great political experiment of these later centuries, the supreme contemporary effort to make international relations more rational and human. Sir Arthur asks, rather dramatically for an Englishman, "Shall we continue to intensify our present economic nationalism, or shall we retrace our steps?" He points out that unhappily lessons from the past are rarely learned, and he finds hope only in the fact that immediate suffering is often effective. So you see we still have a chance to reform as long as the depression continues!

Several years ago at Williamstown Arnold Toynbee boldly stated that our post-war nationalism had developed into a kind of religion—the worship of the local sovereign state. He pointed out that it was a rather low type of religion because it was polytheistic, there are sixty or seventy of these gods called sovereign national states, and the number is growing. He warned us as follows: "If we cannot give up worshipping these idols of the contemporary world, we will have to sacrifice to them the industrial system which we have been building up during the last one hundred and fifty years—the system upon which our economic life now depends. The industrial system cannot work unless it has the whole world for its field and the whole of mankind for its partners. Nationalism demands that this worldwide partnership shall be dissolved into sixty or seventy competing firms. This idolatry of nationalism is not patriotic; it is suicidal."

WhiIe I should hesitate to designate our super-nationalism the sin of idolatry, in the theological sense, because men's hearts which harbor it are often filled with devotion and a desire for self-sacrifice, yet from the social point of view it is a sin against our common humanity, and its social consequences are amazingly disastrous.

Can we not find a formula which shall preserve "that spirit of nationality in which for many years the aspirations of man for liberty and free development have found their expression, and the abuse of that nationality which now threatens with destruction all that it has given or promised?"

Is it not true that the contemporary world, based upon the search for private profit and for national advantage, has come in conflict with the newer principle of social welfare and the zeal for practical justice in our human affairs? Must we wait for another William Penn to show us the unique opportunity it affords to once more make politics further the purposes of religion and to purge religion itself from all taint of personal and national self-righteousness?