January 2011

The American Tradition The Call of Duty On the Dusty Soil

As we are possibly just a little too fond of saying, our nation draws its greatest strength from the ancient traditions of American democracy. These traditions embody certain lofty standards of thought and of behavior, and we like to believe that in time of crisis we can rely upon them. Occasionally it almost seems as if we do so automatically, fondly trusting that some built-in nobility of aspiration and conduct will rescue us either from the results of our own folly or from the evils created by fellow citizens in whom, unaccountably, the traditions never took root.

Like most of our accepted beliefs, this one contains a good substratum of truth. Yet sometimes it pays to see just what these saving traditions are and where they can be found. Who are their guardians, anyway? How do the best of these traditions take shape in action? What are we called upon to do about them, and how do we know when we are actually doing it? Democracy’s traditions, although noble, can be vague; what happens when we need to make them concrete?

Several months before the Republican National Convention of 1920, the Ohio political boss Hairy Micajah Daugherly made the offhand prophecy that none of the leading candidates could muster enough votes to win the nomination, and that alter the delegates had reached a dead end, a group of fifteen party elders would then get together in some smoke-filled hotel room. There, bleary-eyed and perspiring profusely—at about 2:11 in the morning—they would pick the party’s candidate, almost inevitably the next President of the United States. That man. Daugherty predicted, would turn out to be his friend and protégé, Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio.

Neither friend nor enemy ever called Theodore Roosevelt an introvert. Throughout his life he not only talked a good deal but wrote a great many letters, largely about himself. Most of his correspondence was with people who shared his occupational interest in politics, but there was an outstanding exception, Frederick Courteney Selous, with whom Roosevelt exchanged letters for twenty years. Selous lived in England and had no’ connection with the diplomatic world to account for his presence in Roosevelt’s circle. The letters from Roosevelt to Selous now in the National Archives in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, show that to the American this particular Englishman represented something set apart. He was the central figure in Theodore’s other world, the dream world of the small boy who never quite disappeared as long as the adult and aging Roosevelt was alive.

To watch the movements of the Southern agents I who are here purchasing arms and munitions of war and engaged in fating out vessels for the so-called Southern Confederacy it is necessary to employ one or two detectives and occasionally to pay money in way of traveling expenses to the men so employed. They are not as a general thing very estimable men but are the only persons we can get to engage in this business, which I am sure you will agree with me is not a very pleasant one.”

Scarcely a man is now alive who has bellied up to the mahogany in an old-fashioned saloon and said to Mike or Otto, “the usual.”

For more than fifty years over half of the states have been without saloons. Indeed, half of the total area of the United States was legally dried up as long as seventy years ago. Since lew women, other than painted Jezebels, ever saw the inside of a pre-World War I saloon, only a handful of grizzled male survivors remain who can remember the gilt beer sign at the corner, the swinging door, the mouth-watering free lunch, the technique for picking up a dime from a wet bar, and the sheer intellectual pleasure of discussing with Gus the barman the progress of union labor, the statistics of baseball, the infinite variety of woman, President Taft’s definition of whiskey, or the finer points of the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy.