by Owen Wister
A Straight Deal or the Ancient Grudge
Owen Wister
A STRAIGHT DEAL
OR
THE ANCIENT GRUDGE
By
Owen Wister
To Edward and Anna Martin who give help in time of trouble Chapter I: Concerning One’s Letter Box
Publish any sort of conviction related to these morose days through which we are living and letters will shower upon you like leaves in October. No matter what your conviction be, it will shake both yeas and nays loose from various minds where they were hanging ready to fall. Never was a time when so many brains rustled with hates and panaceas that would sail wide into the air at the lightest jar. Try it and see. Say that you believe in God, or do not; say that Democracy is the key to the millennium, or the survival of the unfittest; that Labor is worse than the Kaiser, or better; that drink is a demon, or that wine ministers to the health and the cheer of man—say what you please, and the yeas and nays will pelt you. So insecurely do the plainest, oldest truths dangle in a mob of disheveled brains, that it is likely, did you assert twice two continues to equal four and we had best stick to the multiplication table, anonymous letters would come to you full of passionate abuse.
Thinking comes hard to all of us. To some it never comes at all, because their heads lack the machinery. How many of such are there among us, and how can we find them out before they do us harm? Science has a test for this. It has been applied to the army recruit, but to the civilian voter not yet. The voting moron still runs amuck in our Democracy. Our native American air is infected with alien breath. It is so thick with opinions that the light is obscured. Will the sane ones eventually prevail and heal the sick atmosphere? We must at least assume so. Else, how could we go on?
Chapter II: What the Postman Brought
During the winter of 1915 I came to think that Germany had gone dangerously but methodically mad, and that the European War vitally concerned ourselves. This conviction I put in a book. Yeas and nays pelted me. Time seems to show the yeas had it.
During May, 1918, I thought we made a mistake to hate England. I said so at the earliest opportunity. Again came the yeas and nays. You shall see some of these. They are of help. Time has not settled this question. It is as alive as ever—more alive than ever. What if the Armistice was premature? What if Germany absorb Russia and join Japan? What if the League of Nations break like a toy?
Yeas and nays are put here without the consent of their writers, whose names, of course, do not appear, and who, should they ever see this, are begged to take no offense. None is intended.
There is no intention except to persuade, if possible, a few readers, at least, that hatred of England is not wise, is not justified to-day, and has never been more than partly justified. It is based upon three foundations fairly distinct yet meeting and merging on occasions: first and worst, our school histories of the Revolution; second, certain policies and actions of England since then, generally distorted or falsified by our politicians; and lastly certain national traits in each country that the other does not share and which have hitherto produced perennial personal friction between thousands of English and American individuals of every station in life. These shall in due time be illustrated by two sets of anecdotes: one, disclosing the English traits, the other the American. I say English, and not British, advisedly, because both the Scotch and the Irish seem to be without those traits which especially grate upon us and upon which we especially grate. And now for the letters.
The first is from a soldier, an enlisted man, writing from France.
“Allow me to thank you for your article entitled ‘The Ancient Grudge.’
… Like many other young Americans there was instilled in me from early childhood a feeling of resentment against our democratic cousins across the Atlantic and I was only too ready to accept as true those stories I heard of England shirking her duty and hiding behind her colonies, etc.
It was not until I came over here and saw what she was really doing that my opinion began to change.
“When first my division arrived in France it was brigaded with and received its initial experience with the British, who proved to us how little we really knew of the war as it was and that we had yet much to learn. Soon my opinion began to change and I was regarding England as the backbone of the Allies. Yet there remained a certain something I could not forgive them. What it was you know, and have proved to me that it is not our place to judge and that we have much for which to be thankful to our great Ally.
“Assuring you that your … article has succeeded in converting one who needed conversion badly I beg to remain….”
How many American soldiers in Europe, I wonder, have looked about them, have used their sensible independent American brains (our very best characteristic), have left school histories and hearsay behind them and judged the English for themselves? A good many, it is to be hoped. What that judgment finally becomes must depend not alone upon the personal experience of each man. It must also come from that liberality of outlook which is attained only by getting outside your own place and seeing a lot of customs and people that differ from your own. A mind thus seasoned and balanced no longer leaps to an opinion about a whole nation from the sporadic conduct of individual members of it. It is to be feared that some of our soldiers may never forget or make allowance for a certain insult they received in the streets of London. But of this later. The following sentence is from a letter written by an American sailor: “I have read… ‘The Ancient Grudge’ and I wish it could be read by every man on our big ship as I know it would change a lot of their attitude toward England. I have argued with lots of them and have shown some of them where they are wrong but the Catholics and descendants of Ireland have a different argument and as my education isn’t very great, I know very little about what England did to the Catholics in Ireland.”
Ireland I shall discuss later. Ireland is no more our business to-day than the South was England’s business in 1861. That the Irish question should defeat an understanding between ourselves and England would be, to quote what a gentleman who is at once a loyal Catholic and a loyal member of the British Government said to me, “wrecking the ship for a ha’pennyworth of tar.”
The following is selected from the nays, and was written by a business man. I must not omit to say that the writers of all these letters are strangers to me.
“As one American citizen to another… permit me to give my personal view on your subject of ‘The Ancient Grudge’…
“To begin with, I think that you start with a false idea of our kinship—
with the idea that America, because she speaks the language of England, because our laws and customs are to a great extent of the same origin, because much that is good among us came from there also, is essentially of English character, bound up in some way with the success or failure of England.
“Nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the truth. We are a distinctive race—no more English, nationally, than the present King George is German—as closely related and as alike as a celluloid comb and a stick of dynamite.
“We are bound up in the success of America only. The English are bound up in the success of England only. We are as friendly as rival corporations.
We can unite in a common cause, as we have, but, once that is over, we will go our own way—which way, owing to the increase of our shipping and foreign trade, is likely to become more and more antagonistic to England’s.
“England has been a commercially unscrupulous nation for generations and it is idle to throw the blame for this or that act of a nation on an individual. Such arguments might be kept up indefinitely as regards an act of any country. A res
ponsible nation must bear the praise or odium that attaches to any national action. If England has experienced a change of heart it has occurred since the days of the Boer Republic—as wanton a steal as Belgium, with even less excuse, and attended with sufficient brutality for all practical purposes….
“She has done us many an ill turn gratuitously and not a single good turn that was not dictated by selfish policy or jealousy of others. She has shown herself, up till yesterday at least, grasping and unscrupulous. She is no worse than the others probably—possibly even better—but it would be doing our country an ill turn to persuade its citizens that England was anything less than an active, dangerous, competitor, especially in the infancy of our foreign trade. When a business rival gives you the glad hand and asks fondly after the children, beware lest the ensuing emotions cost you money.
“No: our distrust for England has not its life and being in pernicious textbooks. To really believe that would be an insult to our intelligence—
even grudges cannot live without real food. Should England become helpless tomorrow, our animosity and distrust would die tomorrow, because we would know that she had it no longer in her power to injure us. Therein lies the feeling—the textbooks merely echo it….
“In my opinion, a navy somewhat larger than England’s would practically eliminate from America that ‘Ancient Grudge’ you deplore. It is England’s navy—her boasted and actual control of the seas—which threatens and irritates every nation on the face of the globe that has maritime aspirations. She may use it with discretion, as she has for years. It may even be at times a source of protection to others, as it has—but so long as it exists as a supreme power it is a constant source of danger and food for grudges.
“We will never be a free nation until our navy surpasses England’s. The world will never be a free world until the seas and trade routes are free to all, at all times, and without any menace, however benevolent.
“In conclusion … allow me to again state that I write as one American citizen to another with not the slightest desire to say anything that may be personally obnoxious. My own ancestors were from England. My personal relations with the Englishmen I have met have been very pleasant. I can readily believe that there are no better people living, but I feel so strongly on the subject, nationally—so bitterly opposed to a continuance of England’s sea control—so fearful that our people may be lulled into a feeling of false security, that I cannot help trying to combat, with every small means in my power, anything that seems to propagate a dangerous friendship.”
I received no dissenting letter superior to this. To the writer of it I replied that I agreed with much that he said, but that even so it did not in my opinion outweigh the reasons I had given (and shall now give more abundantly) in favor of dropping our hostile feeling toward England.
My correspondent says that we differ as a race from the English as much as a celluloid comb from a stick of dynamite. Did our soldiers find the difference as great as that? I doubt if our difference from anybody is quite as great as that. Again, my correspondent says that we are bound up in our own success only, and England is bound up in hers only. I agree.
But suppose the two successes succeed better through friendship than through enmity? We are as friendly, my correspondent says, as two rival corporations. Again I agree. Has it not been proved this long while that competing corporations prosper through friendship? Did not the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern form a combination called the Northern Securities, for the sake of mutual benefit? Under the Sherman Act the Northern Securities was dissolved; but no Sherman act forbids a Liberty Securities. Liberty, defined and assured by Law, is England’s gift to the modern world. Liberty, defined and assured by Law, is the central purpose of our Constitution. Just as identically as the Northern Pacific and Great Northern run from St. Paul to Seattle do England and the United States aim at Liberty, defined and assured by Law. As friends, the two nations can swing the world towards world stability. My correspondent would hardly have instanced the Boers in his reference to England’s misdeeds, had he reflected upon the part the Boers have played in England’s struggle with Germany.
I will point out no more of the latent weaknesses that underlie various passages in this letter, but proceed to the remaining letters that I have selected. I gave one from an enlisted man and one from a sailor; this is from a commissioned officer, in France.
“I cannot refrain from sending you a line of appreciation and thanks for giving the people at home a few facts that I am sure some do not know and throwing a light upon a much discussed topic, which I am sure will help to remove from some of their minds a foolish bigoted antipathy.”
Upon the single point of our school histories of the Revolution, some of which I had named as being guilty of distorting the facts, a correspondent writes from Nebraska:
“Some months ago… the question came to me, what about our Montgomery’s History now…. I find that everywhere it is the King who is represented as taking these measures against the American people. On page 134 is the heading, American Commerce; the new King George III; how he interfered with trade; page 135, The King proposes to tax the Colonies; page 136, ‘The best men in Parliament—such men as William Pitt and Edmund Burke—
took the side of the colonies.’ On page 138, ‘William Pitt said in Parliament, “in my opinion, this kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the colonies… I rejoice that America has resisted”’; page 150, ‘The English people would not volunteer to fight the Americans and the King had to hire nearly 30,000 Hessians to help do the work…. The Americans had not sought separation; the King—not the English people—had forced it on them….’
“I am writing this… because, as I was glad to see, you did not mince words in naming several of the worse offenders.” (He means certain school histories that I mentioned and shall mention later again.) An official from Pittsburgh wrote thus: “In common with many other people, I have had the same idea that England was not doing all she could in the war, that while her colonies were in the thick of it, she, herself, seemed to be sparing herself, but after reading this article… I will frankly and candidly confess to you that it has changed my opinion, made me a strong supporter of England, and above all made me a better American “
>From Massachusetts:
“It is well to remind your readers of the errors—or worse—in American school text books and to recount Britain’s achievements in the present war. But of what practical avail are these things when a man so highly placed as the present Secretary of the Navy asks a Boston audience (Tremont Temple, October 30, 1918) to believe that it was the American navy which made possible the transportation of over 2,000,000 Americans to France without the loss of a single transport on the way over? Did he not know that the greater part of those troops were not only transported, but convoyed, by British vessels, largely withdrawn for that purpose from such vital service as the supply of food to Britain’s civil population?”
The omission on the part of our Secretary of the Navy was later quietly rectified by an official publication of the British Government, wherein it appeared that some sixty per cent of our troops were transported in British ships. Our Secretary’s regrettable slight to our British allies was immediately set right by Admiral Sims, who forthwith, both in public and in private, paid full and appreciative tribute to what had been done.
It is, nevertheless, very likely that some Americans will learn here for the first time that more than half of our troops were not transported by ourselves, and could not have been transported at all but for British assistance. There are many persons who still believe what our politicians and newspapers tell them. No incident that I shall relate further on serves better to point the chief international moral at which I am driving throughout these pages, and at which I have already hinted: Never to generalize the character of a whole nation by the acts of individual members of it. That is what everybody does, ourselves, the English, the French, everybody. You can form no valid opinion of an
y nation’s characteristics, not even your own, until you have met hundreds of its people, men and women, and had ample opportunity to observe and know them beneath the surface. Here on the one hand we had our Secretary of the Navy. He gave our Navy the whole credit for getting our soldiers overseas.
He justified the British opinion that we are a nation of braggarts. On the other hand, in London, we had Admiral Sims, another American, a splendid antidote. He corrected the Secretary’s brag. What is the moral?
Look out how you generalize. Since we entered the war that tribe of English has increased who judge us with an open mind, discriminate between us, draw close to a just appraisal of our qualities and defects, and possibly even discern that those who fill our public positions are mostly on a lower level than those who elect them.
I proceed with two more letters, both dissenting, and both giving very typically, as it seems to me, the American feeling about England—
partially justified by instances mentioned by my correspondent, but equally mentioned by me in passages which he seems to have skipped.
“Lately I read and did not admire your article… ‘The Ancient Grudge.’
Many of your statements are absolutely true, and I recognize the fact that England’s help in this war has been invaluable. Let it go at that and hush!
“I do not defend our own Indian policy…. Wounded and disabled in our Indian wars… I know all about them and how indefensible they are…..
“England has been always our only legitimate enemy. 1776? Yes, call it ancient history and forget it if possible. 1812? That may go in the same category. But the causes of that misunderstanding were identically repeated in 1914 and ‘15.
“1861? Is that also ancient? Perhaps—but very bitter in the memory of many of us now living. The Alabama. The Confederate Commissioners (I know you will say we were wrong there—and so we may have been technically—
but John Bull bullied us into compliance when our hands were tied).