University of Virginia Library

XIII
Middle Western Pioneer Democracy[1]

In time of war, when all that this nation has stood for, all
the things in which it passionately believes, are at stake, we
have met to dedicate this beautiful home for history.

There is a fitness in the occasion. It is for historic ideals
that we are fighting. If this nation is one for which we should
pour out our savings, postpone our differences, go hungry,
and even give up life itself, it is not because it is a rich,
extensive, well-fed and populous nation; it is because from
its early days America has pressed onward toward a goal
of its own; that it has followed an ideal, the ideal of a democracy
developing under conditions unlike those of any other
age or country.

We are fighting not for an Old World ideal, not for an
abstraction, not for a philosophical revolution. Broad and
generous as are our sympathies, widely scattered in origin as
are our people, keenly as we feel the call of kinship, the
thrill of sympathy with the stricken nations across the Atlantic,
we are fighting for the historic ideals of the United States,
for the continued existence of the type of society in which
we believe, because we have proved it good, for the things
which drew European exiles to our shores, and which inspired
the hopes of the pioneers.

We are at war that the history of the United States, rich
with the record of high human purposes, and of faith in the
destiny of the common man under freedom, filled with the
promises of a better world, may not become the lost and
tragic story of a futile dream.

Yes, it is an American ideal and an American example for
which we fight; but in that ideal and example lies medicine
for the healing of the nations. It is the best we have to give
to Europe, and it is a matter of vital import that we shall
safeguard and preserve our power to serve the world, and
not be overwhelmed in the flood of imperialistic force that
wills the death of democracy and would send the freeman
under the yoke. Essential as are our contributions of wealth,
the work of our scientists, the toil of our farmers and our
workmen in factory and shipyard, priceless as is the stream
of young American manhood which we pour forth to stop the
flood which flows like moulten lava across the green fields and
peaceful hamlets of Europe toward the sea and turns to ashes
and death all that it covers, these contributions have their
deeper meaning in the American spirit. They are born of the
love of Democracy.

Long ago in prophetic words Walt Whitman voiced the
meaning of our present sacrifices:

Shortly before the Civil War, a great German, exiled
from his native land for his love of freedom, came from his
new home among the pioneers of the Middle West to set forth
in Faneuil Hall, the "cradle of liberty," in Boston, his vision
of the young America that was forming in the West, "the last
depository of the hopes of all true friends of humanity."
Speaking of the contrast between the migrations to the Mississippi
Valley and those of the Old World in other centuries,
he said:

If Carl Schurz had lived to see the outcome of that Germany
from which he was sent as an exile, in the days when
Prussian bayonets dispersed the legislatures and stamped out
the beginnings of democratic rule in his former country, could
he have better pictured the contrasts between the Prussian
and the American spirit? He went on to say:

It is in a solemn and inspiring time, therefore, that we meet
to dedicate this building, and the occasion is fitting to the time.
We may now see, as never before, the deeper significance, the
larger meaning of these pioneers, whose plain lives and homely
annals are glorified as a part of the story of the building of
a better system of social justice under freedom, a broader, and
as we fervently hope, a more enduring foundation for the
welfare and progress under individual liberty of the common
man, an example of federation, of peaceful adjustments by
compromise and concession under a self-governing Republic,
where sections replace nations over a Union as large as
Europe, where party discussions take the place of warring
countries, where the Pax Americana furnishes an example for
a better world.

As our forefathers, the pioneers, gathered in their neighborhood
to raise the log cabin, and sanctified it by the name
of home, the dwelling place of pioneer ideals, so we meet
to celebrate the raising of this home, this shrine of Minnesota's

historic life. It symbolizes the conviction that the past
and the future of this people are tied together; that this
Historical Society is the keeper of the records of a noteworthy
movement in the progress of mankind; that these
records are not unmeaning and antiquarian, but even in their
details are worthy of preservation for their revelation of the
beginnings of society in the midst of a nation caught by the
vision of a better future for the world.

Let me repeat the words of Harriet Martineau, who portrayed
the American of the thirties:

And recall her appeal to the American people to "cherish
their high democratic hope, their faith in man. The older
they grow the more they must reverence the dreams of their
youth."

The dreams of their youth! Here they shall be preserved,
and the achievements as well as the aspirations of the men
who made the State, the men who built on their foundations,
the men with large vision and power of action, the lesser men
in the mass, the leaders who served the State and nation with
devotion to the cause. Here shall be preserved the record of
the men who failed to see the larger vision and worked impatiently

with narrow or selfish or class ends, as well as of
those who labored with patience and sympathy and mutual
concession, with readiness to make adjustments and to subordinate
their immediate interests to the larger good and the
immediate safety of the nation.

In the archives of such an old institution as that of the
Historical Society of Massachusetts, whose treasures run to
the beginnings of the Puritan colonization, the students cannot
fail to find the evidence that a State Historical Society
is a Book of Judgment wherein is made up the record of a
people and its leaders. So, as time unfolds, shall be the
collections of this Society, the depository of the material
that shall preserve the memory of this people. Each section
of this widely extended and varied nation has its own peculiar
past, its special form of society, its traits and its leaders.
It were a pity if any section left its annals solely to the collectors
of a remote region, and it were a pity if its collections
were not transformed into printed documents and monographic
studies which can go to the libraries of all the parts of the
Union and thus enable the student to see the nation as a whole
in its past as well as in its present.

This Society finds its special field of activity in a great
State of the Middle West, so new, as history reckons time, that
its annals are still predominantly those of the pioneers, but so
rapidly growing that already the era of the pioneers is a part
of the history of the past, capable of being handled objectively,
seen in a perspective that is not possible to the observer
of the present conditions.

Because of these facts I have taken as the special theme of
this address the Middle Western Pioneer Democracy, which I
would sketch in some of its outstanding aspects, and chiefly
in the generation before the Civil War, for it was from those

pioneers that the later colonization to the newer parts of the
Mississippi Valley derived much of their traits, and from
whom large numbers of them came.

The North Central States as a whole is a region, comparable
to all of Central Europe. Of these States, a large part
of the old Northwest,—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and
Wisconsin; and their sisters beyond the Mississippi—Missouri,
Iowa and Minnesota—were still, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, the home of an essentially pioneer society.
Within the lifetime of many living men, Wisconsin was called
the "Far West," and Minnesota was a land of the Indian and
the fur traders, a wilderness of forest and prairie beyond the
"edge of cultivation."That portion of this great region
which was still in the pioneering period of settlement by 1850
was alone about as extensive as the old thirteen States, or
Germany and Austria-Hungary combined. The region was a
huge geographic mold for a new society, modeled by nature
on the scale of the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, the upper
Mississippi and the Missouri. Simple and majestic in its vast
outlines it was graven into a variety that in its detail also had
a largeness of design. From the Great Lakes extended the
massive glacial sheet which covered that mighty basin and
laid down treasures of soil. Vast forests of pine shrouded
its upper zone, breaking into hardwood and the oak openings
as they neared the ocean-like expanses of the prairies. Forests
again along the Ohio Valley, and beyond, to the west, lay
the levels of the Great Plains. Within the earth were unexploited
treasures of coal and lead, copper and iron in such
form and quantity as were to revolutionize the industrial processes
of the world. But nature's revelations are progressive,
and it was rather the marvelous adaptation of the soil to the
raising of corn and wheat that drew the pioneers to this land

of promise, and made a new era of colonization. In the unity
with variety of this pioneer empire and in its broad levels we
have a promise of its society.

First had come the children of the interior of the South,
and with ax and rifle in hand had cut their clearings in the
forest, raised their log cabins, fought the Indians and by 1830
had pushed their way to the very edge of the prairies along
the Ohio and Missouri Valleys, leaving unoccupied most of
the Basin of the Great Lakes.

These slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers,
raising the corn and live stock for their own need, living scattered
and apart, had at first small interest in town life or a
share in markets. They were passionately devoted to the ideal
of equality, but it was an ideal which assumed that under free
conditions in the midst of unlimited resources, the homogeneous
society of the pioneers must result in equality. What
they objected to was arbitrary obstacles, artificial limitations
upon the freedom of each member of this frontier folk to
work out his own career without fear or favor. What they
instinctively opposed was the crystallization of differences,
the monopolization of opportunity and the fixing of that
monopoly by government or by social customs. The road
must be open. The game must be played according to the
rules. There must be no artificial stifling of equality of opportunity,
no closed doors to the able, no stopping the free game
before it was played to the end. More than that, there was
an unformulated, perhaps, but very real feeling, that mere
success in the game, by which the abler men were able to
achieve preëminence gave to the successful ones no right to
look down upon their neighbors, no vested title to assert
superiority as a matter of pride and to the diminution of the
equal right and dignity of the less successful.

If this democracy of Southern pioneers, this Jacksonian

democracy, was, as its socialist critics have called it, in reality
a democracy of "expectant capitalists," it was not one which
expected or acknowledged on the part of the successful ones
the right to harden their triumphs into the rule of a privileged
class. In short, if it is indeed true that the backwoods democracy
was based upon equality of opportunity, it is also true
that it resented the conception that opportunity under competition
should result in the hopeless inequality, or rule of
class. Ever a new clearing must be possible. And because
the wilderness seemed so unending, the menace to the enjoyment
of this ideal seemed rather to be feared from government,
within or without, than from the operations of internal evolution.

From the first, it became evident that these men had means
of supplementing their individual activity by informal combinations.
One of the things that impressed all early travelers
in the United States was the capacity for extra-legal,
voluntary association.[2] This was natural enough; in all America
we can study the process by which in a new land social
customs form and crystallize into law. We can even see how
the personal leader becomes the governmental official. This
power of the newly arrived pioneers to join together for a common
end without the intervention of governmental institutions
was one of their marked characteristics. The log rolling,
the house-raising, the husking bee, the apple paring, and the
squatters' associations whereby they protected themselves
against the speculators in securing title to their clearings on
the public domain, the camp meeting, the mining camp, the
vigilantes, the cattle-raisers' associations, the "gentlemen's
agreements,"are a few of the indications of this attitude. It
is well to emphasize this American trait, because in a modified

way it has come to be one of the most characteristic and
important features of the United States of to-day. America
does through informal association and understandings on the
part of the people many of the things which in the Old World
are and can be done only by governmental intervention and
compulsion. These associations were in America not due to
immemorial custom of tribe or village community. They
were extemporized by voluntary action.

The actions of these associations had an authority akin to
that of law. They were usually not so much evidences of a
disrespect for law and order as the only means by which real
law and order were possible in a region where settlement and
society had gone in advance of the institutions and instrumentalities
of organized society.

Because of these elements of individualistic competition and
the power of spontaneous association, pioneers were responsive
to leadership. The backwoodsmen knew that under the free
opportunities of his life the abler man would reveal himself,
and show them the way. By free choice and not by compulsion,
by spontaneous impulse, and not by the domination of
a caste, they rallied around a cause, they supported an issue.
They yielded to the principle of government by agreement,
and they hated the doctrine of autocracy even before it gained
a name.

They looked forward to the extension of their American
principles to the Old World and their keenest apprehensions
came from the possibility of the extension of the Old
World's system of arbitrary rule, its class wars and rivalries
and interventions to the destruction of the free States and
democratic institutions which they were building in the forests
of America.

If we add to these aspects of early backwoods democracy,
its spiritual qualities, we shall more easily understand them.

These men were emotional. As they wrested their clearing
from the woods and from the savages who surrounded them,
as they expanded that clearing and saw the beginnings of commonwealths,
where only little communities had been, and as
they saw these commonwealths touch hands with each other
along the great course of the Mississippi River, they became
enthusiastically optimistic and confident of the continued
expansion of this democracy. They had faith in themselves
and their destiny. And that optimistic faith was responsible
both for their confidence in their own ability to rule and for
the passion for expansion. They looked to the future.
"Others appeal to history: an American appeals to prophecy;
and with Malthus in one hand and a map of the back country
in the other, he boldly defies us to a comparison with America
as she is to be," said a London periodical in 1821. Just
because, perhaps, of the usual isolation of their lives, when
they came together in associations whether of the camp meeting
or of the political gathering, they felt the influence of a
common emotion and enthusiasm. Whether Scotch-Irish Presbyterian,
Baptist, or Methodist, these people saturated their
religion and their politics with feeling. Both the stump and
the pulpit were centers of energy, electric cells capable of
starting widespreading fires. They felt both their religion and
their democracy, and were ready to fight for it.

This democracy was one that involved a real feeling of social
comradeship among its widespread members. Justice Catron,
who came from Arkansas to the Supreme Court in the presidency
of Jackson, said: "The people of New Orleans and
St. Louis are next neighbors—if we desire to know a man in
any quarter of the union we inquire of our next neighbor,
who but the other day lived by him." Exaggerated as this is,
it nevertheless had a surprising measure of truth for the
Middle West as well. For the Mississippi River was the great

highway down which groups of pioneers like Abraham Lincoln,
on their rafts and flat boats, brought the little neighborhood
surplus. After the steamboat came to the western waters
the voyages up and down by merchants and by farmers shifting
their homes, brought people into contact with each other
over wide areas.

This enlarged neighborhood democracy was determined not
by a reluctant admission that under the law one man is as
good as another; it was based upon "good fellowship," sympathy
and understanding. They were of a stock, moreover,
which sought new trails and were ready to follow where the
trail led, innovators in society as well as finders of new
lands.

By 1830 the Southern inundation ebbed and a different tide
flowed in from the northeast by way of the Erie Canal and
steam navigation on the Great Lakes to occupy the zone
unreached by Southern settlement. This new tide spread along
the margins of the Great Lakes, found the oak openings and
small prairie islands of Southern Michigan and Wisconsin;
followed the fertile forested ribbons along the river courses
far into the prairie lands; and by the end of the forties began
to venture into the margin of the open prairie.

In 1830 the Middle West contained a little over a million
and a half people; in 1840, over three and a third millions;
in 1850, nearly five and a half millions. Although in 1830
the North Atlantic States numbered between three and four
times as many people as the Middle West, yet in those two
decades the Middle West made an actual gain of several hundred
thousand more than did the old section. Counties in
the newer states rose from a few hundred to ten or fifteen
thousand people in the space of less than five years. Suddenly,
with astonishing rapidity and volume, a new people was
forming with varied elements, ideals and institutions drawn

from all over this nation and from Europe. They were confronted
with the problem of adjusting different stocks, varied
customs and habits, to their new home.

In comparison with the Ohio Valley, the peculiarity of the
occupation of the northern zone of the Middle West, lay in
the fact that the native element was predominantly from the
older settlements of the Middle West itself and from New
York and New England. But it was from the central and
western counties of New York and from the western and
northern parts of New England, the rural regions of declining
agricultural prosperity, that the bulk of this element came.

Thus the influence of the Middle West stretched into the
Northeast, and attracted a farming population already suffering
from western competition. The advantage of abundant,
fertile, and cheap land, the richer agricultural returns, and
especially the opportunities for youth to rise in all the trades
and professions, gave strength to this competition. By it New
England was profoundly and permanently modified.

This Yankee stock carried with it a habit of community
life, in contrast with the individualistic democracy of the
Southern element. The colonizing land companies, the town,
the school, the church, the feeling of local unity, furnished
the evidences of this instinct for communities. This instinct
was accompanied by the creation of cities, the production
of a surplus for market, the reaching out to connections with
the trading centers of the East, the evolution of a more complex
and at the same time a more integrated industrial society
than that of the Southern pioneer.

But they did not carry with them the unmodified New England
institutions and traits. They came at a time and from a
people less satisfied with the old order than were their
neighbors in the East. They were the young men with initiative,
with discontent; the New York element especially was affected

by the radicalism of Locofoco democracy which was in
itself a protest against the established order.

The winds of the prairies swept away almost at once a
mass of old habits and prepossessions. Said one of these
pioneers in a letter to friends in the East:

They knew that they were leaving many dear associations
of the old home, giving up many of the comforts of life, sacrificing
things which those who remained thought too vital to
civilization to be left. But they were not mere materialists
ready to surrender all that life is worth for immediate gain.
They were idealists themselves, sacrificing the ease of the
immediate future for the welfare of their children, and convinced
of the possibility of helping to bring about a better

social order and a freer life. They were social idealists. But
they based their ideals on trust in the common man and the
readiness to make adjustments, not on the rule of a benevolent
despot or a controlling class.

The attraction of this new home reached also into the Old
World and gave a new hope and new impulses to the people
of Germany, of England, of Ireland, and of Scandinavia.
Both economic influences and revolutionary discontent promoted
German migration at this time; economic causes brought
the larger volume, but the quest for liberty brought the leaders,
many of whom were German political exiles. While the latter
urged, with varying degrees of emphasis, that their own contribution
should be preserved in their new surroundings, and
a few visionaries even talked of a German State in the federal
system, what was noteworthy was the adjustment of the emigrants
of the thirties and forties to Middle Western conditions;
the response to the opportunity to create a new type of society
in which all gave and all received and no element remained
isolated. Society was plastic. In the midst of more or less
antagonism between "bowie knife Southerners," "cow-milking
Yankee Puritans," "beer-drinking Germans," "wild Irishmen,"
a process of mutual education, a giving and taking, was
at work. In the outcome, in spite of slowness of assimilation
where different groups were compact and isolated from the
others, and a certain persistence of inherited morale, there
was the creation of a new type, which was neither the sum of
all its elements, nor a complete fusion in a melting pot. They
were American pioneers, not outlying fragments of New England,
of Germany, or of Norway.

The Germans were most strongly represented in the Missouri
Valley, in St. Louis, in Illinois opposite that city, and
in the Lake Shore counties of eastern Wisconsin north from
Milwaukee. In Cincinnati and Cleveland there were many

Germans, while in nearly half the counties of Ohio, the German
immigrants and the Pennsylvania Germans held nearly or
quite the balance of political power. The Irish came primarily
as workers on turnpikes, canals and railroads, and tended to
remain along such lines, or to gather in the growing cities.
The Scandinavians, of whom the largest proportion were Norwegians,
founded their colonies in Northern Illinois, and in
Southern Wisconsin about the Fox and the head waters of
Rock River, whence in later years they spread into Iowa, Minnesota
and North Dakota.

By 1850 about one-sixth of the people of the Middle West
were of North Atlantic birth, about one-eighth of Southern
birth, and a like fraction of foreign birth, of whom the Germans
were twice as numerous as the Irish, and the Scandinavians
only slightly more numerous than the Welsh, and fewer
than the Scotch. There were only a dozen Scandinavians in
Minnesota. The natives of the British Islands, together with
the natives of British North America in the Middle West, numbered
nearly as many as the natives of German lands. But
in 1850 almost three-fifths of the population were natives of
the Middle West itself, and over a third of the population
lived in Ohio. The cities were especially a mixture of peoples.
In the five larger cities of the section natives and foreigners
were nearly balanced. In Chicago the Irish, Germans
and natives of the North Atlantic States about equaled
each other. But in all the other cities, the Germans exceeded
the Irish in varying proportions. There were nearly three to
one in Milwaukee.

It is not merely that the section was growing rapidly and
was made up of various stocks with many different cultures,
sectional and European; what is more significant is that these
elements did not remain as separate strata underneath an
established ruling order, as was the case particularly in New

England. All were accepted and intermingling components
of a forming society, plastic and absorptive. This characteristic
of the section as "a good mixer" became fixed before the
large immigrations of the eighties. The foundations of the
section were laid firmly in a period when the foreign elements
were particularly free and eager to contribute to a new society
and to receive an impress from the country which offered them
a liberty denied abroad. Significant as is this fact, and influential
in the solution of America's present problems, it is no
more important than the fact that in the decade before the
Civil War, the Southern element in the Middle West had also
had nearly two generations of direct association with the
Northern, and had finally been engulfed in a tide of Northeastern
and Old World settlers.

In this society of pioneers men learned to drop their old
national animosities. One of the Immigrant Guides of the
fifties urged the newcomers to abandon their racial animosities.
"The American laughs at these steerage quarrels,"
said the author.

Thus the Middle West was teaching the lesson of national
cross-fertilization instead of national enmities, the possibility
of a newer and richer civilization, not by preserving unmodified
or isolated the old component elements, but by breaking
down the line-fences, by merging the individual life in the
common product—a new product, which held the promise of
world brotherhood. If the pioneers divided their allegiance
between various parties, Whig, Democrat, Free Soil or Republican,
it does not follow that the western Whig was like the
eastern Whig. There was an infiltration of a western quality
into all of these. The western Whig supported Harrison
more because he was a pioneer than because he was a Whig.
It saw in him a legitimate successor of Andrew Jackson. The
campaign of 1840 was a Middle Western camp meeting on a

huge scale. The log cabins, the cider and the coonskins were
the symbols of the triumph of Middle Western ideas, and
were carried with misgivings by the merchants, the bankers and
the manufacturers of the East. In like fashion, the Middle
Western wing of the Democratic party was as different from
the Southern wing wherein lay its strength, as Douglas was
from Calhoun. It had little in common with the slaveholding
classes of the South, even while it felt the kinship of the
pioneer with the people of the Southern upland stock from
which so many Westerners were descended.

In the later forties and early fifties most of the Middle
Western States made constitutions. The debates in their conventions
and the results embodied in the constitutions themselves
tell the story of their political ideals. Of course, they
based the franchise on the principle of manhood suffrage.
But they also provided for an elective judiciary, for restrictions
on the borrowing power of the State, lest it fall under the
control of what they feared as the money power, and several
of them either provided for the extinguishment of banks of
issue, or rigidly restrained them. Some of them exempted
the homestead from forced sale for debt; married women's
legal rights were prominent topics in the debates of the conventions,
and Wisconsin led off by permitting the alien to vote
after a year's residence. It welcomed the newcomer to the
freedom and to the obligations of American citizenship.

Although this pioneer society was preponderantly an agricultural
society it was rapidly learning that agriculture alone
was not sufficient for its life. It was developing manufactures,
trade, mining, the professions, and becoming conscious
that in a progressive modern state it was possible to pass from
one industry to another and that all were bound by common
ties. But it is significant that in the census of 1850, Ohio,
out of a population of two millions, reported only a thousand

servants, Iowa only ten in two hundred thousand and Minnesota
fifteen in its six thousand.

In the intellectual life of this new democracy there was
already the promise of original contributions even in the midst
of the engrossing toil and hard life of the pioneer.

The country editor was a leader of his people, not a patent-insides
recorder of social functions, but a vigorous and independent
thinker and writer. The subscribers to the newspaper
published in the section were higher in proportion to population
than in the State of New York and not greatly inferior
to those of New England, although such eastern papers as the
New York Tribune had an extensive circulation throughout the
Middle West. The agricultural press presupposed in its articles
and contributions a level of general intelligence and
interest above that of the later farmers of the section, at
least before at the present day.

Farmer boys walked behind the plow with their book in
hand and sometimes forgot to turn at the end of the furrow;
even rare boys, who, like the young Howells, "limped barefoot
by his father's side with his eyes on the cow and his mind
on Cervantes and Shakespeare."

Periodicals flourished and faded like the prairie flowers.
Some of Emerson's best poems first appeared in one of these
Ohio Valley magazines. But for the most part the literature
of the region and the period was imitative or reflective of the
common things in a not uncommon way. It is to its children
that the Middle West had to look for the expression of its life
and its ideals rather than to the busy pioneer who was breaking
a prairie farm or building up a new community. Illiteracy
was least among the Yankee pioneers and highest among
the Southern element. When illiteracy is mapped for 1850
by percentages there appears two distinct zones, the one extending
from New England, the other from the South.

The influence of New England men was strong in the Yankee
regions of the Middle West. Home missionaries, and representatives
of societies for the promotion of education in the
West, both in the common school and denominational colleges,
scattered themselves throughout the region and left a
deep impress in all these States. The conception was firmly
fixed in the thirties and forties that the West was the coming
power in the Union, that the fate of civilization was in its
hands, and therefore rival sects and rival sections strove to
influence it to their own types. But the Middle West shaped
all these educational contributions according to her own needs
and ideals.

The State Universities were for the most part the result of
agitation and proposals of men of New England origin; but
they became characteristic products of Middle Western society,
where the community as a whole, rather than wealthy benefactors,
supported these institutions. In the end the community
determined their directions in accord with popular ideals.
They reached down more deeply into the ranks of the common
people than did the New England or Middle State Colleges;
they laid more emphasis upon the obviously useful, and
became coëducational at an early date. This dominance of the
community ideals had dangers for the Universities, which were
called to raise ideals and to point new ways, rather than to
conform.

Challenging the spaces of the West, struck by the rapidity
with which a new society was unfolding under their gaze, it
is not strange that the pioneers dealt in the superlative and
saw their destiny with optimistic eyes. The meadow lot of
the small intervale had become the prairie, stretching farther
than their gaze could reach.

All was motion and change. A restlessness was universal.
Men moved, in their single life, from Vermont to New York,

from New York to Ohio, from Ohio to Wisconsin, from Wisconsin
to California, and longed for the Hawaiian Islands.
When the bark started from their fence rails, they felt the
call to change. They were conscious of the mobility of their
society and gloried in it. They broke with the Past and thought
to create something finer, more fitting for humanity, more
beneficial for the average man than the world had ever seen.

"With the Past we have literally nothing to do," said B.
Gratz Brown in a Missouri Fourth of July oration in 1850,
"save to dream of it. Its lessons are lost and its tongue is
silent. We are ourselves at the head and front of all political
experience. Precedents have lost their virtue and all their
authority is gone. . . . Experience can profit us only to guard
from antequated delusions."

"The yoke of opinion," wrote Channing to a Western friend,
speaking of New England, "is a heavy one, often crushing
individuality of judgment and action," and he added that
the habits, rules, and criticisms under which he had grown
up had not left him the freedom and courage which are needed
in the style of address best suited to the Western people.
Channing no doubt unduly stressed the freedom of the West
in this respect. The frontier had its own conventions and
prejudices, and New England was breaking its own cake of
custom and proclaiming a new liberty at the very time he
wrote. But there was truth in the Eastern thought of the
West, as a land of intellectual toleration, one which questioned
the old order of things and made innovation its very creed.

The West laid emphasis upon the practical and demanded
that ideals should be put to work for useful ends; ideals were
tested by their direct contributions to the betterment of the
average man, rather than by the production of the man of
exceptional genius and distinction.

For, in fine this was the goal of the Middle West, the welfare

of the average man; not only the man of the South, or
of the East, the Yankee, or the Irishman, or the German, but
all men in one common fellowship. This was the hope of their
youth, of that youth when Abraham Lincoln rose from rail-splitter
to country lawyer, from Illinois legislator to congressman
and from congressman to President.

It is not strange that in all this flux and freedom and novelty
and vast spaces, the pioneer did not sufficiently consider the
need of disciplined devotion to the government which he himself
created and operated. But the name of Lincoln and the
response of the pioneer to the duties of the Civil War,—to
the sacrifices and the restraints on freedom which it entailed
under his presidency, reminds us that they knew how to take
part in a common cause, even while they knew that war's
conditions were destructive of many of the things for which
they worked.

There are two kinds of governmental discipline: that which
proceeds from free choice, in the conviction that restraint of
individual or class interests is necessary for the common good;
and that which is imposed by a dominant class, upon a subjected
and helpless people. The latter is Prussian discipline,
the discipline of a harsh machine-like, logical organization,
based on the rule of a military autocracy. It assumes that if
you do not crush your opponent first, he will crush you. It
is the discipline of a nation ruled by its General Staff, assuming
war as the normal condition of peoples, and attempting
with remorseless logic to extend its operations to the destruction
of freedom everywhere. It can only be met by the discipline
of a people who use their own government for worthy
ends, who preserve individuality and mobility in society and
respect the rights of others, who follow the dictates of humanity
and fair play, the principles of give and take. The Prussian

discipline is the discipline of Thor, the War God, against
the discipline of the White Christ.

Pioneer democracy has had to learn lessons by experience:
the lesson that government on principles of free democracy can
accomplish many things which the men of the middle of the
nineteenth century did not realize were even possible. They
have had to sacrifice something of their passion for individual
unrestraint; they have had to learn that the specially trained
man, the man fitted for his calling by education and experience,
whether in the field of science or of industry, has a place in
government; that the rule of the people is effective and enduring
only as it incorporates the trained specialist into the organization
of that government, whether as umpire between contending
interests or as the efficient instrument in the hands of
democracy.

Organized democracy after the era of free land has learned
that popular government to be successful must not only be
legitimately the choice of the whole people; that the offices
of that government must not only be open to all, but that
in the fierce struggle of nations in the field of economic
competition and in the field of war, the salvation and perpetuity
of the republic depend upon recognition of the fact
that specialization of the organs of the government, the choice
of the fit and the capable for office, is quite as important as
the extension of popular control. When we lost our free lands
and our isolation from the Old World, we lost our immunity
from the results of mistakes, of waste, of inefficiency, and of
inexperience in our government.

But in the present day we are also learning another lesson
which was better known to the pioneers than to their immediate
successors. We are learning that the distinction arising
from devotion to the interests of the commonwealth is a

higher distinction than mere success in economic competition.
America is now awarding laurels to the men who sacrifice
their triumphs in the rivalry of business in order to give their
service to the cause of a liberty-loving nation, their wealth
and their genius to the success of her ideals. That craving
for distinction which once drew men to pile up wealth and
exhibit power over the industrial processes of the nation, is
now finding a new outlet in the craving for distinction that
comes from service to the Union, in satisfaction in the use of
great talent for the good of the republic.

And all over the nation, in voluntary organizations for aid
to the government, is being shown the pioneer principle of
association that was expressed in the "house raising." It
is shown in the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Knights of
Columbus, the councils and boards of science, commerce, labor,
agriculture; and in all the countless other types, from the
association of women in their kitchen who carry out the recommendations
of the Food Director and revive the plain living
of the pioneer, to the Boy Scouts who are laying the foundations
for a self-disciplined and virile generation worthy to
follow the trail of the backwoodsmen. It is an inspiring
prophecy of the revival of the old pioneer conception of the
obligations and opportunities of neighborliness, broadening
to a national and even to an international scope. The promise
of what that wise and lamented philosopher, Josiah Royce
called, "the beloved community." In the spirit of the pioneer's
"house raising" lies the salvation of the Republic.

This then is the heritage of pioneer experience,—a passionate
belief that a democracy was possible which should leave
the individual a part to play in free society and not make
him a cog in a machine operated from above; which trusted
in the common man, in his tolerance, his ability to adjust
differences with good humor, and to work out an American

type from the contributions of all nations—a type for which
he would fight against those who challenged it in arms, and
for which in time of war he would make sacrifices, even the
temporary sacrifice of individual freedom and his life, lest that
freedom be lost forever.