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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience - 12. “Lip-Service” - 13. Value Premises in This Study
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Chapter i. American Ideals 43
When foreigners accuse us of extraordinary love for gain, and of practical materi-
alism, they fail to see how largely we are a nation of idealists. Yet that we arc such
a nation is something constantly brought to the attention of those whose calling
requires them to observe any of the tendencies prevalent in our recent intellectual
life in America.^®
The American problem to be studied in this book would, indeed, have an
entirely different prognosis if this fact were forgotten.
13. Value Premises in This Study
For the study of a national problem which cuts so sharply through the
whole body politic as does the Negro problem, no other set of valuations
could serve as adequately as the norm for an incisive formulation of our
value premises as can the American Creed. No other norm could compete
in authority over people’s minds. ^^The American democratic faith is a
pattern of ideals providing standards of value with which the accomplish-
ments of realistic democracy may be judged,” observes an author surveying
the historical trends of American thinking.®®
And there is no doubt that these ideals are active realities. The student
of American history must be professionally near-sighted or blinded by a
doctrinal belief in a materialistic determinism if he fails to see the signif-
icance of tracing how the Creed is gradually realizing itself. The American
Creed is itself one of the dominant social trends,^^ ‘^Call it a dream or
call it vision,” says John Dewey, ^4t has been interwoven in a tradition
that has had an immense effect upon American life.”®^ Or, to quote a
distinguished Negro thinker, the late Kelly Miller:
In this country political, social and economic conditions gravitate toward equality.
We may continue to expect thunderstorms in the political firmament so long as
there exists inequality of political temperature in the atmosphere of the two regions.
Neither Massachusetts nor Mississippi will rest satisfied until there is an equality of
political condition in both States. . . . Democratic institutions can no more tolerate
a double political status than two standards of ethics or discrepant units of weight
and measure.®^
But apart from trends, the American Creed represents the national con-
science. The Negro is a ‘‘problem” to the average American partly because
of a palpable conflict between the status actually awarded him and those
ideals.
The American Creed, just because it is a living reality in a developing
democracy, is not a fixed and clear-cut dogma. It is still growing. During
the Revolutionary epoch the interests of statesmen and philosophers and
of the general public were focused on the more formal aspects of freedom,
equality and justice. After a long period of material expansion but not
rapid spiritual growth, the American Creed is in this generation again in
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