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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Introduction - 1. The Negro Problem as a Moral Issue
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—even in the South,[1] to a considerable extent—for the advocates of the
Negro, his rights and welfare. All “pro-Negro” forces in American society,
whether organized or not, and irrespective of their wide differences in both
strategy and tactics, sense that this is the situation. They all work on the
national conscience. They all seek to fix everybody’s attention on the
suppressed moral conflict. No wonder that they are often regarded as public
nuisances, or worse—even when they succeed in getting grudging
concessions to Negro rights and welfare.
At this point it must be observed that America, relative to all the other
branches of Western civilization, is moralistic and “moral-conscious.” The
ordinary American is the opposite of a cynic. He is on the average more of
a believer and a defender of the faith in humanity than the rest of the
Occidentals. It is a relatively important matter to him to be true to his own
ideals and to carry them out in actual life. We recognize the American,
wherever we meet him, as a practical idealist. Compared with members of
other nations of Western civilization, the ordinary American is a
rationalistic being, and there are close relations between his moralism and his
rationalism. Even romanticism, transcendentalism, and mysticism tend to
be, in the American culture, rational, pragmatic and optimistic. American
civilization early acquired a flavor of enlightenment which has affected the
ordinary American’s whole personality and especially his conception of
how ideas and ideals ought to “click” together. He has never developed
that particular brand of tired mysticism and romanticism which finds
delight in the inextricable confusion in the order of things and in
ineffectuality of the human mind. He finds such leanings intellectually perverse.
These generalizations might seem venturesome and questionable to the
reflective American himself, who, naturally enough, has his attention
directed more on the dissimilarities than on the similarities within his
culture. What is common is usually not obvious, and it never becomes
striking. But to the stranger it is obvious and even striking. In the social
sciences, for instance, the American has, more courageously than anywhere
else on the globe, started to measure, not only human intelligence,
aptitudes, and personality traits, but moral leanings and the “goodness” of
communities. This man is a rationalist; he wants intellectual order in his
moral set-up; he wants to pursue his own inclinations into their hidden
haunts; and he is likely to expose himself and his kind in a most
undiplomatic manner.
In hasty strokes we are now depicting the essentials of the American
ethos. This moralism and rationalism are to many of us—among them the
author of this book—the glory of the nation, its youthful strength, perhaps
the salvation of mankind. The analysis of this “American Creed” and its
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