Frontier in American History — XIII - Middle Western Pioneer Democracy - Part 1

MIDDLE WESTERN PIONEER DEMOCRACY[335:1]

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: "Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy, Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the Present only, The Past is also stored in thee, Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not of the Western Continent alone, Earth's resume entire floats on thy keel, O ship, is steadied by thy spars, With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink or swim with thee, With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars, thou bear'st the other continents, Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant."

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: It is now not a barbarous multitude pouncing upon old and decrepit empires, not a violent concussion of tribes accompanied by all the horrors of general destruction, but we see the vigorous elements--peaceably congregating and mingling together on virgin soil--; led together by the irresistible attraction of free and broad principles; undertaking to commence a new era in the history of the world, without first destroying the results of the progress of past periods;

undertaking to found a cosmopolitan nation without marching over the dead bodies of slain millions.

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: Thus was founded the _great colony of free humanity_, which has not old England alone, but the _world_ for its mother country.

And in the colony of free humanity, whose mother country is the world, they established the Republic of equal rights where the title of manhood is the title to citizenship.

My friends, if I had a thousand tongues, and a voice as strong as the thunder of heaven, they would not be sufficient to impress upon your minds forcibly enough the greatness of this idea, the overshadowing glory of this result.

This was the dream of the truest friends of man from the beginning; for this the noblest blood of martyrs has been shed; for this has mankind waded through seas of blood and tears.

There it is now; there it stands, the noble fabric in all the splendor of reality.

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: I regard the American people as a great embryo poet, now moody, now wild, but bringing out results of absolute good sense; restless and wayward in action, but with deep peace at his heart; exulting that he has caught the true aspect of things past and the depth of futurity which lies before him, wherein to create something so magnificent as the world has scarcely begun to dream of.

There is the strongest hope of a nation that is capable of being possessed with an idea.

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.