Thinking that it might be good to teach with, I recently looked up the essay from which the phrase “usable past” is generally said to come. The full title of the essay is, “On Creating a Usable Past,” it’s centrally concerned with novels and poetry, and is by a literary critic or literary historian, Van Wyck Brooks. I don’t expect to use it in an undergraduate classroom. But it is interesting, and so here I’m going to point out what I think is worth retaining from it. Also, I want to record some ideas about the surprising (to me) essay that immediately follows Brooks in this same issue – a labor organizer and activist named Helen Marot writing a brief for what I would call syndicalist educational ideas. The April 11, 1918 number of The Dial featured an impressive list of contributors. John Dewey leads the issue, then comes Charles Beard, then Brooks, and finally Marot, who compared to these other luminaries is basically unknown. This is a special issue on education, and the comparison between American and German institutions is arguably the through-line of the four texts, with Brooks something of an outlier. So it is worth returning to also as an example of a moment, maybe not unlike ours, when perhaps the relationship between intellectual life or cultural activity and the institutions of higher education was very much in question.
What is our relationship to the past, and what ought it be? For Brooks, speaking mainly about literary culture, the answer to these paired questions is that we Americans have been robbed of our birthright – what should have been our tradition – and that it is time to create, in the famous titular phrase of his essay, “a usable past” in order to combat the emptiness that disables our literature. No doubt the essay could be put into the broader context of early 20th century readers of Nietzsche, of the debate around philosophical pragmatism, and, on an even larger scale, arguments over objectivity in the decades around 1900. One might look for instance to Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream, although Brooks, since he was not a professional historian, is not a figure of particular interest to Novick. For now though, let us just replace questions with our own: a past that is usable – usable for who and what?
Brooks opens with a distinction between two kinds of anarchy: one that “fosters” and one that “prevents growth.” Brooks does not himself come back to this former kind of anarchy, although it’s worth thinking about what he means by it. The latter kind is “the sudden unbottling of elements that have had no opportunity to develop freely in the open.” In America there are no “inherited resources,” there has been no “cumulative culture,” and so every individual who wishes to do creative work feels that they must start from the very beginning, all alone. Bad anarchy, then, is each individual responding to their particular conditions on their own. This, clearly, is a somewhat artificial situation, and Brooks places the blame very clearly on professors of literature and literary history who “have placed a sort of Talmudic seal upon the American tradition.” They exhibit a “pathological vindictiveness” toward those who are attempting to do creative work. Nothing made today can be as good as what came before, can even enter into conversation with it.
Whence this hatred for creative work in the professoriate? It is because anyone who is successful in American academic life – and again this is in 1918 – must have fully accommodated themselves to “the exigencies of the commercial mind.” The professor by default orients himself toward “the ideal not of the creative but of the practical life.” The professor “passively plays into the hands that underfeed his own imaginative life.” Finding his own fulfillment and meaning in the closed and perfect past he tips the balance against “the living present,” which, for his own psychological protection, he can only despise. Hence, says Brooks, the histories of American literature that exist always treat the present (starting around 1890) as a total failure, and “stumble and hesitate” when it comes even to Whitman. Practicality means commercial life and is antithetical to creative production; it is destructive of tradition. We may note that usability for the novelist or poet is to be distinguished from the practical.
The university has already been conquered by the latter, indeed scholarship in a merely objective mode is the deformation of intellectual life in the spirit of commercial practicality.
For the professorial mind, as I have said, puts a gloss upon the past that renders it sterile for the living mind. Instead of reflecting the creative impulse in American history, it reaffirms the values established by the commercial tradition; it crowns everything that has passed the censorship of the commercial and moralistic mind. And it appears to be justified because, on the whole, only those American writers who have passed that censorship have undergone a reasonably complete development and in this way entered what is often considered the purview of literary criticism.
And here Brooks makes an interesting claim: successful literature thus far has been “chiefly a literature of exploitation, the counterpart of our American life.” Following the literal exploitation of the frontier there is its cultural exploitation (“Irving and Longfellow and Cooper and Bryant”). The very exceptionality of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman proves the larger point. Exploitation, however, lasts only so long. After the initial “unbottling,” there is nothing substantial left, only “lachrymosity” and spectacle.
For particular writers, as we can see from the sorry record, there are only episodes of success, no full development of authorial character. And yet, “the spiritual welfare of this country depends altogether upon the fate of its creative minds.” These creative minds are in a catastrophic position: “We want bold ideas, and we have nuances. We want courage, and we have universal fear. We want individuality, and we have idiosyncrasy. We want vitality, and we have intellectualism. We want emblems of desire, and we have Niagaras of emotionality. We want expansion of soul, and we have an elephantiasis of the vocal organs. Why? Because we have no cultural economy, no abiding sense of spiritual values, no body of critical understanding? Of course.” And why? Because “the present is a void, and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value.” The past ought to anchor, provide one with some footing that would be secure enough to allow forward motion.
For Brooks, the Europeans are in a much better situation. They have continuous tradition, livings pasts, literary histories that allow new writers to pick up a project already begun. European professors have “intellectual freedom” that does not exists in America. And looking to Europe can help the American in other ways. First, they offer us the example of created, invented, useful pasts. Carlyle and Michelet, for instance, have made just that. But in America “the grey conventional mind casts its shadow backward” and not much of use has been written by the historians. Second, as even a little foreign travel (spiritual or physical) demonstrates, different countries have different and differently useful ideas about each other. The Italians, for instance, have a very different understanding of French history than the British have, because these two nations need different things from it. Similarly, the tradition of American literature appears in a new light when seen from abroad. “Englishmen will ask you why we Americans have so neglected Herman Melville…Russians will tell you that we never really understood the temperament of Jack London.” Thus by leaving America, we can learn to ask ourselves what really matters in it for us so that “the past experience of our people can be placed at the service of the future.”
We begin to arrive here at Brooks’ positive program for getting “a vital order out of the anarchy of the present” and reconnecting the “warm artery that ought to lead from the present back into the past,” which has been severed by the anarchic disdain of the professoriate. What do we get if we focus our attention on the creative impulse as it has appeared in American life? “What emerges them is the desire, the aspiration, the struggle, the tentative endeavor, and the appalling obstacles our life has placed before them.” We have the continual appearance of creative energies, and their interruption by the practical. Again, “sudden unbottling” rather than open development, has been the rule. This problem itself, Brooks suggests, becomes the heart of a usable American history. One example is the thwarted development of Theodore Dreiser. “And there is Vachel Lindsay,” who comes to value sound and color alone because that’s what they like in small towns. So, for Brooks, it is not individual works that ought to draw our attention, rather we should seek “tendencies.” And this seems to mean to him mainly patterns of failure in the trajectories of particular writers. “Why did Ambrose Bierce go wrong?” Or Stephen Crane, or Herman Melville again. Brooks concludes thus: “Knowing that others have desired the things we desire and have encountered the same obstacles, and that in some degree time has begun to face those obstacles down and make the way straight for us, would not the creative forces of this country lose a little of the hectic individualism that keeps them from uniting against their common enemies? And would this not bring about, for the first time, that sense of brotherhood in effort and in aspiration which is the best promise of a national culture?”
So for Brooks cultural or spiritual life is defined not by particular texts, but by the development of authorial personalities – styles, we might say. The national community in its capacity for self-reflection is both the condition and the telos of literary production. For it to develop, individuals must be able to develop themselves as personalities within it. The university is not an aid to this, but is itself so caught in the practical and exploitative life of the country – at least of America – that it is an active enemy of intellectual or creative life. We must go abroad in order to see ourselves and our own options more clearly. There is a naturalness to the development of tradition (the “warm artery”) but also clearly it can be created. At the moment, the universities are actively sabotaging the construction of a national cumulative tradition, but the European example suggests they could – were they free enough from the influence of commerce – help in the good work.
We can see Nietzsche floating around in the background here, as well perhaps as Turner’s famous argument about the frontier and American character, and even the kinds of arguments that Carl Becker would make in “Everyman his own Historian” about the usability and living nature of the past. We should also not forget that this literary moment, in retrospect, will belong to modernism. TS Eliot and Ezra Pound are only two of the Americans who went to Europe in search of something very different from the usable national past that Brooks seems to see on the horizon. So we could read Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as a response here, although perhaps it would be better to understand “Prufrock” as, already, offering a radically different account of the relationship between past and present and future.
I’ve gone on very long already, but I want just to end by suggesting that Helen Marot’s text offers us, I think, a different kind of critique. Who was Marot? She was a librarian and a labor organizer. There’s a good deal to say about hergood deal to say about her, and one might start here, but for present purposes it’s significant that she wrote in 1914 a book about the IWW and had a stint on the editorial board of The Masses before it was shut down by the US government in 1917. She joined The Dial shortly after.
Where Brooks cares mainly about literature, Marot takes the industrial school as her object. Marot frames her intervention in line with Dewey’s at the beginning of the issue – should the United States attempt to adopt a German style of industrial education? – but goes on to make an argument about the emancipatory possibilities of what might otherwise be derisively referred to as industrial or vocational training. Like Brooks, she presents us with a dichotomy, this time between predatory and creative profit-making. Like Brooks, she wishes to save the future and foster creative activity. Unlike Brooks, for Marot it is precisely within practical life that this emancipation of creativity can happen. Also unlike Brooks, her project is profoundly and essentially democratic rather than elitist.
German education has contributed to making what she – and she says everyone – recognizes as an extraordinarily efficient industrial plant. The workers are effective and docile. Yet this kind of education, Marot says, does not fit the United States. “The German has no pressing sense of the need to experiment with life” – here in the USA, we do. Marot presents an alternative path forward for industrial schools which are, today, she says, indeed not very effective. Her vision is a frankly syndicalist one: “No work in the subject matter of industry is education which does not in intention or in fact give the persons involved the ability to participate in the administration of industry.” As things stand, industrial education does the opposite: “the pupils gain more the sense of the power of the subject to control them, than an experience in their power to master the subject.” This mastery, this capacity to manage modern industrial production, is what Marot wants for every working person.
We cannot give up modern industrial production, there is no going back to an old craft system of production. The division of labor, technological development – these are conditions that, we should understand, in fact contain new possibilities. “Technological subject matter…is not part of common experience” – at least not yet. It ought to be. “If released for common experimentation, it is fit matter for making science a vital experience in everyday life.” Educators ought to seize this opportunity and “initiate produce enterprises wherein young people will be free to gain first-hand experience in the problems of industry.” We must, this is to say, fully embrace technological production as what we might call an element of civilization.
The people to ally with here are not so much the businessmen or financiers as people like architects and especially “engineers, not under the influence of business, are qualified to open up the creative aspects of production to the workers.” Marot cites Robert B. Wolf (on whom, see here), speaking at the Taylor Society, as an inspiration here, who argued that Scientific Management ought to bend its science to “making him [the working man] self-reliant and creative.” That’s not what happens now, because industrial education is carried on entirely from the side of business, and so “turn industrial education into industrial training” Educators, on the other hand, are positioned to bring out the “adventure” that exists in industry. “Industrial problems carry those who participate in their solution into pure and applied science, into the study of the market for raw materials and finished products, into the search for unconquered wealth.” Their goal is “to give young people, not an experience which is tagged on to industry under the influence of profits, but an experience which is inspired by the desire to produce and the opportunity to develop the inspiration.” Going a little beyond what Marot has written, and thinking about Taylor’s own writings – we can say that this is of course directly opposed to the plain meaning of Taylorism, which sought precisely and explicitly to strip from the worker all his accumulated store of knowledge and turn it over to the manager, to reduce to zero the ‘inspiration’ of the worker so as to achieve docile efficiency.
This is just what Marot is against. The big industrialists and financiers may well attempt to impose German style efficiency education in the USA. They’ll fail, but the cost will be high for everyone. We shouldn’t let them try: “the problem for American educators is the retention of our native concept of experimental life and the attainment of standards of workmanship – the realization of the strength of associated effort, together with the advance of wealth production.” What we need to do is insist on, says Marot, is a creative rather than a predatory industrial structure. Wealth exploitation must not be allowed to be synonymous with wealth production. For the creative concept to win out, it must “rest upon a people’s desire for productive experience, and their ability to associate together for that common end.” What Marot is trying to do, this is to say, is link a critique of shop floor and classroom practices with a larger critique of capitalist accumulation.
I’ve called Marot’s line of argument here syndicalist, and I was struck by how familiar some of it sounds from the French context. It fits to some degree with the populist mode of thinking about education. However it is revolutionary because Marot sees industrial education and education more broadly neither as training for the shop floor nor as an engine of class mobility, but rather as enabling the transformation of class relations themselves. Brooks had introduced a distinction between the practical and the useful, Marot one between predatory and creative wealth – both are supposed to mark a distance from a certain kind of bad commercial exploitation. Both want to re-activate or make available the past for use in the present, but for Brooks this is a basically elite project; for Marot the technical aspect of production is to be separated from the commercial one in order to render it – the adventure of scientific and technological capacity – available for popular use. Marot wants, we could say, to make of industrial production a usable past for all people.
