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American Traditions for Young People
BARRIERS between reading for adults and for children seem to be breaking down, so that young people may often have the experience of lending books to their elders, who may in turn find with startled interest that a book which they have regarded as fairly complex has been read with understanding by children. In spite of their amazing schedules, their French, their dancing--tap, ballet, classic, expressionistic--their school papers, athletics, clubs, dramatics, their home work and social service, their production of novels, plays, or autobiographies or their many other sometimes rather militant forms of self-expression, they seem to have a fair amount of time in which to discover some of the things they want to know. They read with greedy enjoyment. They like things because they like them. They are unconcerned, unless someone puts wretched ideas into their heads, as to whether what they are reading is going to promote their careers. Since they know so much and are so capable and clever and have such enviable freshness and enthusiasm, it might seem that there is nothing we can do for them. Yet there may be a few contributions that members of an older generation can make without warping their initiative or invading their personalities. They can be permitted to share in the current movement toward a discovery of the American past, particularly in its concern with our cultural traditions. Periodically and in sketchy ways, we always seem to have been digging away at our somewhat mysterious past, but the present movement has freshness and vigor, engaging both amateur and professional historians. The amateurs may be as important as the professionals. It might puzzle almost any experienced writer to prepare a biography of an individual like Old Dan Tucker who washed his face in a frying pan and combed his hair with a wagon wheel and about whom only a few similar bits of information are to be had, but it did not puzzle an aged gentleman whom I met a few years ago. He had just polished off a manuscript some two feet thick, and he had given this a structure by the simple device of moving Old Van around the country--always late for his supper--from the eastern shore to the Rocky Mountains, from Texas to Tennessee and Maine, meeting leading characters of the nation in numbers all along the way. The intervals were filled in by long and lavish descriptions of scenery which the author had enjoyed. He had been a Currier and Ives painter, and I do not think it mattered much to him that his adventure in literature was doomed never to see the light. He had had the amateur's true pleasure in the experiment. There are dozens of such individuals in out of the way places who rarely break into print, who will write or talk about some section of the American past or the American character as if they were obsessed, and who perhaps prove more as to the warmth and genuineness of this retrospective movement than could be proved by a regiment of practiced biographers and historians. PIECE TOGETHER FRAGMENTSIn quiet ways, new ground is continually being broken as to our history, yet lacks knowledge in essential fields. Recently, an extraordinarily charming collection of swipes and swatches and patterns of printed cotton was discovered which had belonged to a man who went peddling his wares through one of our great river valleys in the early part of the last century. But this material lacks a frame of reference. Our knowledge of early textile design and manufacture is fragmentary in the extreme. We do not know where major designs have come from or where the machines were made from which they were printed, or what was the balance between designs of foreign origin and those created in this country, yet all these facts would have much to say as to American taste and talent in the era when the nation was forming and when industrialism was slowly on the rise. What has been done during the past two years under the Federal Art Project by the Index of American Design, in recording sequences of examples in the useful and decorative arts, suggests both the richness of this phase of our inheritance and the slenderness of our knowledge. New and comparatively unknown materials have constantly come to light. New relationships in design have steadily appeared. No pictorial records have existed in this country of full color and dimension, such as those which are being created by the index, showing figureheads, shop signs, toys, puppets, Shaker crafts and crafts of other communes, textiles, stoneware, weathervanes. BECOMING CONSCIOUS OF OUR INHERITANCEEven with the best conditions for completing such a survey, a sufficiently large problem will remain--to devise means by which this inheritance may be appropriated. We do not have that strong and natural association with evidences of the past which is still a commonplace in other countries. A small boy in northern France may grow up with many objects about him which reveal native traditions in the arts, offering him a vocabulary which he can learn to use, without a wrench, without study, almost without thought. With us, continuities have been broken by our continual migrations, and what we have actually created has often been scattered to the four winds. If and when publication comes for such materials as those of the index, no doubt they will be promptly used for definite purposes such as teaching the arts of design, yet they would seem to be far more important as a means by which young people may saturate themselves with a knowledge of forms which have been essential to us in the past, getting a sense of these into their minds and eyes and at the ends of their fingers, without any immediate purpose. The same kind of instinctive possession could be cultivated in relation to American painting if a genuine program of circulating exhibitions and of subsidizing reproductions were embarked upon--and this could be begun even with our present imperfect and incomplete knowledge of the history of American art. From musical materials brought forward by such students as the Lomaxes, Carl Sandburg, and George Pulled Jackson we are beginning to suspect that folk music has taken a distinctive course in this country; and this could easily be made familiar to young people through a wide use of records--best perhaps to be listened to for no particular purpose, not for school programs, or as subjects for topics, or as backgrounds for social history in some studious way, but merely for enjoyment. Though money and plenty of it would be required for such undertakings, the principal handicap would seem to be a prevailing philosophy: we have not believed--educators in particular do not seem to believe--that our cultural inheritance is important. The educational method of beginning with the immediate, the near-at-hand, is pretty well established, yet it would be considered fantastic to open courses in art with a study of American art or to make this a prerequisite for advanced work, even though it would make a quite tenable and interesting approach to more general art history. In many colleges, American literature is offered as a requirement for a teacher's certificate and so remains a dull duty. As a rule, the study of the frontier is presented in one of the primary grades, often the fourth. This is an excellent place to begin, not to stop, but most children stop; and usually nothing more is offered on this subject except perhaps in a college elective. Yet it is not necessary to go the whole way with Turner to see that if we fully understood the development of our many frontiers we should go far toward understanding our contemporary society. A RATIONAL LOYALTYCertainly this is not to urge exaltation of our national history. The unhappy results of this are only too obvious elsewhere. In any event, as a people, we have been committed to internationalism from the beginning, by innumerable circumstances. To sustain this internationalism in an educational program and at the same time to focus upon our own inheritance is by no means a simple matter; yet we must somehow contrive to know ourselves, without obscuring romanticisms. It is romantic to try to prove that the founding fathers and their successors were utilitarians or materialists or obscurely Marxists or actuated quite simply by an "American dream." The difficulty is that realism cannot be put on like a garment. It is an objective which must be approached with an enormous amount of skill and patience, and probably can be achieved only when a whole generation or so of young people has become habituated to its disciplines. ORIGINAL SOURCES CONVEY GENUINE SENSE OF PASTThis is not to deny them the truly romantic; probably we could not if we tried. Nor should they miss the heroic; but they should have these elements without the glossing over of ruder values. The rougher and grosser edges of action and character have been almost habitually smoothed out in the presentation of such folk heroes as Mike Fink and Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, and the tales about them have too often been adorned by a pseudo-literary style though the rustic style which belongs to them is a good style. Revision of estimates downward in later years, whether of people, events, or ideas of social life or artistic achievement is a rather bad business. The means by which young people can obtain a realistic approach would seem to be the same means by which they can obtain a genuine sense of the past--by discovering materials in pristine forms and at first hand, not in one field, as in economic or political history, but in many fields so that a whole texture becomes apparent. They are far better able to use original sources than is generally supposed. They can often pursue their investigations quite competently in the files of such periodicals as the Journal of American Folklore or even the Publications of the Bureau of Ethnology, emerging with better folk tales, songs, and Indian stories than they are likely to find in most so-called children's books. One surmises that if the channels are really opened to them, there is no determinable limit as to what they might excavate, particularly if we are candid and let them know that nobody knows any too much. The problem of setting such youthful investigations in motion is large and complex enough to engage the talents of considerable numbers of teachers, librarians, writers, and parents. It is not a question of turning young people loose and telling them to write their own passports. More books are needed--many finely composed anthologies of out of the way materials, many reprints of older books that have become forgotten, of minor books that can open up essential vistas, biographies of local or regional figures which could have much to say about the history or culture of a place or a section. Writers might turn in and write a few much needed books in their spare time, books with a rich grounding of fact, a fine quality of style, books which might speak only to a local or regional audience for the most part and so would not pay. These are all needed, but the general conviction that books are only one means of reaching the past seems to be needed more. Our education has been and still is almost exclusively literary. We still have a long way to go if the balance is to be redressed, if the many arts which have been intertwined in our culture are to be evoked, and if we are to regard these as essentials in themselves and not merely as "background." POSSIBILITIES OF AN "AMERICAN ROOM"An American room in our libraries, or a group of rooms, might lead to a just proportion, where records of our music could be found at no great distance from records, in another sense, of our sequences in the practical arts; where portfolios of reproductions of our painting, sculpture, and architecture might elbow biographies and histories, novels and poetry belonging to the same places and periods. At best such a room would branch off in all directions and become something of a museum, showing examples of American primitives, some of our early pottery from the Shenandoah or the Ohio valleys, a Pennsylvania chest or cupboard, Louisiana ironwork, or the decorative arts of the old Spanish southwest. The country itself might be evoked by photography--its wild life, its varied contours, and its spoiled and eroded areas as well. Such a room may stand as a symbol of those balances and coordinations which we still lack. There is, of course, no one way of meeting the prodigious circumstance that our national life has been lived too fast for real assimilation or remembrance. Many substitutes may perhaps be devised for this long process. Obviously, the arts grow from tradition, slowly, yet we seem to forget that fact in many of our plans for education and in much of our contemporary criticism. Importance attaches to young people, not because youth is a plastic period but because it is an unconscious period, when many experiences may flow together without special purpose or thought, and wellsprings of the imagination be formed. If we could open our past to young people with genuine abundance, with its poetry and homeliness, its occasional strange sparseness, its cruelties and dark failures, we might have a great literature and music and art upon us before we know it. We might even be able to devise equable ways of living. We can at least let them have what we now possess as fully as possible, with no strings tied.
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