OUR DOUBTFUL PAST

The story of the man who had to pay more to have his family history hushed up than he did to have it discovered is paralleled in the current Harper's by a Technology professor, Harold U. Faulkner. What the D. A. R. and the Colonial Dames will think of him is yet undisclosed. Mr. Faulkner states unblushingly that the majority of immigrants to America "belonged to the class at home who were economically beaten or who were persecuted for religious or political beliefs." New England was not full of psalm singing and blue laws but was a very decent place to live; Virginia had fifty small farmers for every plantation owner of the traditional type. In this impolite fashion, Mr. Faulkner gives a picture of colonial America which makes one think that, in view of what it came from, the United States has done miraculously well by itself.

Popular conceptions are so seldom right that the probabilities are all in Mr. Faulkner's favor. Yet people will probably cling to their picturesque illusions all the more because they have small foundation. Where could one find a horrible example of religious bigotry to cartoon if New England refuses the role? what becomes of the ancestry societies if one's ancestor was a bond servant on a rundown tobacco farm? The public will see to it that these iconoclastic assertions are still-born; it would never do to see the United States join hands with Australia as a place whose social genesis is best not talked about.

Such a view of our ancestors would be as socially healthful as it is impossible. If Americans could only consider themselves sprung from "beaten" and "persecuted" sources, there might arise a justifiable national pride in the fact of material self-improvement to take the place of the straw and wind kind of bombast with which the great mass of the American public is filled.