Floyd Dell on G. K. Chesteron, Part 2

A month ago, I posted the first part of Floyd Dell's review of G. K. Chesterton's "A Short History of England."  Here's the rest:

The philosophy of Christianity is generally – save in the Calvinistic sects – a free-will philosophy.  A good Christian wants to believe in miracles.  And a good Christian who happens to be a revolutionist wants to live in a world where the miracle of revolution is possible – where the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.  Not for him the cut-and-dried universe of Marxian determinism!  And not for some millions of other excellent people who, I am sure, would gladly take their places behind the first barricade of the Revolution.  Professor Milyukov, it is said, sat in a balcony and watched the Petrograd mob go against the machine-guns.  “It will all be over in half an hour,” he said.  He knew too much to believe that a mob could suddenly overthrow the solid tyranny of Tsarism.  But the mob didn’t know.  And so it went and did it.  Since then we have learned that success of the Russian revolution was, for a lot of reasons, inevitable, predestined, economically determined.  But for about twenty-four hours what was needed was Christian courage and the faith that is beyond knowledge.

Floyd Dell by John Sloane (1914)

It is characteristic of this mode of thought, however, that it does not wait for the Revolution, but rather continually creates revolutionary forms of action, some hopeless and some fruitful, out of its ever-youthful energies.

 [Mr. Chesterton champions] the movement for the creation or restoration of small peasant holdings of land [and] Guild Socialism intending to restore to labor the chief of its medieval virtues, the ancient virtue of handicraftsmanship. It will be noted that the mind which is free from the obsession of the Present is free to conceive a restoration of the Past.  To the determinist there is something at once sacrilegious and wasteful in this attempt, which he describes as “setting back the clock.” To the free-willist, however, this is no clockwork universe.  Going back to the path from which we wandered a few hundred years ago may be the most progressive thing to do – particularly if we have wandered into a bog.


There is then a scattered but philosophically related set of efforts now being made all over the world, outside the Socialist movement, to remould the world nearer to the heart’s desire.  The chief practical difference between these efforts and those of Socialism is that they aim at restricting and if you please abolishing capitalism, rather than fostering it; and the same thing is true with regard to that creature of capitalism, the modern State.  They regard State capitalism, as we do, as the logical outcome of present-day affairs; but precisely because it is the logical outcome, they propose to prevent it.  They call it, in H. Belloc’s phrase, the Servile State, and their chief anger against us Socialists is on the ground that we have been these many years engaged – oh, with the best intentions! – in helping our masters forge the fetters for an industrial slavery.

Well, we have now bounded G. K. Chesterton, I think, on all sides.  He hates capitalism, distrusts the State, fears Industrial Slavery, wants labor to get back the mastery of its tools and the people to get back the land taken away from them in the middle ages, sees no reason why these things should not be done at once, and prefers to live in a universe in which such a revolution is possible. His “Short History of England,” intended for working-people, is a vivid account of the way in which the workers were robbed by the middle-class of their land and their tools.

Ordinarily, I am still so much under the spell of the Evolutionary Myth that I can’t help feeling, as the heir of all the ages, that I am pretty well off.  But Mr. Chesterton tells me that I have in fact been robbed of my patrimony.  My folks, no longer ago than the middle ages, had things which I have not – taken away from them by force in the fourteenth and succeeding centuries by the ancestors as it were, of Mr. Rockefeller.  It really makes me feel quite differently about the matter.  I had intended to confiscate Mr. Rockefeller’s property, on broad sociological grounds, some time in the next hundred and fifty years.  But now I want the family property back right away!  Particularly I want back those guilds which Mr. Rockefeller’s ancestors destroyed much in the way his hired thugs break up an I.W.W. local today.

 Mr. Chesterton deserves the attention of the working-class movement in America.  It is difficult to say which has stood most in the way of his acceptance here, his wit or his Catholicism.  If it is the latter, these books furnish Mr. Chesterton’s own defense – a very aggressive defense, it should be said. So much the better for us.  We have been so nourished upon Protestant myth in our school histories that even our later thinking is colored with adolescent prejudices.  We need to be reminded that Luther was not our liberator from any sense of responsibility toward the workers.  We need to be told again that Protestantism was the preface to the devil-take-the-hindmost school of economics, and that whatever may have been the shortcomings of the Catholic Church in our own times, it has never yet given its sanction to capitalist ethics.  We all know, of course, that Catholic workingmen can fight as fiercely for their rights as Atheists; but we need Mr. Chesterton to point out that in doing so they do not cease to be good Catholics in the strictest sense.

The young Floyd Dell was on fire with new ideas, some useful, some destructive, but the fire went out.  By the early 1930's radical journalism had passed into the hands of the communists.  Dell got a job during the depression writing manuals for an agency of the federal government and stayed there until his retirement following World War II. He died in Bethesda, MD on July 23, 1969.