A Modern Beanstalk

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Title:     A Modern Beanstalk
Author: Heywood Broun [More Titles by Broun]

The legends of the world have been devised by timorous people. They represent the desire of man, sloshing around in a world much too big for him, to keep up his courage by whistling. He has pretended through these tales that champions of his own kind would spring up to protect him. "Let St. George do it," was a well known motto in the days of old.

And we must insist again that such tales are false and pernicious stimulants for the young. We intend to tell H. 3d that when Jack climbed up the beanstalk the giant flicked him off with one finger. We want the child to have some respect for size and to associate it with authority. Otherwise we don't see how we can possibly prevail upon him to pay any attention when we say, "Stop that." If he goes on with these fairy stories he will merely measure us coolly for a slingshot.

As a matter of fact, he doesn't pay any attention now. The time for propaganda is already here. In our stories the ogre is going to receive his due. Of course, we will add a moral. It would be wrong to lead the boy to believe that brute force is the only effective power in the world. Now and then a giant will be killed, but it will not be any easy victory for one presumptuous champion with a magic sword. Instead we will explain that little Jack was not killed when the giant flipped him off the beanstalk. The huge finger struck him only a glancing blow. Nevertheless, it took Jack a good many days to get well again. It was a fine lesson for him. During his convalescence (naturally we will have to think up a shorter word) he did a lot of thinking. As soon as he was up and around he scoured the country for other boys and at last he managed to recruit a band of fifty. The first dark night Jack climbed the beanstalk again, but he took along the fifty. By a prearranged plan they fell upon the giant from all sides and managed to bear him down and kill him. We certainly are not going to admit that a giant can be opened by anything less than Jacks or better.

Following the account of the death of the giant will come the moral. We will explain that Jack is small and weak and that there are great and monstrous powers in the world which are too strong for him. But he need not wait for the superman or the magic lamp or anything like that. He must make common cause with his kind. At this point we shall probably digress for a while to go into a brief but adequate exposition of the League of Nations, municipal ownership, profit sharing and the single tax.

Dropping the serious side of the discussion, we shall add that even a great broth of a man can be spoiled by too many cooks. There is no power in the world great enough to resist the will of man if only he moves against it valiantly--and in numbers.

Maybe H. 3d will not like our version of "Jack and the Beanstalk" half as well as the original. But we fear that when he grows up he is going to find that there are still dragons and ogres and assorted monsters roaming the world. We want him to be instrumental in killing them. We don't want him to get clawed by going forward in foolishly overconfident forays.

There is the Tammany Tiger, for instance. Here and there a brave young fellow rises up and says, "I'm going to kill the Tiger." Having read the fairy stories, he thinks that the thing can be done by a little courage mixed with magic. He paints REFORM on a banner, charges ahead before anybody but the Tiger is ready and gets chewed up.

This is sentimentally appealing, but it has been a singularly useless system of ridding the city of the Tiger. I want H. 3d to know better and to act not only more wisely but more successfully. Somewhere in the story I plan to work in a paraphrase of something Emerson once said. Jack's last words to his army just before climbing the beanstalk will be, "If you strike a giant you must kill him."

[The end]
Heywood Broun's essay: Modern Beanstalk

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