Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE

When Professor Einstein roused the ire of the women’s clubs by stating that “women dominate the entire life of America,” and that “there are cities with a million population, but cities suffering from terrible poverty—the poverty of intellectual things,” he was but repeating a criticism of our life now old enough to be almost a cliché. Hardly any intelligent foreigner has failed to observe and comment upon the extraordinary feminization of American social life, and oftenest he has coupled this observation with a few biting remarks concerning the intellectual anæmia or torpor that seems to accompany it. Naturally this attitude is resented, and the indiscreet visitor is told that he has been rendered astigmatic by too limited observation. He is further informed that he should travel in our country more extensively, see more people, and live among us longer. The inference is that this chastening process will in due time acquaint him with a beauty and a thrilling intellectual vitality coyly hidden from the superficial impressionist.

Now the thesis of this paper is that the spontaneous judgment of the perceptive foreigner is to a remarkable degree correct. But it is a judgment which has to be modified in certain respects rather sharply. Moreover, even long residence in the United States is not likely to give a visitor as vivid a sense of the historical background that has so largely contributed to the present situation as is aroused in the native American, who in his own family hears the folklore of the two generations preceding him and to whom the pioneer tradition is a reality more imaginatively plausible than, say, the emanations of glory from English fields or the aura of ancient pomp enwrapping an Italian castle. The foreigner is too likely to forget that in a young country, precisely because it is young, traditions have a social sanction unknown in an older country where memory of the past goes so far back as to become shadowy and unreal. It is a paradox of history that from ancient cultures usually come those who “were born too soon,” whereas from young and groping civilizations spring the panoplied defenders of conventions. It is usually when a tradition is fresh that it is respected most; it is only when it has been followed for years sufficient to make it meaningless that it can create its repudiators. America is a very young country—and in no respect younger than that of all Western nations it has the oldest form of established government; our naïve respect for the fathers is surest proof that we are still in the cultural awkward age. We have not sufficiently grown up but that we must still cling to our father and mother. In a word, we still think in pioneer terms, whatever the material and economic facts of a day that has already outgrown their applicability.

And it is the pioneer point of view, once thoroughly understood, which will most satisfactorily explain the peculiar development of the intellectual life in the United States. For the life of the mind is no fine flower of impoverishment, and if the beginnings of human reflection were the wayward reveries of seamen in the long watches of the night or of a shepherd lying on his back idly watching the summer clouds float past, as surely have the considered intellectual achievements of modern men been due to the commercial and industrial organization which, whether or not conducive to the general happiness, has at least made leisure possible for the few. But in the pioneer community leisure cannot exist, even for the few; the struggle is too merciless, the stake—life itself, possibly—too high. The pioneer must almost of necessity hate the thinker, even when he does not despise thought in itself, because the thinker is a liability to a community that can afford only assets; he is non-productive in himself and a dangerously subversive example to others. Of course, the pioneer will tolerate the minister, exactly as primitive tribes tolerated medicine men—and largely for the same reasons. The minister, if he cannot bring rain or ward off pestilence as the medicine man at least pretended he could, can soften the hardness of the human lot and can show the road to a future kingdom that will amply compensate for the drudgery of the present world. He has, in brief, considerable utilitarian value. The thinker per se, however, has none; not only that, he is a reproach and a challenge to the man who must labour by the sweat of his brow—it is as if he said, “For what end, all this turmoil and effort, merely to live? But do you know if life is worth while on such terms?” Questions like these the pioneer must cast far from him, and for the very good reason that if they were tolerated, new communities might never become settled. Scepticism is an expensive luxury possible only to men in cities living off the fruit of others’ toil. Certainly America, up to the end of the reconstruction period following the Civil War, had little practical opportunity and less native impulse for the cultivation of this tolerant attitude towards ultimate values, an atmosphere which is a talisman that a true intellectual life is flourishing.

Consider the terrible hardness of the pioneer’s physical life. I can think of no better description of it than in one of Sherwood Anderson’s stories, “Godliness,” in his book, “Winesburg, Ohio.” He is writing of the Bentley brothers just before the Civil War: “They clung to old traditions and worked like driven animals. They lived as practically all of the farming people of the time lived. In the spring and through most of the winter the highways leading into the town of Winesburg were a sea of mud. The four young men of the family worked hard all day in the fields, they ate heavily of coarse, greasy food, and at night slept like tired beasts on beds of straw. Into their lives came little that was not coarse and brutal, and outwardly they were themselves coarse and brutal.” Naturally, this intense concentration upon work is not the whole of the picture; there was gaiety and often there was romance in the early days of pioneering, it ran like a coloured thread through all the story of our Drang nach Westen. But on the whole the period from our confederation into a Union until the expanding industrial era following the Civil War—roughly the century from 1783 to 1883—was a period in which the cardinal command was, “Be active, be bold, and above all, work.” In that century we subdued and populated a continent. There was no time for the distractions of art or the amenities of literature.

To be sure, a short-range perspective seems to belie this last generalization. The colonial times and the first part of the 19th century witnessed a valid and momentous literary and intellectual efflorescence, and it was then we contributed many names to the biography of greatness. Yet it was a culture centred almost wholly in New England and wholly East of the Alleghanies; it had its vitality because it was not self-conscious, it was frankly derivative from England and Europe, it made no pretensions to being intrinsically American. The great current of our national life went irresistibly along, ploughing, and tilling, and cutting down the trees and brush, making roads and bridges as it filled the valleys and the plains. That was the real America, a mighty river of life, compared with which, for instance, Emerson and the Transcendentalists seemed a mere backwater—not a stagnant or brackish one to be sure, often a pool of quietude in which the stars, like Emerson’s sentences, might be reflected. But the real America was still in the heart of the pioneer. And in one sense, it still is to-day.

The “real America,” I say, because I mean the America of mind and attitude, the inner truth, not the outer actuality. That outer actuality has made the fact of the pioneer almost grotesque. The frontier is closed; the nation is the most prosperous among the harassed ones of the earth; there is no need for the old perpetual preoccupation with material existence. In spite of trade depressions and wars and their aftermaths, we have conquered that problem. But we have not conquered ourselves. We must still go on in the old terms, as if the purpose of making money in order to make more money were as important as the purpose of raising bread in order to support life. The facts have changed, but we have not changed, only deflected our interests. Where the pioneer cleared a wilderness, the modern financier subdues a forest of competitors. He puts the same amount of energy and essentially the same quality of thought into his task to-day, although the practical consequences can hardly be described as identical.

And what have been those practical consequences? As the industrial revolution expanded, coincidently with the filling up of the country, the surplus began to grow. That surplus was expended not towards the enrichment of our life—if one omit the perfunctory bequests for education—but towards the most obvious of unnecessary luxuries, the grandiose maintenance of our women. The daughters of pioneer mothers found themselves without a real job, often, indeed, the chief instrument for advertising their husbands’ incomes. For years the Victorian conception of women as ornaments dominated what we were pleased to call our “better elements”—those years, to put it brutally, which coincided with that early prosperity that made the conception possible. If the leisure of the landed gentry class of colonial times had been other than a direct importation, if there had ever been a genuine salon in our cultural history, or if our early moneyed aristocracy had ever felt itself really secure from the constant challenge of immigrant newcomers, this surplus might have gone towards the deepening and widening of what we could have felt to be an indigenous tradition. Or if, indeed, the Cavalier traditions of the South (the only offshoot of the Renaissance in America) had not been drained of all vitality by the Civil War and its economic and intellectual consequences, this surplus might have enhanced the more gracious aspects of those traditions. None of these possibilities existed; and when prosperity smiled on us we were embarrassed. We were parvenus—even to this day the comic series, “Bringing Up Father,” has a native tang. We know exactly how Mr. Jiggs feels when Mrs. Jiggs drags him away to a concert and makes him dress for a stiff, formal dinner, when all his heart desires is to smoke his pipe and play poker with Dinty and the boys. Indeed, this series, which appears regularly in all the newspapers controlled by Mr. Hearst, will repay the social historian all the attention he gives it. It symbolises better than most of us appreciate the normal relationship of American men and women to cultural and intellectual values. Its very grotesqueness and vulgarity are revealing.

In no country as in the United States have the tragic consequences of the lack of any common concept of the good life been so strikingly exemplified, and in no country has the break with those common concepts been so sharp. After all, when other colonies have been founded, when other peoples have roved from the homeland and settled in distant parts, they have carried with them more than mere scraps of tradition. Oftenest they have carried the most precious human asset of all, a heritage of common feeling, which enabled them to cling to the substance of the old forms even while they adapted them to the new conditions of life. But with us the repudiation of the old heritages was complete; we deliberately sought a new way of life, for in the circumstances under which we came into national being, breaking with the past was synonymous with casting off oppression. The hopefulness, the eagerness, the enthusiasm of that conscious attempt to adjudge all things afresh found its classic expression in the eloquent if vague. Declaration of Independence, not even the abstract phraseology of which could hide the revolutionary fervour beneath. Yet a few short years and that early high mood of adventure had almost evaporated, and men were distracted from the former vision by the prospect of limitless economic expansion, both for the individual and the nation as a whole. The Declaration symbolized only a short interlude in the pioneer spirit which brought us here and then led us forth to conquer the riches nature, with her fine contempt of human values, so generously spread before us. The end of the revolutionary mood came as soon as the signing of the Constitution by the States, that admirable working compromise in government which made no attempt to underscore democracy, as we understand it to-day, but rather to hold it in proper check and balance. Free, then, of any common heritage or tradition which might question his values, free, also, of the troublesome idealism of the older revolutionary mood, the ordinary man could go forth into the wilderness with singleness of purpose. He could be, as he still is to-day, the pioneer toujours.

Now when his success in his half-chosen rôle made it unnecessary for him to play it, it was precisely the lack of a common concept of the good life which made it impossible for him to be anything else. It is not that Americans make money because they love to do so, but because there is nothing else to do; oddly enough, it is not even that the possessive instincts are especially strong with us (I think the French, for instance, are naturally more avaricious than we), but that we have no notion of a definite type of life for which a small income is enough, and no notion of any type of life from which work has been consciously eliminated. Never in any national sense having had leisure, as individuals we do not know what to do with it when good fortune gives it to us. Unlike a real game, we must go on playing our game even after we have won.

But if the successful pioneer did not know what to do with his own leisure, he had naïve faith in the capacity of his women to know what to do with theirs. With the chivalric sentimentality that often accompanies the prosperity of the primitive, the pioneer determined that his good luck should bestow upon his wife and sisters and mother and aunts a gift, the possession of which slightly embarrassed himself. He gave them leisure exactly as the typical business man of to-day gives them a blank check signed with his name. It disposed of them, kept them out of his world, and salved his conscience—like a check to charity. Unluckily for him, his mother, his wife, his sisters, and his aunts were of his own blood and breeding; they were the daughters of pioneers like himself, and the daughters of mothers who had contributed share and share alike to those foundations which had made his success possible. Although a few developed latent qualities of parasitism, the majority were strangely discontented (strangely, that is, from his point of view) with the job of mere Victorian ornament. What more natural under the circumstances than that the unimportant things of life—art, music, religion, literature, the intellectual life—should be handed over to them to keep them busy and contented, while he confined himself to the real man’s job of making money and getting on in the world? Was it not a happy and sensible adaptation of function?

Happy or not, it was exactly what took place. To an extent almost incomprehensible to the peoples of older cultures, the things of the mind and the spirit have been given over, in America, into the almost exclusive custody of women. This has been true certainly of art, certainly of music, certainly of education. The spinster school-marm has settled in the impressionable, adolescent minds of boys the conviction that the cultural interests are largely an affair of the other sex; the intellectual life can have no connection with native gaiety, with sexual curiosity, with play, with creative dreaming, or with adventure. These more genuine impulses, he is made to feel, are not merely distinguishable from the intellectual life, but actually at war with it. In my own day at Harvard the Westerners in my class looked with considerable suspicion upon those who specialized in literature, the classics, or philosophy—a man’s education should be science, economics, engineering. Only “sissies,” I was informed, took courses in poetry out in that virile West. And to this day for a boy to be taught to play the piano, for example, is regarded as “queer,” whereas for a girl to be so taught is entirely in the nature of things. That is, natural aptitude has nothing to do with it; some interests are proper for women, others for men. Of course there are exceptions enough to make even the boldest hesitate at generalizations, yet assuredly the contempt, as measured in the only terms we thoroughly understand, money, with which male teachers, male professors (secretly), male ministers, and male artists are universally held should convince the most prejudiced that, speaking broadly, this generalization is in substance correct.

In fact, when we try to survey the currents of our entire national life, to assess these vagrant winds of doctrine free from the ingenuousness that our own academic experience or training may give us, the more shall we perceive that the dichotomy between the cultural and intellectual life of men and women in this country has been carried farther than anywhere else in the world. We need only recall the older women’s clubs of the comic papers—in truth, the actual women’s clubs of to-day as revealed by small-town newspaper reports of their meetings—the now deliquescent Browning Clubs, the Chautauquas, the church festivals, the rural normal schools for teachers, the women’s magazines, the countless national organizations for improving, elevating, uplifting this, that, or the other. One shudders slightly and turns to the impeccable style, the slightly tired and sensuous irony of Anatole France (not yet censored, if we read him in French) for relief. Or if we are so fortunate as to be “regular” Americans instead of unhappy intellectuals educated beyond our environment, we go gratefully back to our work at the office. Beside the stilted artificiality of this world of higher ethical values the business world, where men haggle, cheat, and steal with whole-hearted devotion is at least real. And it is this world, the world of making money, in which alone the American man can feel thoroughly at home. If the French romanticists of the 18th century invented the phrase la femme mécomprise, a modern Gallic visitor would be tempted to observe that in this 20th century the United States was the land of l’homme mécompris.

These, then, are the cruder historical forces that have led directly to the present remarkable situation, a situation, of course, which I attempt to depict only in its larger outlines. For the surface of the contemporary social structure shows us suffrage, the new insights into the world of industry which the war gave so many women for the first time, the widening of professional opportunity, co-education, and, in the life which perhaps those of us who have contributed to this volume know best, a genuine intellectual camaraderie. Nevertheless, I believe the underlying thesis cannot be successfully challenged. Where men and women in America to-day share their intellectual life on terms of equality and perfect understanding, closer examination reveals that the phenomenon is not a sharing but a capitulation. The men have been feminized.

Thus far through this essay I have by implication rather than direct statement contrasted genuine interest in intellectual things with the kind of intellectual life led by women. Let me say now that no intention is less mine than to contribute to the old controversy concerning the respective intellectual capacities of the two sexes. If I use the adjective “masculine” to denote a more valid type of intellectual impulse than is expressed by the adjective “feminine,” it is not to belittle the quality of the second impulse; it is a matter of definition. Further, the relative degree of “masculine” and “feminine” traits possessed by an individual are almost as much the result of acquired training as of native inheritance. The young, independent college girl of to-day is in fact more likely to possess “masculine” intellectual habits than is the average Y.M.C.A. director. I use the adjectives to express broad, general characteristics as they are commonly understood.

For a direct examination of the intellectual life of women—which, I repeat, is practically the intellectual life of the nation—in the United States shows the necessity of terms being defined more sharply. Interest in intellectual things is first, last, and all the time disinterested; it is the love of truth, if not exclusively for its own sake, at least without fear of consequences, in fact with precious little thought about consequences. This does not mean that such exercise of the native disposition to think, such slaking of the natural metaphysical curiosity in all of us, is not a process enwrapped—as truly as the disposition to make love or to get angry—with an emotional aura of its own, a passion as distinctive as any other. It merely means that the occasions which stimulate this innate intellectual disposition are of a different sort than those which stimulate our other dispositions. An imaginative picture of one’s enlarged social self will arouse our instincts of ambition or a desire to found a family, whereas curiosity or wonder about the mystery of life, the meaning of death, the ultimate nature of God (objects of desire as truly as other objects) will arouse our intellectual disposition. These occasions, objects, hypotheses are of necessity without moral significance. The values inherent in them are the values of satisfied contemplation and not of practical result. Their immediate utility—although their ultimate, by the paradox that is constantly making mere common sense inadequate, may be very great—is only subjective. In this sense, they seem wayward and masculine; and, cardinal sin of all, useless.

Perhaps the meaning of the “feminine” approach to the intellectual life may be made somewhat clearer by this preliminary definition. The basic assumption of such an approach is that ideas are measured for their value by terms outside the ideas themselves, or, as Mrs. Mary Austin recently said in a magazine article, by “her [woman’s] deep sense of social applicability as the test of value.” Fundamentally, in a word, the intellectual life is an instrument of moral reform; the real test of ideas lies in their utilitarian success. Hence it is hardly surprising that the intellectual life, as I have defined it, of women in America turns out on examination not to be an intellectual life at all, but sociological activity. The best of modern women thinkers in the United States—and there are many—are oftenest technical experts, keen to apply knowledge and skill to the formulation of a technique for the better solution of problems the answers to which are already assumed. The question of fundamental ends is seldom if ever raised: for example, the desirability of the modern family, the desirability of children glowing with health, the desirability of monogamy are not challenged. They are assumed as ends desirable in themselves, and what women usually understand by the intellectual life is the application of modern scientific methods to a sort of enlarged and subtler course in domestic science.

This attitude of contempt for mere intellectual values has of course been strengthened by the native pioneer suspicion of all thought that does not issue immediately in successful action. The remarkable growth of pragmatism, and its sturdy offspring instrumentalism, where ideas become but the lowly handmaidens of “getting on,” has been possible to the extent to which we see it to-day precisely because the intellectual atmosphere has been surcharged with this feminized utilitarianism. We are deeply uncomfortable before introspection, contemplation, or scrupulous adherence to logical sequence. Women do not hesitate to call these activities cold, impersonal, indirect—I believe they have a phrase for them, “the poobah tradition of learning.” With us the concept of the intellect as a soulless machine operating in a rather clammy void has acquired the force of folklore because we have so much wished to strip it of warmth and colour. We have wanted to discredit it in itself; we have respected it only for what it could do. If its operations lead to better sanitation, better milk for babies, and larger bridges over which, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, we might cross more rapidly from one dismal, illiberal city to another dismal, illiberal city, then those operations have been justified. That the life of the mind might have an emotional drive, a sting or vibrancy of its own, constituting as valuable a contribution to human happiness as, say, the satisfied marital felicity of the bacteria-less suburbanite in his concrete villa has been incomprehensible. Every science must be an applied science, the intellect must be applied intellect before we thoroughly understand it. We have created an environment in which the intellectual impulses must become fundamentally social in quality and mood, whereas the truth of the matter is that these impulses, like the religious impulse, in their pristine spontaneity are basically individualistic and capricious rather than disciplined.

But such individualism in thought, unless mellowed by contact with institutions that assume and cherish it and thus can, without patronizing, correct its wildnesses, inevitably turns into eccentricity. And such, unfortunately, has too often been the history of American intellectuals. The institutional structure that might sustain them and keep them on the main track of the humanistic tradition has been too fragile and too slight. The university and college life, the educational institutions, even the discipline of scholarship, as other essays in this volume show us, have been of very little assistance. Even the church has provoked recalcitrance rather than any real reorientation of religious viewpoint, and our atheists—recall Ingersoll—have ordinarily been quite conventional in their intellectual outlook. With educated Englishmen, for example, whatever their religious, economic, or political views, there has been a certain common tradition or point of departure and understanding, i.e., the classics. Mr. Balfour can speak the same language as Mr. Bertrand Russell, even when he is a member of a government that puts Mr. Russell in gaol for his political opposition to the late war. But it really is a strain on the imagination to picture Mr. Denby quoting Hume to refute Mr. Weeks, or Vice-President Coolidge engaging in an epistemological controversy with Postmaster-General Hays. There is no intellectual background common to President Harding and Convict Debs or to any one person and possibly as many as a hundred others—there are only common social or geographical backgrounds, in which the absence of a real community of interests is pathetically emphasized by grotesque emphasis upon fraternal solidarity, as when Mr. Harding discovered that he and his chauffeur belonged to the same lodge, regarding this purely fortuitous fact as a symbol of the healing power of the Fathers and of American Democracy!

In such an atmosphere of shadowy spiritual relationships, where the thinness of contact of mind with mind is childishly disguised under the banner of good fellowship, it might be expected that the intellectual life must be led not only with that degree of individualistic isolation which is naturally necessary for its existence, but likewise in a hostile and unintelligent environment of almost enforced “difference” from the general social type. Such an atmosphere will become as infested with cranks, fanatics, mushroom religious enthusiasts, moral prigs with new schemes of perfectability, inventors of perpetual motion, illiterate novelists, and oratorical cretins, as a swamp with mosquitoes. They seem to breed almost overnight; we have no standard to which the wise and the foolish may equally repair, no criterion by which spontaneously to appraise them and thus, by robbing them of the breath of their life, recognition, reduce their numbers. On the contrary, we welcome them all with a kind of Jamesian gusto, as if every fool, like every citizen, must have his right to vote. It is a kind of intellectual enfranchisement that produces the same sort of leadership which, in the political field of complete suffrage, we suffer under from Washington and our various State capitals. Our intellectual life, when we judge it objectively on the side of vigour and diversity, too often seems like a democracy of mountebanks.

Yet when we turn from the more naïve and popular experiments for finding expression for the baulked disposition to think, the more sophisticated jeunesse dorée of our cultural life are equally crippled and sterile. They suffer not so much from being thought and being “queer”—in fact, inwardly deeply uncomfortable at not being successful business men, they are scrupulously conventional in manner and appearance—but from what Professor Santayana has called, with his usual felicity, “the genteel tradition.” It is a blight that falls on the just and the unjust; like George Bernard Shaw, they are tolerant before the caprices of the mind, and intolerant before the caprices of the body. They acquire their disability from the essentially American (and essentially feminine) timorousness before life itself; they seem to want to confine, as do all good husbands and providers, adventure to mental adventure and tragedy to an error in ratiocination. They will discant generously about liberty of opinion—although, strictly speaking, opinion is always free; all that is restricted is the right to put it into words—yet seem singularly silent concerning liberty of action. If this were a mere temperamental defect, it would of course have no importance. But it cuts much deeper. Thought, like mist, arises from the earth, and to it must eventually return, if it is not to be dissipated into the ether. The genteel tradition, which has stolen from the intellectual life its own proper possessions, gaiety and laughter, has left it sour and déraciné. It has lost its earthy roots, its sensuous fulness, its bodily mise-en-scène. One has the feeling, when one talks to our correct intellectuals, that they are somehow brittle and might be cracked with a pun, a low story, or an animal grotesquerie as an eggshell might be cracked. Yet whatever else thought may be in itself, surely we know that it has a biological history and an animal setting; it can reach its own proper dignity and effectiveness only when it functions in some kind of rational relationship with the more clamorous instincts of the body. The adjustment must be one of harmony and welcome; real thinkers do not make this ascetic divorce between the passions and the intellect, the emotions and the reason, which is the central characteristic of the genteel tradition. Thought is nourished by the soil it feeds on, and in America to-day that soil is choked with the feckless weeds of correctness. Our sanitary perfection, our material organization of goods, our muffling of emotion, our deprecation of curiosity, our fear of idle adventure, our horror of disease and death, our denial of suffering—what kind of soil of life is that?

Surely not an over-gracious or thrilling one; small wonder that our intellectual plants wither in this carefully aseptic sunlight.

Nevertheless, though I was tempted to give the sub-title “A Study in Sterility” to this essay, I do not believe that our soil is wholly sterile. Beneath the surface barrenness stirs a germinal energy that may yet push its way through the weeds and the tin-cans of those who are afraid of life. If the genteel tradition did not succumb to the broad challenge of Whitman, his invitations have not been wholly rejected by the second generation following him. The most hopeful thing of intellectual promise in America to-day is the contempt of the younger people for their elders; they are restless, uneasy, disaffected. It is not a disciplined contempt; it is not yet kindled by any real love of intellectual values—how could it be? Yet it is a genuine and moving attempt to create a way of life free from the bondage of an authority that has lost all meaning, even to those who wield it. Some it drives in futile and pathetic expatriotism from the country; others it makes headstrong and reckless; many it forces underground, where, much as in Russia before the revolution of 1905, the intelligentsia meet their own kind and share the difficulties of their common struggle against an environment that is out to destroy them. But whatever its crudeness and headiness, it is a yeast composed always of those who will not conform. The more the pressure of standardization is applied to them the sharper and keener—if often the wilder—becomes their rebellion against it. Just now these non-conformists constitute a spiritual fellowship which is disorganized and with few points of contact. It may be ground out of existence, for history is merciless and every humanistic interlude resembles a perilous equipoise of barbaric forces. Only arrogance and self-complacency give warrant for assuming that we may not be facing a new kind of dark age. On the other hand, if the more amiable and civilized of the generation now growing up can somehow consolidate their scattered powers, what may they not accomplish? For we have a vitality and nervous alertness which, properly channelled and directed, might cut through the rocks of stupidity with the precision and spaciousness with which our mechanical inventions have seized on our natural resources and turned them into material goods. Our cup of life is full to the brim.

I like to think that this cup will not all be poured upon the sandy deltas of industrialism ... we have so much to spare! Climb to the top of the Palisades and watch the great city in the deepening dusk as light after light, and rows of lights after rows, topped by towers of radiance at the end of the island, shine through the shadows across the river. Think, then, of the miles of rolling plains, fertile and dotted with cities, stretching behind one to that other ocean which washes a civilization that was old before we were born and yet to-day gratefully accepts our pitiful doles to keep it from starvation, of the millions of human aspirations and hopes and youthful eagernesses contained in the great sprawling, uneasy entity we call our country—must all the hidden beauty and magic and laughter we know is ours be quenched because we lack the courage to make it proud and defiant? Or walk down the Avenue some late October morning when the sun sparkles in a clear and electric air such as can be found nowhere else in the world. The flashing beauty of form, the rising step of confident animalism, the quick smile of fertile minds—must all these things, too, be reduced to a drab uniformity because we lack the courage to proclaim their sheer physical loveliness? Has not the magic of America been hidden under a fog of ugliness by those who never really loved it, who never knew our natural gaiety and high spirits and eagerness for knowledge? They have the upper hand now—but who would dare to prophesy that they can keep it?

Perhaps this is only a day-dream, but surely one can hope that the America of our natural affections rather than the present one of enforced dull standardization may some day snap the shackles of those who to-day keep it a spiritual prison. And as surely will it be the rebellious and disaffected who accomplish the miracle, if it is ever accomplished. Because at bottom their revolt, unlike the aggressions of the standardizers, is founded not on hate of what they cannot understand, but on love of what they wish all to share.

Harold E. Stearns