This was the dominant surface impression that I carried away from Zenith after my last visit, and it is so different from anything that I have read or heard about even the smallest minority in any Middle-Western city that I have gone about telling it to a number of people—in New York and elsewhere. My listeners, when at all interested, were sceptical, and usually observed that Zenith must be very different from most Middle-Western cities—a special case. It may be so. I do not profess to generalize about the whole region. Zenith is the only Middle-Western city that I know well. But I am doubtful. I rather fancy that people are corrupted by literature. They do not see things for themselves, even those close-by; instead, they read in novels or plays that things are thus and so, and take the author’s word for it. And the author, himself, I fancy, is frequently writing about what he, too, has read to be thus and so. One sees Victor Margueritte, for example, becoming uncomfortably aware (like all the rest of the elderly writers, through hearsay) that something dreadful has happened to the younger generation, and then setting out to write about it in La Garçonne—a work as sheerly literary, lacking in observation, and impossible in its psychology, as a novel by Florence Barclay.
But, to return to the people of Zenith, I found them very like well-bred people anywhere else—like, say, well-bred people in Philadelphia or in an English city. They read—the women, anyway—desultorily, as people everywhere read, but books demanding some effort: The Revolt against Civilization, The Education of Henry Adams, novels by Couperus, Bojer, and Knut Hamsun; almost never poetry. They did not know a great deal about pictures—at least, pictures and statues were not an intimate part of their lives—because in Zenith there was no art gallery; they did not have daily opportunity to look at pictures. But a great many of them were intelligently and sincerely fond of music, because there was much good music to be heard every year in Zenith. A string quartet would be glad indeed to draw such a house in New York as it draws in Zenith.
When you come to think of it, all this is natural enough (except perhaps the intensity of their love for music—but I shall say more of that later). There is no reason outside of literature why these people should have been crude or conventionally Middle-Western. Virtually all of them had been away to school or college, probably half of the younger men and a much larger proportion of the younger women in the East; all had travelled widely in America, and a great many, especially the women, in Europe. A considerable number of the older ones go to California or Florida for the winter.
There were, of course, different groups and eddies within this society. There were the very young—the débutantes and their swains. I observed them at the dances and talked casually with a few, but I really learned little about them. My very superficial impression, which I give you for whatever it may be worth, was that they had magnificent and amusing savoir-faire, beneath which they hid an ashamed ingenuousness. I do not know or greatly care what their morals were, but I should guess that they were much the same as morals were among people of their age and wealth ten years ago or twenty.
There was also the fast set, a small group of young married people. Personally I saw nothing of them and can only repeat what I was told of them by others: that they drank hard in order to experience some emotion in promiscuous embraces, and that it was all hopelessly raw. I cannot vouch for the truth of the description, but it sounded plausible. Having refused to generalize about the whole of the Middle-West, I am certainly not going to do so about the whole of the United States, but I can say that, from what little I have seen of fast sets anywhere in America, they have always seemed to me raw. I have seen elegance and swiftness delightfully combined in Europe, but not in America. It may be that this group in Zenith represented some obscure, desperate and futile revolt against the smoothness of Zenith society, of the Zenith soul. If so, it was pathetic, for it did not cause so much as a ripple. People did not seem even shocked by it, only bored.
This, then, was the impression I received of Zenith people: smoothness, ease, manner, something approaching grace, something approaching charm. It was very delightful.
Still, I should not like to live in Zenith. For, if it has none of the faults popularly attributed to the Middle-West, it has others, unsectional, beneath and perhaps even in part the cause of its charm, that trouble me deeply.
This society, which is the heart and mind and soul of Zenith, is immensely conservative, immensely conventional, both morally and mentally. It does not belligerently flaunt, or argue in favour of, conventional standards; it accepts them as something settled a long time since. There is a good deal to be said for this—or for a part of it. Indeed, there is a good deal to be said for most of what Zenith does or is. Is not more real freedom to be obtained through accepting certain age-old conventions, such as that of marriage and married fidelity, for instance, and then making the best of them, than through wasting one’s strength in struggling against them, with no adequate substitute to offer? But Zenith accepts too much. It accepts the Steel Corporation, Mr. Gary, the American Legion, the Republican Party, the total wickedness of the I.W.W., the sole responsibility of Germany for the war, and the entire basic system of Capital and Labour as at present existing, though it is willing to concede improvements in detail. But this attitude probably makes for the almost suave charm of this society, which is, after all, the same kind of charm that was to be found in Upper-Middle-Class English society before the war.
These people are amazingly cut off from and ignorant of the vast labouring class. They know that not one of themselves could be elected congressman or mayor or even to membership on the school-board, but they accept the fact coolly and without much resentment as revealing nothing more than the jealousy of the ‘Have-Nots’ for the ‘Haves,’ of those at the bottom for those who have deservedly reached the top. Yet they are democratic among themselves, and, unlike the McKelveys, admit newcomers easily, with no inquiry into their antecedents. They are not really snobbish. Many of the men are employers of labour on a large scale, yet even they seem to be merely exasperated by the increasing difficulties in controlling their men, in much the same way that the women are annoyed by the difficulty of getting and keeping servants. They talk of demagogues, of Red propaganda, of the unwillingness of men to do an honest day’s work, of labour unrest, of Bolshevism—oh, especially of Bolshevism! But among even these employers I could detect no perception that the whole economic system was being seriously questioned, and certainly no perception of the numerical strength and growing unity of the questioners. But it would not be fair to consider this ignorance in the class of people I am describing as confined especially to Zenith or the Middle-West. Where in the world does it not exist?
A lesser fault was that there was no good general conversation. Indeed, there was virtually no general conversation at all. Perhaps this was because the men did not join in. There seemed, in fact, to be a strange separation of men from women in Zenith. The attitude of the men toward the women was delightful—easy, courteous without being deferential in the obnoxious Southern fashion—and the women’s attitude toward the men was equally pleasant. But men and women seemed to have nothing in common. They often did things together, played golf or bridge or tennis or even went on long canoe-trips, but they did not think together. They did not even appear to be united by sex-attraction. One simply did not feel, not ever, the haunting presence of that restless vivifying emotion. Zenith was uncannily, horribly cool. How in the world, I kept wondering, did babies get born here? Still, they did, and their mothers, with quite inadequate help, looked after them admirably. For real amusement the men liked to get off by themselves, have dinner, drink, and play poker or bridge. They were continually giving small parties of this sort in some private dining-room of the Zenith Club. At one which I attended a discussion of wives arose, the model wife being esteemed the one who cheerfully let her husband go out any or every evening. On this same evening a mixed dinner-party was being given in the ladies’ dining-room of the club, and when it was over the young men of that party drifted into our smaller room for a few minutes. They sniffed up rather wistfully the doggy atmosphere that pervades a stag-party and helped themselves to drinks from the bottles on the sideboard. ‘And where are you going now?’ one of us inquired. ‘Up to Jim’s house to play bridge.’ ‘Think of it!’ exclaimed my host pityingly, as the victims to sex filed out. ‘They’re going to Jim’s house—to play bridge—with women!’