Introducing the American Spirit

by Edward Alfred Steiner

The big, American out-of-doors, even where it is old and its waste spaces are cultivated and hedged about, has something which is characteristically American. Of course nature knows no political boundary; the grass is green everywhere, the sky is blue, cattle and sheep, like man, have a long and honorable ancestry. Yet there is a difference which may not be due to what nature is, but to man’s attitude towards her and his treatment of her.

I have noticed this in passing through Europe; how unerringly one knows where Germanic boundaries end and those of the Slav begin. German fields and forests are trim and orderly; Slavic territory so ill kept and ill used that when one has a glimpse of a village even from the swift moving train, the difference is obvious.

Sometimes I am inclined to believe that this attitude of man affects his environment as much as we know the environment affects him. I wonder just how much of the American out-of-doors, with its generous but not gentle aspect, its subdued but untamed spirit, is due to those valiant men who came from across the sea, and in so doing restored a bit of their long-lost courage, and made masters of men who so long had been serfs and knaves.

I had hoped that the sudden burst of the Hudson upon my guests’ vision would thrill them; but if they were thrilled, they were careful to conceal it. When I suggested the likeness of the Hudson to the Rhine, the Herr Director took it as a personal affront and said you might as well compare St. Patrick’s Cathedral and that of Cologne. They are both churches and Gothic; the Hudson and the Rhine are two rivers, and both are big.

Nevertheless I insisted that there is an evident resemblance which would be complete if the Hudson had a ruined castle here and there, or a picturesquely cramped village huddling against the hillside.

“Yes, and beside castles and picturesque villages,” the Herr Director replied tartly, “you need a thousand years of culture and the same traditions which make the shores of the Rhine sacred to us; you also need generations of patiently plodding peasants who have made a sacrament of their toil. One glance at your rotting boats lying along the shore, at the untilled, gaping spaces and glaring, inartistic sign-boards which disfigure it, is sufficient to distinguish the two rivers or perhaps even the two countries.”

Having thus forcefully delivered himself, he scornfully pointed out the waste places and the unkempt-looking fields, asking me whether I still dared compare anything in this out-of-doors with the fine economy and splendid supervision of the natural resources of his own country.

Shamefacedly I acknowledged my country’s guilt, and the guilt which was evident on the majestic shores of the Hudson. We are wasteful, extravagant and reckless—great defects in our national spirit, and most in evidence in our treatment of nature’s beauty and wealth. We shall have to remedy that, in fact we are just beginning to do it; if not from any sense of guilt, from the same sheer necessity which makes the nations of the Old World careful of their national wealth.

“The Conservation of our National Resources” is a fine phrase; it represents not only an economic, but a spiritual gain—this feeling of responsibility for the next generation. It is a new and most valuable asset of our national spirit; yet I must confess that I fear the coming of a day when we, too, shall have to practice the sordid little economies of the Old World and think with anxiety about the to-morrow.

It has always seemed to me that here the miracle of the loaves and fishes might be performed indefinitely, and that there always would be left over the baskets full of fragments. Somehow, in common with the rest of mankind, I have associated generous plenty with the American spirit, and I trust we shall never have just our dole and no more.