Introducing the American Spirit

by Edward Alfred Steiner

I recall walking one evening with the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin through the well-regulated, officially trimmed and “Streng Verboten” forest which encircles his native city. My children were with us—young, vigorous, American savages, who have a superabundance of the American spirit although they have not a drop of American blood in their veins. We passed a small mound of freshly mown hay and they promptly jumped into it, tossing a few handfuls as an offering to their aboriginal deity, the wind. If they had dashed into the plateglass window of a jeweler’s shop or had desecrated the most holy shrine, they could not have caused greater consternation.

“Um Gottes Himmels Willen die Polizei!” cried the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin echoed: “Die Polizei!”

Although this happened about ten years ago, my children have not forgotten their fright.

I suppose we still lack this virtue of economy, and yet I hope we may not lose that certain largeness of nature and that generosity of spirit which have characterized us.

I love the generous spaces, the unfenced lawns, which make of the whole village one common park; the grass and clover free to the touch of our children’s feet, the fragrant flowers wasting their bloom, and berries and cherries enough for the wild things of the woods. May the future not bring more high walls and narrow lanes, big game preserves for the rich, and scant patches of soil for the poor; castles for capital and tenements for labor. And may we never see written over every blade of grass: “Streng Verboten.”

I realized that the Herr Director spoke truly when he said that what we lack over here is a healthy class spirit, which the German farmer has. A sort of pride in his calling which makes him care for the soil and nourish it with a lover’s passion. To him robbing the soil is as great a crime as it would be to rob his children. It is not only the Emperor who regards himself as a partner with God, and sometimes the senior partner; the commonest, poorest peasant is apt to say as he drenches his field with the accumulated compost: “Ich und Gott.”

Speaking of the farmer, the Herr Director admitted that in Germany as elsewhere there is a trend to the city; but the tide is held back by the pride of the German farmer, who glories in having his traditions, his folksongs, and, above all, this sense of partnership with God.

We scarcely have such a thing as a farmer class; we have merely merchandizers in dirt who sell not only the products of the soil, but unhesitatingly the soil itself.

The land which we see from the car window, which the pioneers won from this boundless space, these houses and sheltering groves, the homesteads in which a great race was cradled, are all for sale, now that the soil is robbed of its fertility and the robbers have moved on to repeat the process elsewhere. We are doing something, he admitted, to stem the tide to the cities; we are introducing agricultural training into our public schools and are making the raising of corn and wheat a science, but not as yet a sacrament.

We stayed over night in one of the half-asleep towns on the shores of the river, a town whose history is written upon the headstones in the cemetery, in the center of which the stately meeting-house stands. We met the descendants of those who sleep there, whose pride lies in the fact that their forefathers were the pioneers who fought the Indians, the fevers and each other. Their houses are full of old furniture shipped from England and Holland, and we ate their food and drank their tea from costly silver and exquisite china which they have inherited.