The Spirit of America

by Henry Van Dyke

I was talking to a young man and woman the other day, both thoroughbred Americans, who had resolved to enter upon the adventure of matrimony together. The question was whether he should accept an opening in business with a fair outlook for making a fortune, or take a position as teacher in a school with a possible chance at best of earning a comfortable living. They asked my advice. I put the alternative as clearly as I could. On the one hand, a lot of money for doing work that was perfectly honest, but not at all congenial. On the other hand, small pay in the beginning, and no chance of ever receiving more than a modest competence for doing work that was rather hard but entirely congenial. They did not hesitate a moment. “We shall get more out of life,” they said with one accord, “if our work makes us happy, than if we get big pay for doing what we do not love to do.” They were not exceptional. They were typical of the best young Americans. The noteworthy thing is that both of them took for granted the necessity of doing something as long as they lived. The notion of a state of idleness, either as a right or as a reward, never entered their blessed young minds.

In later lectures I shall speak of some of the larger evidences in education, in social effort, and in literature, which encourage the hope that the emotional life of America is not altogether a “conventional sentimentality,” nor her spiritual life a complete “feebleness,” nor her intelligence entirely “slovenly.” But just now we have to consider the real reason and significance of the greater strength, the fuller development of the industrial life. Let us try to look at it clearly and logically. My wish is not to accuse, nor to defend, but first of all to understand.

The astonishing industrial advance of the United States, and the predominance of this motive in the national life, come from the third element in the spirit of America, will-power, that vital energy of nature which makes an ideal of activity and efficiency. “The man who does things” is the man whom the average American admires.

No doubt the original conditions of the nation’s birth and growth were potent in directing this will-power, in transforming this energy into forces of a practical and material kind. A new land offered the opportunity, a wild land presented the necessity, a rich land held out the reward, to men who were eager to do something. But though the outward circumstances may have moulded and developed the energy, they did not create it.

Mexico and South America were new lands, wild lands, rich lands. They are not far inferior, if at all, to the United States in soil, climate, and natural resources. They presented the same kind of opportunity, necessity, and reward to their settlers and conquerors. Yet they have seen nothing like the same industrial advance. Why? There may be many reasons. But I am sure that the most important reasons lie in the soul of the people, and that one of them is the lack, in the republics of the South, of that strong and confident will-power which has made the Americans a nation of hard and quick workers.

This fondness for the active life, this impulse to “do things,” this sense of value in the thing done, does not seem to be an affair of recent growth in America. It is an ancestral quality.

The men of the Revolution were almost all of them busy and laborious persons, whether they were rich or poor. Read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and you will find that he was as proud of the fact that he was a good printer and that he invented a new kind of stove as of anything else in his career. One of his life mottoes under the head of industry is: “Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” Washington, retiring from his second term in the presidency, did not seek a well-earned ease, but turned at once to the active improvement of his estate. He was not only the richest man, he was one of the best practical farmers in America. His diary shows how willingly and steadily he rode his daily rounds, cultivated his crops, sought to improve the methods of agriculture and the condition and efficiency of his work-people. And this primarily not because he wished to add to his wealth,—for he was a childless man and a person of modest habits,—but because he felt “il faut cultiver son jardin.”

After the nation had defended its independence and consolidated its union, its first effort was to develop and extend its territory. It was little more than a string of widely separated settlements along the Atlantic coast. Some one has called it a country without an interior. The history of the pioneers who pushed over the mountains of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, into the forests of Tennessee and Kentucky, into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and so on to the broad rolling prairies of the West, is not without an interest to those who feel the essential romance of the human will in a world of intractable things. The transformation of the Indian’s hunting trail into the highroad, with its train of creaking, white-topped wagons, and of the highroad into the railway, with its incessant, swift-rushing caravans of passengers and freight; the growth of enormous cities like Chicago and St. Louis in places that three generations ago were a habitation for wild geese and foxes; the harnessing of swift and mighty rivers to turn the wheels of innumerable factories; the passing of the Great American Desert, which once occupied the centre of our map, into the pasture-ground of countless flocks and herds, and the grain-field where the bread grows for many nations,—all this, happening in a hundred years, has an air of enchantment about it. What wonder that the American people have been fascinated, perhaps even a little intoxicated, by the effect of their own will-power?

In 1850 they were comparatively a poor people, with only $7,000,000,000 of national wealth, less than $308 per capita. In 1906 they had become a rich people, with $107,000,000,000 of national wealth, more than $1300 per capita. In 1850 they manufactured $1,000,000,000 worth of goods, in 1906 $14,000,000,000 worth. In 1850 they imported $173,000,000 worth of merchandise and exported $144,000,000 worth. In 1906 the figures had changed to $1,700,000,000 of merchandise exports and $1,200,000,000 of imports. That is to say, in one year America sold to other nations six dollars’ worth per capita more than she needed to buy from them.

I use these figures, not because I find them particularly interesting or philosophically significant, but because the mere size of them illustrates, and perhaps explains, a point that is noteworthy in the development of will-power in the American people: and that is its characteristic spirit of magnificence. I take this word for want of a better, and employ it, according to its derivation, to signify the desire to do things on a large scale. This is a spirit which is growing everywhere in the modern civilized world. Everywhere, if I mistake not, quantity is taking precedence of quality in the popular thought. Everywhere men are carried away by the attraction of huge enterprises, immense combinations, enormous results. One reason is that Nature herself seems to have put a premium upon the mere mass of things. In the industrial world it appears as if Napoleon were right in his observation that “God is on the side of the big battalions.” Another reason is the strange, almost hypnotic, effect that number has upon the human mind.