The Spirit of America

by Henry Van Dyke

The same propensity makes a public ready to try new devices, and to adopt them promptly as soon as they prove useful. “Yankee notions” is a slang name that was once applied to all sorts of curious and novel trifles in a peddler’s stock. But to-day there are a hundred Yankee notions without the use of which the world’s work would go on much more slowly. The cotton-gin takes the seeds from seven thousand pounds of cotton in just the same time that a hand picker formerly needed to clean a pound and a half. An American harvesting-machine rolls through a wheat-field, mowing, threshing, and winnowing the wheat, and packing it in bags, faster than a score of hands could do the work. The steamboat, the sewing-machine, the electric telegraph, the type-writer, the telephone, the incandescent light,—these are some of the things with which American ingenuity and energy have been busy for the increase of man’s efficiency and power in the world of matter. The mysterious force or fluid which Franklin first drew quietly to the earth with his little kite and his silken cord has been put to a score of tasks which Franklin never dreamed of. And in the problem of aerial navigation, which is now so much in the air everywhere, it looks as if American inventors might be the first to reach a practical solution.

I do not say that this indicates greatness. I say only that it shows the presence in the Spirit of America of a highly developed will-power, strong, active, restless, directed with intensity to practical affairs. The American inventor is not necessarily, nor primarily, a man who is out after money. He is hunting a different kind of game, and one which interests him far more deeply: a triumph over nature, a conquest of time or space, the training of a wild force, or the discovery of a new one. He likes money, of course. Most men do. But the thing that he most loves is to take a trick in man’s long game with the obstinacy of matter.

Edison is a typical American in this. He has made money, to be sure; but very little in comparison with what other men have made out of his inventions. And what he gains by one experiment he is always ready to spend on another, to risk in a new adventure. His real reward lies in the sense of winning a little victory over this secretive world, of taking another step in the subjugation of things to the will of man.

There is probably no country where new inventions, labour-saving devices, improved machinery, are as readily welcomed and as quickly taken up as in America. The farmer wants the newest plough, the best reaper and mower. His wife must have a sewing-machine of the latest model; his daughter a pianola; his son an electric runabout or a motor-cycle. The factories are always throwing out old machinery and putting in new. The junk-heap is enormous. The waste looks frightful; and so it would be, if it were not directed to a purpose which in the end makes it a saving.

American cities are always in a state of transition. Good buildings are pulled down to make room for better ones. My wife says that “New York will be a delightful place to live in when it is finished.” But it will never be finished. It is like Tennyson’s description of the mystical city of Camelot:—

“always building,
Therefore never to be built at all.”

But unlike Camelot, it is not built to music,—rather to an accompaniment of various and dreadful noise.

Even natural catastrophes which fall upon cities in America seem to be almost welcomed as an invitation to improve them. A fire laid the business portion of Baltimore in ashes a few years ago. Before the smoke had dispersed, the Baltimoreans were saying, “Now we can have wider streets and larger stores.” An earthquake shook San Francisco to pieces. The people were stunned for a little while. Then they rubbed the dust out of their eyes, and said, “This time we shall know how to build better.”

The high stimulation of will-power in America has had the effect of quickening the general pace of life to a rate that always astonishes and sometimes annoys the European visitor. The movement of things and people is rapid, incessant, bewildering. There is a rushing tide of life in the streets, a nervous tension in the air. Business is transacted with swift despatch and close attention. The preliminary compliments and courtesies are eliminated. Whether you want to buy a paper of pins, or a thousand shares of stock, it is done quickly. I remember that I once had to wait an hour in the Ottoman Bank at Damascus to get a thousand francs on my letter of credit. The courteous director gave me coffee and delightful talk. In New York the transaction would not have taken five minutes,—but there would have been no coffee nor conversation.

Of course the rate of speed varies considerably in different parts of the country. In the South it is much slower than in the North and the West. In the rural districts you will often find the old-fashioned virtues of delay and deliberation carried to an exasperating point of perfection. Even among the American cities there is a difference in the rapidity of the pulse of life. New York and Chicago have the name of the swiftest towns. Philadelphia has a traditional reputation for a calm that borders on somnolence. “How many children have you?” some one asked a Chicagoan. “Four,” was his answer; “three living, and one in Philadelphia.”