The Spirit of America

by Henry Van Dyke

‘Finally, America is the home of materialism, a land of crude, practical worldliness, unimaginative, irreverent, without religion. But per contra, America is the last refuge of superstition, of religious enthusiasm, of unenlightened devotion, even of antique bigotry, a land of spiritual dreamers and fanatics, who, as Brillat-Savarin said, have “forty religions and only one sauce.”’

Have I sharpened these contrasts and contradictions a little? Have I overaccented the inconsistencies in this picture postal-card view of America?

Perhaps so. Yet it is impossible to deny that the main features of this incoherent view are familiar. We see the reflection of them in the singular choice and presentation of the rare items of American news which find their way into the columns of European newspapers. We recognize them in the talk of the street and of the table-d’hôte.

I remember very well the gravity and earnestness with which a learned German asked me, some years ago, whether, if he went to America, it would be a serious disadvantage to him in the first social circles to eat with his knife at the dinner-table. He was much relieved by my assurance that no one would take notice of it.

I recall also the charming naïveté with which an English lady inquired, “Have you any good writers in the States?” The answer was: “None to speak of. We import most of our literature from Australia, by way of the Cape of Good Hope.”

Sometimes we are asked whether we do not find it a great disadvantage to have no language of our own; or whether the justices of the Supreme Court are usually persons of good education; or whether we often meet Buffalo Bill in New York society; or whether Shakespeare or Bernard Shaw is most read in the States. To such inquiries we try to return polite answers, although our despair of conveying the truth sometimes leads us to clothe it in a humorous disguise.

But these are minor matters. It is when we are seriously interrogated about the prospect of a hereditary nobility in America, created from the descendants of railway princes, oil magnates, and iron dukes; or when we are questioned as to the probability that the next President, or the one after the next, may assume an imperial state and crown, or perhaps that he may abolish the Constitution and establish communism; or when we are asked whether the Germans, or the Irish, or the Scandinavians, or the Jews are going to dominate the United States in the twentieth century; or when we are told that the industrial and commercial forces which created the republic are no longer coöperant but divisive, and that the nation must inevitably split into several fragments, more or less hostile, but certainly rival; it is when such questions are gravely asked, that we begin to feel that there are some grave misconceptions, or at least that there is something important lacking, in the current notion of how America came into being and what America really is.

I believe that the thing which is lacking is the perception of the Spirit of America as the creative force, the controlling power, the characteristic element of the United States.

The republic is not an accident, happy or otherwise. It is not a fortuitous concourse of emigrants. It is not the logical demonstration of an abstract theory of government. It is the development of a life,—an inward life of ideals, sentiments, ruling passions, embodying itself in an outward life of forms, customs, institutions, relations,—a process as vital, as spontaneous, as inevitable, as the growth of a child into a man. The soul of a people has made the American nation.

It is of this Spirit of America, in the past and in the present, and of some of its expressions, that I would speak in these conferences. I speak of it in the past because I believe that we must know something of its origins, its early manifestations, its experiences, and its conflicts in order to understand what it truly signifies.