The Americans

by Hugo Münsterberg

This saving of strength by the proper disposal of time corresponds to a general practicality in every sort of work. Business is carried on in a business-like way. The banker, whose residence is filled with sumptuous treasures of art, allows nothing unpractical to come into his office for the sake of adornment. A certain strict application to duty is the feeling one gets from every work-room; and while the foreigner feels a certain barrenness about it, the American feels that anything different shows a lack of earnestness and practical good sense. The extreme punctuality with which the American handles his correspondence is typical of him. Statistics show that no other country in the world sends so many letters for every inhabitant, and every business letter is replied to on the same day with matter-of-fact conciseness. It is like a tremendous apparatus that accomplishes the greatest labour with the least friction, by means of the precise adaptation of part to part.

A nation which is after self-initiative must inspire the spirit of initiative in every single co-operator. Nothing is more characteristic of this economic body than the intensity with which each workman—taking the word in its broadest sense—thinks and acts for himself. In this respect, too, outsiders often misunderstand the situation. One hears often from travellers in America that the country must be dwarfing to the intelligence of its workmen, because it uses so much machinery that the individual workman comes to see only a small part of what is being done in the factory and, so to say, works the same identical lever for life. He operates always a certain small part of some other part of the whole. Nothing could be less exact, and a person who comes to such a conclusion is not aware that even the smallest duties are extremely complex, and that, therefore, specialization does not at all introduce an undesirable uniformity in labour. It is specialization on the one hand which guarantees the highest mastery, and on the other lets the workman see even more the complexity of what is going on, and inspires him to get a full comprehension of the thing in hand and perhaps to suggest a few improvements.

Any man who is at all concerned with the entire field of operations, or who is moving constantly from one special process to another, can never come to that fully absorbed state of the attention which takes cognizance of the slightest detail. Only the man who has concentrated himself and specialized, learns to note fine details; and it is only in this way that he becomes so much a master in his special department that any one else who attempts to direct him succeeds merely in interfering and spoiling the output. In short, such a workman is face to face with intricate natural processes, and is learning straight from nature. It is in the matter of industrial technique exactly as in science. A person not acquainted with science finds it endlessly monotonous, and cannot understand how a person should spend his whole life studying beetles or deciphering Assyrian inscriptions. But a man who knows the method of science realizes that the narrower a field of study becomes, the more full of variety and unexpected beauties it is found to be. The triumph of technical specialization in America lies just in this. If a single man works at some special part of some special detail of an industrial process, he more and more comes to find in his narrow province an amazing intricacy which the casual observer looking on cannot even suspect; and only the man who sees this complexity is able to discover new processes and improvements on the old. So it is that the specialized workman is he who constantly contributes to perfect technique, proposes modifications, and in general exercises all the intelligence he has, in order to bring himself on in his profession. Just as we have seen how the spirit of self-determination which resides at the periphery of the body politic has been the peculiar strength of American political life, so this free initiative in the periphery, this economic resourcefulness of the narrow specialists, is the peculiar strength of all American industry.

The spirit of self-initiative does not know pettiness. Any one who goes into economic life merely for the sake of what he can get out of it, thinks it clever to gain small, unfair profits; but whosoever views his industry in a purely idealistic spirit, and really has some inner promptings, is filled with an interest in the whole play—sees an economic gain in anything which profits both capital and labour, and only there, and so has a large outlook even within his narrow province. The Americans constantly complain of the economic smallness of Europe, and even the well-informed leaders of American industry freely assert that the actual advance in American economic culture does not lie in the natural resources of the country, but rather in the broad, free initiative of the American people. The continental Europeans, it is said, frustrate their own economic endeavours by being penny-wise and observant of detail in the wrong place, and by lacking the courage to launch big undertakings. There is no doubt that it was the lavishness of nature which firstly set American initiative at work on a broad scale. The boundless prairies and towering mountains which the pioneers saw before them inspired them to undertake great things, and to overlook small hindrances, and in laying out their first plans to overlook small details. American captains of industry often say that they purposely pay no attention to a good many European methods, because they find such pedantic endeavour to economize and to achieve minute perfections to be wasteful of time and unprofitable.

The same spirit is found, as well, in fields other than the industrial. When the American travels he prefers to pay out round sums rather than to haggle over the price of things, even although he pays considerably more thereby than he otherwise would. And nothing makes him more angry than to find that instead of stating a high price at the outset, the person with whom he is dealing ekes out his profit by small additional charges. This large point of view involves such a contempt of petty detail as to astonish Europeans. Machines costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, which were new yesterday, are discarded to-day, because some improvement has been discovered; and the best is everywhere found none too good to be used in this magnificent industrial system. If the outlay is to correspond to the result, there must be no parsimony.

A similar trait is revealed in the way in which every man behaves toward his neighbour. It is only the petty man who is envious, and envy is a word which is not found in the American vocabulary. If one’s own advantage is not the goal, but general economic progress, then the success of another man is almost as great a pleasure as one’s own success. It is for the American an æsthetic delight to observe, and in spirit to co-operate with economic progress all along the line; and the more others accomplish the more each one realizes the magnificence of the whole industrial life. Men try to excel one another, as they have to do wherever there is free competition; and such rivalry is the best and surest condition for economic progress. Americans use every means in their power to succeed, but if another man comes out ahead they neither grumble nor indulge in envy, but rather gather their strength for a new effort. Even this economic struggle is carried on in the spirit of sport. The fight itself is the pleasure. The chess-player who is checkmated in an exciting game is not sorry that he played, and does not envy the winner.

This conviction, that one neither envies nor is envied, whereby all competitive struggle comes to be pervaded with a certain spirit of co-operation, ennobles all industrial activities, and the immediate effect is a feeling of mutual confidence. The degree to which Americans trust one another is by no means realized on the European Continent. A man relies on the self-respect of his commercial associates in a way which seems to the European mind almost fatuous, and yet herein lies just the strength and security of the economic life of this country.

It is interesting, in a recently published harangue against the Standard Oil Company, to read what a high-handed, Napoleonic policy Rockefeller has pursued, and then, in the midst of the fierce accusations, to find it stated that agreements involving millions of dollars and the economic fate of thousands of people were made merely orally. All his confederates took the word of Rockefeller to be as good as his written contract, and such mutual confidence is everywhere a matter of course, whether it is a millionaire who agrees to pay out a fortune or a street urchin who goes off to change five cents. Just as public, so also commercial, affairs get on with very few precautions, and every man takes his neighbour’s check as the equivalent of money. The whole economic life reveals everywhere the profoundest confidence; and undoubtedly this circumstance has contributed, more than almost anything else, to the successful growth of large organizations in America.

The spirit of self-initiative goes out in another direction. It makes the American optimistic, and so sure of success that no turn of fortune can discourage him. And such an optimism is necessary to the man who undertakes great enterprises. It was an undertaking to cross the ocean, and another to press on from the coast to the interior; it was an undertaking to bring nature to terms, to conjure up civilization in a wild country, and to overcome enemies on all hands; and yet everything has seemed to succeed. With the expansion of the country has grown the individual’s love of expansion, his delight in undertaking new enterprises, not merely to hold his own, but to go on and to stake his honour and fortune and entire personality in the hope of realizing something as yet hardly dreamed of. Any Yankee is intoxicated with the idea of succeeding in a new enterprise; he plans such things at his desk in school, and the more venturesome they are the more he is fascinated.

Nothing is more characteristic of this adventurous spirit than the way in which American railroads have been projected. In other countries railroads are built to connect towns which already exist. In America the railroad has created new towns; the engineer and capitalist have not laid their tracks merely where the land was already tilled, but in every place where they could foresee that a population could support itself. At first came the railroad, and then the men to support it. The freight car came first, and then the soil was exploited and made to supply the freight. Western communities have almost all grown up around the railway stations. To be sure, every railway company has done this in its own interest, but the whole undertaking has been immediately productive of new civilization.