Search-Light Letters

by Robert Grant

I shall assume, then, that you, in common with other citizens, have reached this rationally patriotic point of view and are willing to agree that we are not, as a nation, above criticism. If you are still inclined to regard us, the plain people of these United States, as a mighty phalanx of Sir Galahads in search of the Holy Grail, the citation of a few facts may act aperiently on your mind and wash away the cobwebs of hallucination. For instance, to begin from the political standpoint, our acquirement of Texas and other territory once belonging to Mexico suggests the predatory methods of the Middle Ages rather than an aspiring and sensitive national public temper. The government of our large cities has from time to time been so notoriously corrupt as to indicate at least an easy-going, shiftless, civic spirit in the average free-born municipal voter. It is a matter of common knowledge that in the legislative bodies of all our States there is a certain number of members whose action in support of or against measures is controlled by money bribes. From the point of view of morals, statistics show that poverty and crime, drunkenness and licentiousness in our large cities are little less rife than in the great capitals of Europe; and you have merely to read the newspapers to satisfy yourself that individuals from the population of the small towns and of the country districts from the eastern limit of Maine to the southwestern coast of California are capable of monstrous murders, rank thefts, and a sensational variety of ordinary human vices. It were easy to illustrate further, but this should convince you that the patriotic enthusiast who would prove the people of the United States to be a cohort of angels of light has verily a task compared with which the labors of Sisyphus and other victims of impossibility fade into ease. Even our public schools, that favorite emblem of our omniscience, have been declared by authority to merit interest but by no means grovelling admiration on the part of the effete peoples of Europe.

We will proceed then on the understanding that, whatever its past, the present civilization of the United States reveals the every-day human being in his or her infinite variety, and that the true American must grasp this fact in order to fulfil his destiny. If our nation is to be a lamp to the civilized world, it will be because we prove with time that poor human nature, by virtue of the leaven called Americanism, has reached a higher plane of intelligent virtue and happiness than the world has hitherto attained. Who then is the true American? And what are the signs which give us hope that the people of the United States are capable of accomplishing this result? What, too, are the signs which induce our censors and critics to shake their heads and refuse to acknowledge the probability of it?

To A Young Man wishing to be an American. II.

will begin with the inverse process and indicate a list of those who are not true Americans, and yet who are so familiar types in our national community that the burden of proof is on the patriot to show that they are not essentially representative.

No. 1. The Plutocratic Gentleman of Leisure who Amuses Himself.—Here we have a deliberate imitation of a well-known figure of the older civilizations. The grandfather by superior ability, industry, and enterprise has accumulated a vast fortune. His grandchildren, nurtured with care, spend their golden youth in mere extravagant amusement and often in dissipation. There are many individuals in our so-called leisure class who devote their lives to intelligent and useful occupation, but there is every reason for asserting that the point of view of the child of fortune in this country is significantly that of the idler—and a more deplorable idler than he of the aristocracies of Europe on whom he models himself for the reason that the foreigner is less indifferent than he to intellectual interests. Is there any body of people in the world more contemptible, and any body among us more useless as an inspiring product of Americanism, than the pleasure-seeking, unpatriotic element of the very rich who, under the caption of our best society, arrogate social distinction by reason of their vulgar ostentation of wealth, their extravagant methods of entertainment and their aimless pleasure-loving lives? To vie with each other in lavish outlay, to visit Europe with frequency, to possess steam-yachts, to bribe custom-house officers, to sneer at our institutions and, save by an occasional check, to ignore all the duties of citizenship, is an off-handed epitome of their existence. And in it all they are merely copy-cats—servile followers of the aristocratic creed, but without the genuine prestige of the old-time nobilities. And in the same breath let me not forget the women.

[Note.—"I was afraid you were going to," said my wife, Josephine. "Women count for so much here, and yet their heads seem to become hopelessly turned as soon as they are multi-millionaires.">[

Women indeed count for much here, and yet it is they even more than the men who are responsible for and encourage the mere pleasure-loving life among the leisure class. A ceaseless round of every variety of money-consuming, vapid amusement occupies their days and nights from January to January, and for what purpose? To marry their daughters to foreign noblemen? To breed scandal by pursuing intimacies with other men than their husbands? To demonstrate that the American woman, when she has all the opportunities which health, wealth, and leisure can bestow, is content to become a mere quick-witted, shallow voluptuary?

You will be told that these people are very inconsiderable in number, that they really exercise a small influence, and that one is not to judge the men and women of the United States by them. It is true that they are not very numerous, though their number seems to be increasing, and I am fain to believe that they are not merely out of sympathy with, but alien in character to, the American people as a whole; and yet I cannot see why an unfriendly critic should not claim that they are representative, for they are the lineal descendants of the men from every part of the land who have been the most successful in the accumulation of wealth. Their grandfathers were the pioneers whose brains and sinews were stronger than their fellows in the struggle of nation-building; their fathers were the keenest and not presumptively the most dishonest men of affairs in the country. Though the plain people of the nation affect to reprobate this class as un-American and evil, yet the newspapers, who aim to be the exponents of the opinions of the general mass and to cater to their preferences, are constantly setting forth the doings of the so-called multi-millionaires and their associates with a journalistic gusto and redundancy which reveals an absorbing interest and satisfaction in their concerns on the part of the every-day public.