The Abounding American

by T. W. H. Crosland

There are literally thousands of these parks scattered throughout the United States, and at all and each of them roaring provision is made for the people’s enjoyment. Compared with our English parks, with their sad, uncertain County Council bands, they fire the imagination. Practically they represent the old English fair—which the drab English authorities have so ruthlessly stamped out—very much modernised, Americanised, and “notionised.” Here the pea-nut reigns supreme. You chew it on the Razzle-Dazzle and in the Baby Rack and the Old Mill and the House of Mirth and the Chubbuck Wheel, and even in the $15,000 Figure Eight and the $5,000 Rustic Vaudeville. It is pea-nuts, pea-nuts, pea-nuts all the time, and nobody hopes, and nobody has the least desire to get away from them—from pea-nuts.

Now, as the parks are open throughout the year and run seven days a week, and are all situated within easy distance of large centres of population, it follows that the consumption of pea-nuts in America is something enormous. If the yearly supply were to be put into trucks and looped up into a procession, it would probably take that procession 368 days to pass a given point.

The big fact that I wish to bring out is that the Americans are a pea-nut-fed nation. With this simple statement it is possible to account for a great deal that is otherwise inexplicable in the American genius and character.

Nut-chewing is a habit which has been in vogue on the earth for an incredible period. Originally developed by the Simian races, it was at one time the only known dietetic habit that did not involve bloodshed. It fell into neglect in Europe with the coming of the white man, and throughout the dark ages which ensued nobody appears to have given it a thought. It remained for the genius of America to revive it, and there can be no doubt that the renascence has been brought about in a thoroughly adequate and successful manner.

For, as I have shown, all America now chews pea-nuts. As the result, they are a square-jawed, massy-faced race, martyrs to dyspepsia, fussy in the matter of appetite, and indiscriminate in the general selection of viands, their staples under this head consisting of fat pork and beans, corn mush and jungle-canned beef. Moreover, by dint of the assiduous and long-continued absorption of pea-nuts, they have acquired what may be reasonably termed a pea-nut mind.

If you can imagine the vast hordes of the original nut-chewers of antiquity suddenly set down in the midst of the machinery and advantages of twentieth-century civilisation, and imagine what they would proceed to do in the circumstances, you have gone a great way towards a true conception of the American people as they really are. Their habits and manners and aspirations and desires appear in effect to be based entirely on nut-chewing, which, as every naturalist is aware, tends to render the chewer acquisitive, cute, tricksome, not given to reflection, tough and nimble of body, and reasonably devoid of soul. The habit carries with it, also, an innate love of what is noisy and showy, and a vanity which passes ordinary human understanding. It is all based on the desire to dazzle.

So long as America has parks, so long will she chew pea-nuts, and so long as she chews pea-nuts, so long will she continue to remain as artlessly, amazingly and convincingly American as she is at the present moment. To take a few pertinent instances, you will find that all American oratory is simply and solely pea-nut oratory. I append an extract from a speech delivered at the New York Board of Aldermen by a representative from the Borough of Brooklyn, as reported in an American paper:—

“I demand this ordinance to your attention fer the sake of humanity and fer the cause of freedom. Has introduced two ordinances on this subject before, and now I am submittin’ this Bill instead of them two. Maybe I don’t know nuthin’ about how things is over here on this side of the bridge, but I know just how it is in Brooklyn. An’ I wanter tell you that them motormen over in Brooklyn is grinded under the heels of their masters just as the slaves was drove in the olden times by his masters, an’ it’s time fer us to interfere in this here matter now.

“Now you may want to know why them motormen don’t come over here and speak up to you for their rights. If the is suffering such outrages as this, you asks, why don’t they come here and tell us that they is sufferin’ and ast us to life the yoke from offen them?