Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

This average Englishman is a highly complicated being. Through the overlay which industrialism has imposed on him, he has preserved to quite an extraordinary extent the asperities, the generosities, the occasional eccentricities of the days when he was a free man in a free land. No melting process has ever subdued the sharp bright hues of his individuality into the universal, all-pervading drab that is the result of blending primary colours. No man who has employed him to useful purpose has ever succeeded in reducing his personality to the proportions of a number on a brass tag. The pirate and rover who looked upon Roman villadom and found it not good, the archer who brought the steel-clad hierarchy of France toppling from their blooded horses at Crécy and Agincourt, the churl who struck off the heads of lawyers in Westminster Palace yard survive in him.

If I am stressing this kink in the British character it is because one of its results has been to make the Englishman of all men the least impressed by scale, and the one to whom appeals made on the size of an experiment or the vastness of a vision will evoke the least response, and especially because I think I perceive a tendency to approach him in the interests of Anglo-American unity precisely from the angle that will awake antagonism where co-operation is sought. The attachment of the Englishman to little things and to hidden things, which no one except Chesterton has had the insight to perceive, or at all events which Chesterton was the first to place in its full relation to his inconsistencies, explains his strangely detached attitude to that British Empire of which his country is the core. Its discovery as an entity calling for a special quality in thought and action dates no further back than that strange interlude in history, when the personality of Roosevelt and the vision of Kipling held the imagination of the world.

This refusal to be impressed by greatness, whether his own or others’, has its disadvantages, but at least it has one saving element. It leaves an Englishman quite capable of perceiving that it is possible for a thing to be grandiose in scale and mean in quality. It leaves intact his frank and childlike confidence that the little things of the world confound the strong; his implicit conviction that David will always floor Goliath, and that Jack’s is the destined sword to smite off the giant’s head. The grotesqueness of the Kaiser’s upturned moustaches, the inadequacy of a mythical “William the Weed” to achieve results that would count, were his guiding lights to victory, the touchstones by which he tested in advance the vast machine that finally cracked and broke under its own weight. It was the “contemptible” little army of shopmen and colliers which seized his imagination and held his affection throughout, not the efficient mechanical naval machine that fought one great sea battle, which was a revelation of the risks inherent in its own monstrousness and complexity, and made its headquarters in Scapa Flow. I recall the comments heard at the time of Jutland in the artillery camp where fate had throwm me. They served to confirm a dawning conviction that the navy, while it still awes and impresses, lost its hold on the British heart the day wooden walls were exchanged for iron and steel. It is perhaps the “silent service” to-day because its appeal awakes so little response. It has been specialized and magnified out of the average Englishman’s power to love it.

In America the contrary seems the case. The American heart appears to go out to bulk, to scale, and to efficiency. The American has neither the time nor the temperament to test and weigh. His affections, even his loyalties, seem to be at the mercy of aspects that impose and impress. I know no other country where the word “big” is used so constantly as a token of affection. Every community has its “Big Tims,” “Big Bills,” “Big Jacks,” great hearty fellows who gambol and spout on public occasions with the abandonment of a school of whales. Gargantuan “Babe Ruth,” mountainous Jack Dempsey are the idols of its sport-loving crowds. “Mammoth in character,” the qualification which on the lips of the late Mr. Morgan Richards stirred laughter throughout England, is to the American no inconsequential or slipshod phrase. He does perceive a character and justification in bigness. It was perhaps to this trait in his mental make-up that the puzzling shift of allegiance to the beginning of the great war was due. The scale and completeness of the German effort laid hold of his imagination to an extent that only those who spent the first few months of agonizing doubt in the West and the Middle West can appreciate. Something that was obscurely akin, something that transcended racial affinities and antipathies, awoke in him at the steady ordered flow of the field-grey legions Westward, so adequately pictured for him by Richard Harding Davis. He is quite merciless to defeat.

Nothing conceived on such a scale can indulge complexities. Its ideals must be ample, rugged, and primitive, adequate to the vast task. Hence the velocity, the thoroughness, the apparent ruthlessness with which American enterprises are put through. It is the fashion among a certain school of thought to call America the country of inhibitions. But there is little inhibition to be perceived on that side of his temperament, which the American has chosen to cultivate, leaving all else to those who find perverse attraction in weed and ruin. His language—and he is amazingly vocal—is as simple and direct as his thought. The appeals and admonitions of his leaders reverberate from vast and resonant lungs. They are calculated rather to carry far than to penetrate deeply. They are statements and re-statements rather than arguments. If their verbiage often aims at and sometimes seems to attain the sublime, if the American leader is forever dedicating, consecrating, inspiring something, the altitude is like the elevation given a shell in order that it may travel further. The nimble presentation of antithesis of a Lloyd George, the dagger-play of sarcasm of an Asquith, are conspicuously absent from the speeches of American leaders. There is something arrogant and ominous, like the clenching of a fist before the arm is raised, in this sonorous presentation of a faith already securely rooted in the hearts of all its hearers.

This primitiveness and single-mindedness of the American seem to intensify as his historical origins recede further and further into the past. It is idle to speculate on what might have happened had the development of his country remained normal and homogeneous, as, up to the Civil War, it admittedly did. It is an even less grateful task to look back on the literature of the Transcendental period and register all that American thought seems to have lost since in subtlety and essential catholicity. What is really important is to realize that not only the language but the essence of Occidental civilization has called for simplification, for sacrifice, year by year. It is hard to see what other choice has lain before the American, as wave after wave of immigration diluted his homogeneity, than to put his concepts into terms easily understood and quickly grasped, with the philological economy of the traveller’s pocket manual and the categorical precision of the drill book. If in the very nature of things, this evangel is oftener pointed with a threat than made palatable with the honey of reason and sympathy, the task and not the taskmaster is to blame. On no other country has ever been imposed similar drudgery on a similar scale. It is idle to talk about the spiritual contribution of the foreigner when his first duty is to cast that contribution into the discard. It is futile to appeal to his traditions where the barrier of language rears itself in a few years between parents who have never learnt the new tongue and children who are unable or ashamed to speak the old.

But such a régime cannot endure for many years without a profound influence, not only on those to whom it is prescribed, but on those who administer it. The most heaven-born leader of men, put into a receiving depot to which monthly and fortnightly contingents of bemused recruits arrive, quickly deteriorates into something like a glorified and commissioned drill sergeant. The schoolmaster is notoriously a social failure in circles where intercourse must be held on the level to which the elevation of his estrade has dishabituated him. Exact values—visions, to use a word that misuse has made hateful—disappear under a multiplicity of minor tasks. It is one of the revenges taken by fate that those who must harass and drive become harassed and sterile in turn.

No one yet, so far as I know, has sought to place this amazing simplification in its true relation to the aridity of American life, an aridity so marked that it creates a positive thirst for softer and milder civilizations, not only in the foreigner who has tasted of them, but at a certain moment in their life in almost every one of the native born whose work lies outside the realm of material production. It is not that in England, as in every community, entire classes do not exist who seek material success by the limitation of interests and the retrenchment of sympathies. But in so doing they sacrifice to a domestic, not a national God; they follow personal not racial proclivities. There is no conscious subscription to a national ideal in their abandonment of æsthetic impulses. Side by side with them live other men whose apparent contentment with insecure and unstable lives at once redresses their pride and curtails their influence. They are conscious of the existence around them of a whole alien world, the material returns from which are negligible but in which other men somehow manage to achieve a fullness of experience and maintain self-respect. This other world reacts not only on employer but on employed. For the worker it abates the fervour and stress of his task, lends meaning and justification to his demand for leisure in the face of economic demands that threaten or deny. No one in England has yet dared to erect into an evangel the obvious truth that poor men must work. No compulsion sets the mental attitude a man may choose when faced with his task. The speeder-up and the efficiency expert is hateful and alien. “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” may seem a loose and questionable phrase, but its implications go very deep. It sets a boundary mark on the frontier between flesh and spirit by which encroachments are registered as they occur.

In America no such frontier exists. Here the invasion seems to be complete. The spirit that would disentangle material from immaterial aims wanders baffled and perplexed through a maze of loftily conceived phrases and exhortations each one of which holds the promise of rescue from the drudgery of visionless life, yet each one of which leads back to an altar where production is enthroned as God. Manuals and primers, one had almost written psalters, pour out from the printing presses in which such words as “inspiration,” “dedication,” “consecration” urge American youth not to the renunciation of material aims but to their intensive pursuit. This naïve and simple creed is quite free of self-consciousness or hypocrisy. In its occasional abrupt transitions from the language of prayer to such conscience-searching questions as “Could you hold down a $100.00 a week job?” or “Would you hire yourself?” no lapse from the sublime to the ridiculous, far less to the squalid, is felt. It has the childlike gravity and reverence of all religions that are held in the heart.

But its God is a jealous God. No faltering in his service, no divided allegiance is permitted. His rewards are concrete and his punishments can be overwhelming. For open rebellion, outlawry; for secret revolt, contempt and misunderstanding are his inevitable visitations. For this reason those who escape into heresy not unfrequently lose their integrity and are gibbeted or pilloried for the edification of the faithful. The man who will not serve because the service starves and stunts his soul is all too likely to find himself dependent for company upon the man who will not serve because his will is too weak or his habits too dissipated.