Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

I am painfully aware of the fact that, through the meshes of this necessarily abstract and sketchy analysis, a good deal of the beauty and vastness, the vigour and good-humour of American life inevitably escapes. The traveller from the old countries experiences here a sense of great spaces and of practically unbounded possibilities, which reflects itself in an unparalleled gaiety and openness of heart, and freedom of social intercourse. The true meaning of the doctrine of opportunity lies much more in these individual attitudes than in any difference between the structures of American and European societies. And I do not believe that the only explanation for them is in the prosperity of America when compared to the misery of Europe, because this generosity stands in no direct relation with individual wealth. The lumberman and the longshoreman are as good as, if not better than, the millionaire.

These individual attitudes find their collective expression in the idea of, and readiness for, service, which is universal in this country. Churches, political parties, movements for social reform, fraternal orders, industrial and business organizations, meet on this common ground. There is no material interest or spiritual prejudice that will not yield to an appeal for service: and whenever the object of service is clearly defined, action follows the impulse, intolerant of any delay. But Service is a means and not an end: you can serve a God, or a man, or a group of men, and in that man or group of men what you conceive to be his or their need, but you cannot serve Service. And the common end can only be given by a clear intellectual vision of the relations between a set of ideals and the realities of life.

This intrinsic generosity of the American people is the motive of the song, and the substance of the ideal, of the one great poet that America has added to the small family of European poets: Walt Whitman. In him that feeling and that impulse became a vision and a prophecy. There is a habit on the part of American intellectuals to look with a slight contempt on the admiration of Europeans for the poetry of Walt Whitman, as just another symptom of their ignorance of American things. But I, for one, will confess that what I have loved passionately, as little more than a boy, in that poetry, is that same quality whose presence I have now recognized as the human flower of American culture, and which makes me love this country as passionately as I loved that poetry.

It is one of the many paradoxes of American intellectual life that even the cultural preparation of a Walt Whitman should have been deeper and more substantial, if not more systematic, than that of any professor or writer of his times. These were minds which had as fully imbibed European thought and imagination as any professor or writer in Europe: but that thought, that imagination, transplanted to the new country, stood in no real relation with the new practical and moral surroundings, and were therefore thin and sterile. Walt Whitman knew and understood the great traditions of European civilization, and tried to express them in the original idiom, moral and literary, of his America.

But nemo propheta, and it takes centuries to understand a poet. Walt Whitman still waits for his own generation. The modern schools of American poetry, curious of all winds of fashion, working for the day rather than for the times, have not yet fully grasped, I do not say the spirit of his message, but even, for all their free-versifying, the mystery of his magnificent rhythms. His successors are rather among some of the younger novelists, and in a few men, spiritually related to them, who approach the study of American conditions from a combined economic and psychological point of view. The novelists are busy in discovering the actual traits of the American physiognomy, with sufficient faith in the future to describe the shades with as much care as the lights, and with a deeper passion; the economists are making way for the highest and purest American ideals by revealing the contingent and merely psychological basis of the supposedly scientific axioms of classical economics.

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My own experience of American life, between the autumn of 1919 and the summer of 1921, has brought me in contact with all sorts and manners of people from one end to the other of the country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is from this direct intercourse with Americans, rather than from my readings of American literature, continued for a much longer time, that I have formed the opinions expressed in this paper. But as my work has brought me in closer communion with colleges and universities than with any other kind of institutions, I feel a little more assured in writing of the educational aspect of the American problem.

A university is in any case more a universitas studentium than a corporation of professors. I have enjoyed my life in American faculties, and I have gained a good deal from the many noble souls and intellects that I have met among them; but, whenever it has been possible to me, I have escaped from the faculties to the students and tried to understand the tendencies of the coming generations.

The students of the American college or university, from the comparatively ancient institutions of the East, to the young co-educational schools of the Middle and Far West, form a fairly homogeneous, though very widely representative, cross-section of the American community. They are, in a very precise and inclusive meaning, young America, the America of to-morrow. A good many of their intellectual and spiritual characteristics are the common traits of American culture which we have studied in the preceding paragraphs; and yet, because of the social separation of individuals according to ages, which is carried in this country much farther than in any European country, they develop also a number of independent traits, which are peculiar to each one of the “younger generations” in their turn. The life of the American boy or girl, up to the time of their entrance into college, is mainly the life of a beautiful and healthy young organism, not subject to any too strict intellectual or spiritual discipline. The High Schools seem to understand their function in a spirit which is substantially different from that of the European secondary schools, owing especially to certain prevailing educational doctrines founded on a fiction which is used also in many other fields of American life, but which in the field of education has wrought more harm than in any other one, the fiction of the public demand—in this particular case of one or another type of education. A fiction undoubtedly it is, and used to give prestige and authority to the theories of individual educationalists, since in no country and in no time there have existed educational opinions outside the circle of the educators themselves. But this fiction has unfortunately had practical consequences because American educators, subject to big business in the private institutions, and to the politicians in the State schools and universities, have not found in themselves the energy, except in a few isolated instances, to resist what came to them strengthened by such auspices. And the public itself was easily convinced that it wanted what it was told that it wanted. The students, more sinned against than sinning, enjoy the easy atmosphere of the school, and it is only when they reach college that they become aware of their absolute unpreparedness for the higher studies.

This consciousness of their inferiority manifests itself in an attitude of “low-browism,” which is not contempt of that which they think is beyond them, but rather an unwillingness to pretend that they are what they know they are not. It is practically impossible for them to acquire any standards in matters of scholarship, and they are thus forcibly thrown back on that which they know very well, the sports, and social life among themselves. A Chinese friend of mine once quaintly defined an American university as an athletic association in which certain opportunities for study were provided for the feeble-bodied. Now, in athletics and social life, the student finds something that is real, and therefore is an education: there is no pretence or fraud about football, and in their institutions within the college and the university the students obey certain standards and rules which are not as clearly justified as those of athletics, but still are made by themselves, and therefore readily understood. They are standards and rules that sometimes strangely resemble those of primitive society, as it is only too natural when the ground on which they grow is a community of the very young only, and yet undoubtedly they are a preparation for a life after college in which similar features are very far from being the exception. And besides, that social life has a freedom and beauty of its own, evident in one at least of its most hallowed institutions, the dance. American dances, with those captivating and vital rhythms which American music has appropriated for itself from the Negro, are a perfect expression of the mere joy of life. The older generations are shocked and mystified by these dances, and also by many other ways and by the implicit opinions of the young; but so they have been in all ages and countries. To a curious and passionate observer, the youth of America seems to be obscurely labouring at a liberation of the sexual life from pretences and unjustified inhibitions, and, through an original experience of the elements of love, at a creation of new values, perhaps of a new morality.