I am glad that, however serious, we are never solemn in these essays. Often, in fact, we are quite gay, and it would be a humourless person indeed who could not read many of them, even when the thrusts are at himself, with that laughter which Rabelais tells us is proper to the man. For whatever our defects, we Americans, we have one virtue and perhaps a saving virtue—we still know how to laugh at ourselves.
H. E. S.
New York City, July Fourth, 1921.
CONTENTS
| PAGE | ||
| Preface | The Editor | [iii] |
| The City | Lewis Mumford | [3] |
| Politics | H. L. Mencken | [21] |
| Journalism | John Macy | [35] |
| The Law | Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | [53] |
| Education | Robert Morss Lovett | [77] |
| Scholarship and Criticism | J. E. Spingarn | [93] |
| School and College Life | Clarence Britten | [109] |
| The Intellectual Life | Harold E. Stearns | [135] |
| Science | Robert H. Lowie | [151] |
| Philosophy | Harold Chapman Brown | [163] |
| The Literary Life | Van Wyck Brooks | [179] |
| Music | Deems Taylor | [199] |
| Poetry | Conrad Aiken | [215] |
| Art | Walter Pach | [227] |
| The Theatre | George Jean Nathan | [243] |
| Economic Opinion | Walter H. Hamilton | [255] |
| Radicalism | George Soule | [271] |
| The Small Town | Louis Raymond Reid | [285] |
| History | H. W. Van Loon | [297] |
| Sex | Elsie Clews Parsons | [309] |
| The Family | Katharine Anthony | [319] |
| The Alien | Frederic C. Howe | [337] |
| Racial Minorities | Geroid Tanquary Robinson | [351] |
| Advertising | J. Thorne Smith | [381] |
| Business | Garet Garrett | [397] |
| Engineering | O. S. Beyer, Jr. | [417] |
| Nerves | Alfred B. Kuttner | [427] |
| Medicine | Anonymous | [443] |
| Sport and Play | Ring W. Lardner | [457] |
| Humour | Frank M. Colby | [463] |
| American Civilization from the Foreign Point of View | ||
| I As an Englishman Sees It | Henry L. Stuart | [469] |
| II As an Irishman Sees It | Ernest Boyd | [489] |
| III As an Italian Sees It | Raffaello Piccoli | [508] |
| Bibliographical Notes | [527] | |
| Who’s Who of the Contributors | [557] | |
| Index | [565] | |
CIVILIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES
THE CITY
Around us, in the city, each epoch in America has been concentrated and crystallized. In building our cities we deflowered a wilderness. To-day more than one-half the population of the United States lives in an environment which the jerry-builder, the real estate speculator, the paving contractor, and the industrialist have largely created. Have we begotten a civilization? That is a question which a survey of the American city will help us to answer.
If American history is viewed from the standpoint of the student of cities, it divides itself roughly into three parts. The first was a provincial period, which lasted from the foundation of Manhattan down to the opening up of ocean commerce after the War of 1812. This was followed by a commercial period, which began with the cutting of canals and ended with the extension of the railroad system across the continent, and an industrial period, that gathered force on the Atlantic seaboard in the ’thirties and is still the dominant economic phase of our civilization. These periods must not be looked upon as strictly successive or exclusive: the names merely express in a crude way the main aspect of each era. It is possible to telescope the story of America’s colonial expansion and industrial exploitation by following the material growth and the cultural impoverishment of the American city during its transformations.
The momentum of the provincial city lasted well on to the Civil War. The economic basis of this period was agriculture and petty trade: its civic expression was, typically, the small New England town, with a central common around which were grouped a church—appropriately called a meeting-house—a school, and perhaps a town hall. Its main street would be lined with tall suave elms and bordered by reticent white houses of much the same design as those that dotted the countryside. In the growing towns of the seaboard this culture was overthrown, before it had a chance to express itself adequately in either institutions or men, and it bloomed rather tardily, therefore, in the little towns of Concord and Cambridge, between 1820 and the Civil War. We know it to-day through a largely anonymous architecture, and through a literature created by the school of writers that bears the name of the chief city. Unfortunately for the further development of what we might call the Concord culture, the agricultural basis of this civilization shifted to the wheat-growing West; and therewith channels of trade were diverted from Boston to ports that tapped a richer, more imperial hinterland. What remained of the provincial town in New England was a mummy-case.