by Unknown
Such faith in politics and in politicians all during that long middle period of our history, after we had fought our way through to recognition as a nation. For a long time the State was to the average American, what God was to the man of the Middle Ages.
Pass laws and make men happy. Solve the problems of life by passing more laws. Ten thousand new laws by 1928. Onward and upward.
For a long time Americans thought the power of the state would work down into individual lives—remake individual lives—but that faith is being lost now. No one hangs on to it now but the Anti-Saloon League, the Watch and Ward Society and the K. K. K.
A big, fat, rich country, the land stretching away westward, on and on. Great rivers, forests, mines to be opened, railroads to be built, immigrants pouring in. Had England managed to hold on, this might have been an English country now. We do speak that language, after our own fashion. That is a confusing fact.
What a conglomeration of peoples from all over the old world, coming here, raising their sons and daughters here, speaking our American language, making songs in it, writing stories in it.
It must be confusing to the English mind. You still hear an occasional Englishman referring to us as one of the Lion’s cubs. We aren’t, of course, anything of the sort. In any American town or city nowadays, there are more descendants of any one of a dozen European nations than of England. After we kicked loose the young bloods of England began going out to their own colonies. Why not?
We got out of our row with England the chance for a trial at the making of something new in the world. Who wants another England this side of the water? That’s been done once.
• • •
You see I’m only trying to sum things up after these hundred and fifty years in my own fashion, as a present day American man, a man glad he is an American.
Surely we don’t deserve so much credit, being so rich and grand and all. We do deserve some credit for being so amusing and we are amusing. We have made of America a lively, amusing place in which to live. At least, they must give us credit for that.
It must have been a long time to wait here for something to begin, but it did begin—in my time too. I’m glad of that.
Sophistication began, civilization began.
From the point of view of the arts, and I am speaking here somewhat from that point of view, being one of that sort and being very American; from the point of view of the arts I say, we are beginning to get on a bit. There is evidence of it on all sides, in the buildings in our cities, in the cities themselves, in the rapidity and boldness of our development in all forms of expression.
As a nation we are still young. It has only been a hundred and fifty years. What’s that? Well, we may still be wearing short pants, but we are walking down past the clothing stores on Main Street and looking at the spring styles in long pants almost every day now.
Such a job we tackled—whew!
The only reason we ever hung together as one nation was because the mechanical age came along at the same time we did. The machine is the only thing that made it possible for us to be one nation, spreading ourselves out over an entire continent. The very thing that made us stands in the way of our development as a civilized people.
The machine itself isn’t a civilizer. As a people, for a time it looked as though we were going to be a nation of machine-worshippers, but I’ve a hunch we are going to escape that.
Civilization, sophistication, depends, I should say, upon the opportunity offered in a country for the development of individual expression of life, through work. The machine and the natural wealth of the country did away with much drudgery, but it tended also to destroy individuality. We had a lot of that at the beginning. In the early days, when the towns and cities were widely scattered, when it was a difficult slow job to get from one place to another, when the forests spread away on all sides, men lived in comparative isolation and were thrown back upon themselves. Those who were able to bear such a life at all became strong individuals. They were bold, half mystics, believing divinely in themselves and their own dogmas, thought out in lonely places, who infected other men with their dogmas because they were strong men.
• • •
Then the machine, the herding of men into towns and cities, the age of the factory. Men all began to dress alike, eat the same foods, read the same kind of newspapers and books. Minds began to be standardized as were the clothes men wore, the chairs they sat on, the houses they lived in, the streets they walked in.
For a long time here the only individualistic expression of life in the arts or in architecture were European fragments, accidentally overlooked in the swift march of the standardizing machine. There was the Vieux Carré in New Orleans, fragments of Spain on the West Coast, English and German fragments in New York City and in New England—leaking over into the Middle West.
The machines had promised America much and had delivered. All of American life is unbelievably more comfortable, more liveable, than it was in the days of our more rampant early Individualism.
And individual life here, being more comfortable, has also aesthetic values it did not have before the machine came. The crass, tobacco-chewing, cock-fighting, quarreling life led by the men of the middle period of American history is unknown now, except in a few isolated regions of the South, where the railroads, the automobiles, the radios and the aeroplanes have not yet done their work.
You get all of this standardization of the trappings of life—cheap comforts—and you pay for it. We are paying for it.
Democracy is itself, I am quite sure, but an expression of the notion of the standardization of life. The majority is right. It is the duty of the minority to conform. What an absurdity—really. We see the absurdity very clearly in the effect upon us all of the passing of our prohibition amendment—the State more and more losing its grip on men’s imaginations, the State, as a controlling factor in lives, becoming constantly more and more ineffective.
Is this loosening of the grip of the State necessarily a destructive sign? I think not. To the men of the middle period of our hundred and fifty years it would have seemed terrible. It may be only a way of pulling the State in its proper position in our scheme of living. Putting it somewhere near where the French put it after their debauch of state worship. Surely, for citizen Anderson, the State should be a servant, not a master. It should clean and police the street in front of his house, arrest violent men who disturb or annoy him. The State should never be permitted to say what he shall eat and drink, what he shall think, what he shall say to his fellows.
My own central interest is in human life, getting all I can out of my own life and the lives about me—not in the growth of the power of the State. I believe that with the coming of civilization, comes also the international mind. I want more sophistication myself. I need it. I admire some primitive arts but I do not want to be a primitive. I believe also that I am a pretty typical American.
However, I am talking in the dark now, being pretty heavy and serious. You would never guess I was in Vanity Fair. Excuse me please. This is the first time I ever tried to talk about such a big thing as America. I am confused and a little puffed up. I feel like a President writing a State Paper and really cannot think politically. Besides, if I were a President, I would have a secretary to do all this. There was a man I met once. His name was Randolph Bourne and he had a perfect scheme of government, had all of the functions of government properly arranged in the scheme of living. I used to sit hearing him talk and his words were like music to me, but he is dead now and I cannot remember the details of his scheme.
I am just a man going about. Since I was a child I have seen that life was unfair to some men, more than fair to others. I’m a lucky man myself. All the Negroes tell me so. I’ve got the power of making passes. I cure warts. I have no idea that laws will change anything. Life is like that, has always been like that. There is a kind of natural compensation
always at work.
What I conclude is that in America life is better now for the individual man than in another place in the world I know about. And that isn’t due to any special virtue in us, as Americans, but to the fact that our country is so big and so rich.
• • •
We present day American men live in flush times and I’m glad we do. I consider myself lucky, being born when I was. In another three or four hundred years we may be as crowded and hard up here as men are in older lands.
By that time, I dare say, our tone as a nation will have become fixed. The French, the Germans, Italians, English, Spaniards, all of the older peoples of Europe, were once a mixed people as we are now, but none of them ever had such a grand garden to play in.
They became fixed as a type, as a people, because new peoples from the outside quit pouring in and because, gradually coming to know each other, living a long time together in one place, accepting themselves for what they were, they developed artists who gave expression to their lives.
As I have already gone so far as to suggest, a nation is at the beginning like a newborn child. If England was the mother of the Big Boy, America, she was, I fear, a woman of questionable virtue. No one knows for certain who the father was. It is what a woman gets for trying to live in so many houses.
The child got out of the mother’s arms and tried to walk and talk for itself. For a long time it talked the mother’s tongue, rather unchanged, thought the mother’s thoughts.
The child had been left alone in a big place and was afraid. It is the frightened child who brags, blusters. That was the tone of American thought and of American art for a long time. Boasting of our own inferior efforts at national expression and secretly imitating the very people we pretended to scorn.
All of our early literary efforts, our painting, architecture, music was imitative. When I was a boy there used to hang, in almost every Middle Western house, framed pictures of Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes and Emerson. None of these men expressed anything distinctly American. They were not motivated by the life in which they lived.
Whitman came, a windy gusty sweet singer but his voice was not heard.
Followed Poe, such men as Bret Harte and Howells.
To the modern man there seems in all of these men a kind of death, they were like men living and working in a vacuum. O. Henry was in the same mood.
Twain broke away. He wrote Huckleberry Finn, but they caught him and suppressed him. Boston and Respectability put him to sleep.
What went on in writing went on in all of the arts. One might have thought that life in our own towns and cities meant nothing. It did not mean much.
The fear was on us still. We had the inferiority complex.
Fear of what England would think, of what Germany and France would think. The arts are for older peoples. Younger peoples should be seen and not heard. Not so very long ago that the most second-rate of English novelists, coming to our shores, was met down the bay by representatives of all the big metropolitan newspapers. “What do you think of us? What do you think of America?”
People everywhere reading what such men had to say as though it mattered. If we have been brutally patronized it is our own fault. We sure laid ourselves open.
We have begun getting a somewhat different feeling in America now. Of course we still bend the knee some but not as abjectly as we did. We are beginning to build our own cities, love our own towns, respect ourselves as artists and as a people. When I was a boy there used to be a saying, “when he dies every good American goes to Paris”. Now he goes to New York and I don’t blame him. It’s a better town, more majestic, terrible and wonderful.
San Francisco is something, too, and New Orleans and Boston and Chicago.
What has helped more than anything else is the dying out of the old belief, held so strenuously by the so-called Fathers, and carrying on through all the middle period and until well after the Civil War, the belief that in America all the problems of mankind were to be solved, because this was a special, God-made country, inhabited only by men up to the special mission of showing mankind how to solve its problems.
You can’t get over that belief until you have artists who spring up naturally in a country, who get their inspiration as story-tellers, painters, singers and builders, out of the life of their own country and out of the people directly about them.
Artists who look upon themselves as men with missions, are pests, but all real artists do serve some such purpose indirectly.
Believing in the life directly about them, these men begin to give it forth so that all may a little love and understand.
My notion is that things do not begin at the top and work down. Things work the other way. My own life begins in the house in which I live. It goes from that out into the street, begins a little to comprehend the life of the street, of many streets, of a town, of a city.
What nonsense for me to say I love my country, if I do not love my own house, my own street, my own town. If I am not interested in the life of the neighbour across the fence I am not interested in life at all. Living, emotionally and imaginatively in another place, in Europe or in some place far away, living in books or pictures primarily, I am nothing. When I want to reform or change the life about me, because of some fancied superiority in myself, I am a pest and a bad citizen.
Personally I think that America is getting somewhere and has been getting somewhere in my time. I like it here. The Puritans, the reformers, are still with us, but they are on the defensive now.
We get on. Today, in America, no man does good work in the arts without it being recognized. The artist here may not be widely acclaimed but good work never was very quickly or widely acclaimed anywhere.
We get enough. Being Americans we are lucky dogs. It may not be any special merit in ourselves that we live in the most prosperous country in the world, in what is, perhaps, its most prosperous period, but I am not one who dislikes the good things of life because I do not deserve them. I rather like things better for not deserving them.
I may not deserve to be an American, in America, in 1926, after a hundred and fifty years, but I’m sure glad I am one.
A WESTERN REUNION
In Which a Pleasant House Party Is Disrupted by Some Marital Jealousies
GEOFFREY KERR
FROM AUGUST 1926
Palm Beach 21 January
Mrs Henry Dumm
51 East 51 Street New York
HOW ABOUT COMING DOWN FOR FEBRUARY AND MARCH
Ethel Wrisk
* * *
New York 22 January
Mrs Arthur Wrisk
Champagne Villa Palm Beach
DARLING I DONT SEE HOW I CAN AS OUR HUSBANDS ARENT SPEAKING TO EACH OTHER
Anne Dumm
* * *
Palm Beach 23 January
Mrs Henry Dumm
51 East 51 Street New York
ITS QUITE ALL RIGHT WITH ARTHUR WHAT ABOUT HENRY
Ethel
* * *
New York 24 January
Mrs Arthur Wrisk
Champagne Villa Palm Beach
IS CHARLEY KNECKER STAYING WITH YOU
Anne
* * *
Palm Beach 25 January
Mrs Henry Dumm
51 East 51 Street New York
OF COURSE DARLING THATS THE INDUCEMENT
Ethel
* * *
New York 26 January
Mrs Arthur Wrisk
Champagne Villa Palm Beach
IN THAT CASE NO GOOD ASKING HENRY BUT I WILL COME
Anne
* * *
Palm Beach 27 January
Mrs Henry Dumm
51 East 51 Street New York
HURRAH WHEN
Ethel
* * *
New York 28
January
Mrs Arthur Wrisk
Champagne Villa Palm Beach
HENRY GOES TO PITTSBURGH MONDAY FOR TWO DAYS SHALL LEAVE TUESDAY
Anne
* * *
New York 1 February
Henry Dumm
William Penn Hotel Pittsburgh
LEAVING TOMORROW FOR TWO MONTHS HOLIDAY
Anne
* * *
Pittsburgh 2 February
Mrs Henry Dumm
51 East 51 Street New York
WHERE AND WHY
Henry
* * *
New York 2 February
Henry Dumm
William Penn Hotel Pittsburgh
YOULL HAVE TO GUESS
Anne
* * *
Pittsburgh 2 February
Mrs Henry Dumm
51 East 51 Street New York
I INSIST ON KNOWING
Henry
* * *
New York 2 February
Henry Dumm
William Penn Hotel Pittsburgh
I AM GOING TO THE GEORGE TOANS IN CHICAGO BECAUSE I AM BORED
Anne
* * *
New York 2 February
Mrs Arthur Wrisk
Champagne Villa Palm Beach
STARTING NOW LOVE
Anne
* * *
New York 2 February
Mrs George Toan
105 Blair Avenue Chicago
ON MY WAY TO ETHEL WRISKS AT PALM BEACH FOR TWO MONTHS FUN HAVE TOLD HENRY I AM STAYING WITH YOU IS THAT ALL RIGHT AND WILL YOU FORWARD THINGS
Anne Dumm
* * *
Chicago 3 February
Mrs Henry Dumm
51 East 51 Street New York
MR AND MRS TOAN LEFT MONDAY FOR EUROPE
Dawson
* * *
Pittsburgh 3 February
Mrs Henry Dumm
Care George Toan 105 Blair Ave Chicago
