Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_; boldface
text is enclosed in =equals signs=; Small-Caps text is shown as
ALL-CAPS. Other notes will be found following the Index.
CIVILIZATION IN THE
UNITED STATES
_AN INQUIRY BY THIRTY AMERICANS_
EDITED BY HAROLD E. STEARNS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.
PREFACE
This book has been an adventure in intellectual co-operation. If it
were a mere collection of haphazard essays, gathered together to make
the conventional symposium, it would have only slight significance.
But it has been the deliberate and organized outgrowth of the common
efforts of like-minded men and women to see the problem of modern
American civilization as a whole, and to illuminate by careful
criticism the special aspect of that civilization with which the
individual is most familiar. Personal contact has served to correct
overemphasis, and slow and careful selection of the members of a group
which has now grown to some thirty-odd has given to this work a unity
of approach and attack which it otherwise could not possibly have had.
The nucleus of this group was brought together by common work,
common interests, and more or less common assumptions. As long ago
as the autumn of last year Mr. Van Wyck Brooks and I discussed the
possibility of several of us, who were engaged in much the same kind
of critical examination of our civilization, coming together to
exchange ideas, to clarify our individual fields, and to discover
wherein they coincided, overlapped, or diverged. The original desire
was the modest one of making it possible for us to avoid working at
cross-purposes. I suggested that we meet at my home, which a few of
us did, and since that time until the delivery of this volume to the
publishers we have met every fortnight. Even at our first meeting we
discovered our points of view to have so much in common that our desire
for informal and pleasant discussions became the more serious wish to
contribute a definite and tangible piece of work towards the advance
of intellectual life in America. We wished to speak the truth about
American civilization as we saw it, in order to do our share in making
a real civilization possible--for I think with all of us there was a
common assumption that a field cannot be ploughed until it has first
been cleared of rocks, and that constructive criticism can hardly exist
until there is something on which to construct.
Naturally the first problem to arise was the one of ways and means. If
the spirit and temper of the French encyclopædists of the 18th century
appealed strongly to us, certainly their method for the advancement of
knowledge was inapplicable in our own century. The cultural phenomena
we proposed to survey were too complicated and extensive; besides, we
wished to make a definite contribution of some kind or another while,
so to speak, there was yet time. For the cohesiveness of the group,
the good-humoured tolerance and cheerful sacrifice of time, were to
some extent the consequence of the intellectual collapse that came
with the hysterical post-armistice days, when it was easier than in
normal times to get together intelligent and civilized men and women
in common defence against the common enemy of reaction. We wished to
take advantage of this strategic situation for the furtherance of our
co-operative enterprise, and decided, finally, that the simplest plan
would be the best. Each of us was to write a single short essay on the
special topic we knew most thoroughly; we were to continue our meetings
in order to keep informed of the progress of our work and to see that
there was no duplication; we were to extend the list of subjects to
whatever legitimately bore upon our cultural life and to select the
authors by common agreement; we were to keep in touch with each other
so that the volume might have that inner consistency which could come
only from direct acquaintance with what each of us was planning.
There were a few other simple rules which we laid down in the
beginning. Desirous of avoiding merely irrelevant criticism and of
keeping attention upon our actual treatment of our subjects rather
than upon our personalities, we provided that all contributors
to the volume must be American citizens. For the same reason, we
likewise provided that in the list there should be no professional
propagandists--except as one is a propagandist for one’s own ideas--no
martyrs, and no one who was merely disgruntled. Since our object was to
give an uncompromising, and consequently at some points necessarily
harsh, analysis, we desired the tone to be good-natured and the temper
urbane. At first, these larger points of policy were decided by common
agreement or, on occasion, by majority vote, and to the end I settled
no important question without consultation with as many members of the
group as I could approach within the limited time we had agreed to have
this volume in the hands of the publisher. But with the extension of
the scope of the book, the negotiations with the publisher, and the
mass of complexities and details that are inevitable in so difficult an
enterprise, the authority to decide specific questions and the usual
editorial powers were delegated as a matter of convenience to me, aided
by a committee of three. Hence I was in a position constantly to see
the book as a whole, and to make suggestions for differentiation, where
repetition appeared to impend, or for unity, where the divergence was
sharp enough to be construed by some as contradictory. In view both of
the fact that every contributor has full liberty of opinion and that
the personalities and points of view finding expression in the essays
are all highly individualistic, the underlying unity which binds the
volume together is really surprising.
It may seem strange that a volume on civilization in the United States
does not include a specific article on religion, and the omission is
worth a paragraph of explanation. Outside the bigger cities, certainly
no one can understand the social structure of contemporary American
life without careful study of the organization and power of the church.
Speaking generally, we are a church-going people, and at least on the
surface the multiplicity of sects and creeds, the sheer immensity of
the physical apparatus by which the religious impulse is articulated,
would seem to prove that our interest in and emotional craving for
religious experience are enormous. But the omission has not been due
to any superciliousness on our part towards the subject itself; on the
contrary, I suppose I have put more thought and energy into this essay,
which has not been written, than into any other problem connected with
the book. The bald truth is, it has been next to impossible to get any
one to write on the subject; most of the people I approached shied
off--it was really difficult to get them to talk about it at all.
Almost unanimously, when I did manage to procure an opinion from them,
they said that real religious feeling in America had disappeared, that
the church had become a purely social and political institution, that
the country is in the grip of what Anatole France has aptly called
Protestant clericalism, and that, finally, they weren’t interested
in the topic. The accuracy of these observations (except the last) I
cannot, of course, vouch for, but it is rather striking that they were
identical. In any event, the topic as a topic has had to be omitted;
but it is not neglected, for in several essays directly--in particular,
“Philosophy” and “Nerves”--and in many by implication the subject is
discussed. At one time Mr. James Harvey Robinson consented to write
the article--and it would have been an illuminating piece of work--but
unfortunately ill health and the pressure of official duties made the
task impossible for him within the most generous time limit that might
be arranged.
I have spoken already of the unity which underlies the volume. When
I remember all these essays, and try to summon together the chief
themes that run through them, either by explicit statement or as a
kind of underlying rhythm to all, in order to justify the strong
impression of unity, I find three major contentions that may be said to
be basic--contentions all the more significant inasmuch as they were
unpremeditated and were arrived at, as it were, by accident rather than
design. They are:
First, That in almost every branch of American life there is a sharp
dichotomy between preaching and practice; we let not our right hand
know what our left hand doeth. Curiously enough, no one regards
this, and in fact no one consciously feels this as hypocrisy--there
are certain abstractions and dogmas which are sacred to us, and if
we fall short of these external standards in our private life, that
is no reason for submitting them to a fresh examination; rather are
we to worship them the more vociferously to show our sense of sin.
Regardless, then, of the theoretical excellence or stupidity of these
standards, in actual practice the moral code resolves itself into
the one cardinal heresy of being found out, with the chief sanction
enforcing it, the fear of what people will say.
Second, That whatever else American civilization is, it is not
Anglo-Saxon, and that we shall never achieve any genuine nationalistic
self-consciousness as long as we allow certain financial and social
minorities to persuade us that we are still an English Colony. Until
we begin seriously to appraise and warmly to cherish the heterogeneous
elements which make up our life, and to see the common element running
through all of them, we shall make not even a step towards true
unity; we shall remain, in Roosevelt’s class-conscious and bitter but
illuminating phrase, a polyglot boarding-house. It is curious how a
book on American civilization actually leads one back to the conviction
that we are, after all, Americans.
Third, That the most moving and pathetic fact in the social life of
America to-day is emotional and æsthetic starvation, of which the
mania for petty regulation, the driving, regimentating, and drilling,
the secret society and its grotesque regalia, the firm grasp on the
unessentials of material organization of our pleasures and gaieties are
all eloquent stigmata. We have no heritages or traditions to which to
cling except those that have already withered in our hands and turned
to dust. One can feel the whole industrial and economic situation
as so maladjusted to the primary and simple needs of men and women
that the futility of a rationalistic attack on these infantilisms of
compensation becomes obvious. There must be an entirely new deal of
the cards in one sense; we must change our hearts. For only so, unless
through the humbling of calamity or scourge, can true art and true
religion and true personality, with their native warmth and caprice and
gaiety, grow up in America to exorcise these painted devils we have
created to frighten us away from the acknowledgment of our spiritual
poverty.
If these main contentions seem severe or pessimistic, the answer must
be: we do not write to please; we strive only to understand and to
state as clearly as we can. For American civilization is still in the
embryonic stage, with rich and with disastrous possibilities of growth.
But the first step in growing up is self-conscious and deliberately
critical examination of ourselves, without sentimentality and without
fear. We cannot even devise, much less control, the principles
which are to guide our future development until that preliminary
understanding has come home with telling force to the consciousness
of the ordinary man. To this self-understanding, this book is, in
our belief, a genuine and valuable contribution. We may not always
have been wise; we have tried always to be honest. And if our attempt
will help to embolden others to an equally frank expression of their
beliefs, perhaps in time wisdom will come.
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.
The civilization of the New England town spent itself in the settlement
of the Ohio Valley and the great tracts beyond. None of the new centres
had, _qua_ provincial towns, any fresh contribution to make. It had
taken the culture of New England more than three centuries before it
had borne its Concord fruit, and the story of the Western movement
is somehow summed up in the legend of Johnny Appleseed, who planted
dry apple seeds, instead of slips from the living tree, and hedged
the roads he travelled with wild apples, harsh and puny and inedible.
Cincinnati and Pittsburgh jumped from a frustrate provincialism into
the midst of the machine era; and so for a long time they remained
destitute of the institutions that are necessary to carry on the
processes of civilization.
West of the Alleghanies, the common, with its church and school, was
not destined to dominate the urban landscape: the railroad station and
the commercial hotel had come to take their place. This was indeed the
universal mark of the new industrialism, as obvious in 19th-century
Oxford as in Hoboken. The pioneer American city, however, had none of
the cultural institutions that had been accumulated in Europe during
the great outbursts of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, and as a
result its destitution was naked and apparent. It is true that every
town which was developed mainly during the 19th century--Manchester as
well as Milwaukee--suffered from the absence of civic institutes. The
peculiarity of the New World was that the facilities for borrowing
from the older centres were considerably more limited. London could
export Madox Brown to Manchester to do the murals in the Town Hall: New
York had still to create its schools of art before it had any Madox
Browns that could be exported.
With the beginning of the 19th century, market centres which had at
first tapped only their immediate region began to reach further back
into the hinterland, and to stretch outward, not merely for freight
but for immigrants, across the ocean. The silly game of counting
heads became the fashion, and in the literature of the ’thirties one
discovers that every commercial city had its statistical lawyer who
was bold enough to predict its leadership in “population and wealth”
before the century was out. The chief boast of the American city was
its prospective size.
Now the New England town was a genuine community. In so far as the
New England community had a common social and political and religious
life, the town expressed it. The city which was representative of the
second period, on the other hand, was in origin a trading fort, and
the supreme occupation of its founders was with the goods life rather
than the good life. New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis have
this common basis. They were not composed of corporate organizations
on the march, as it were, towards a New Jerusalem: they were simply a
rabble of individuals “on the make.” With such a tradition to give it
momentum it is small wonder that the adventurousness of the commercial
period was exhausted on the fortuities and temptations of trade. A
state of intellectual anæsthesia prevailed. One has only to compare
Cist’s _Cincinnati Miscellany_ with Emerson’s _Dial_ to see at what a
low level the towns of the Middle West were carrying on.
Since there was neither fellowship nor social stability nor security
in the scramble of the inchoate commercial city, it remained for a
particular institution to devote itself to the gospel of the “glad
hand.” Thus an historian of Pittsburgh records the foundation of a
Masonic lodge as early as 1785, shortly after the building of the
church, and in every American city, small or big, Odd Fellows, Mystic
Shriners, Woodmen, Elks, Knights of Columbus, and other orders without
number in the course of time found for themselves a prominent place.
(Their feminine counterparts were the D.A.R. and the W.C.T.U., their
juniors, the college Greek letter fraternities.) Whereas one will
search American cities in vain for the labour temples one discovers
to-day in Europe from Belgium to Italy, one finds that the fraternal
lodge generally occupies a site of dignity and importance. There
were doubtless many excellent reasons for the strange proliferation
of professional fraternity in the American city, but perhaps the
strongest reason was the absence of any other kind of fraternity. The
social centre and the community centre, which in a singularly hard and
consciously beatific way have sought to organize fellowship and mutual
aid on different terms, are products of the last decade.
Perhaps the only other civic institution of importance that the
commercial towns fostered was the lyceum: forerunner of the elephantine
Chautauqua. The lyceum lecture, however, was taken as a soporific
rather than a stimulant, and if it aroused any appetite for art,
philosophy, or science there was nothing in the environment of the
commercial city that could satisfy it. Just as church-going became
a substitute for religion, so automatic lyceum attendance became a
substitute for thought. These were the prayer wheels of a preoccupied
commercialism.
The contrast between the provincial and the commercial city in America
was well summed up in their plans. Consider the differences between
Cambridge and New York. Up to the beginning of the 19th century New
York, at the tip of Manhattan Island, had the same diffident, rambling
town plan that characterizes Cambridge. In this old type of city layout
the streets lead nowhere, except to the buildings that give onto them:
outside the main roads the provisions for traffic are so inadequate as
to seem almost a provision against traffic. Quiet streets, a pleasant
aspect, ample domestic facilities were the desiderata of the provincial
town; traffic, realty speculation, and expansion were those of the
newer era. This became evident as soon as the Empire City started to
realize its “manifest destiny” by laying down, in 1808, a plan for its
future development.
New York’s city plan commissioners went about their work with a
scarcely concealed purpose to increase traffic and raise realty values.
The amenities of city life counted for little in their scheme of
things: debating “whether they should confine themselves to rectilinear
and rectangular streets, or whether they should adopt some of those
supposed improvements, by circles, ovals, and stars,” they decided, on
grounds of economy, against any departure from the gridiron design. It
was under the same stimulus that these admirable philistines had the
complacency to plan the city’s development up to 155th Street. Here we
are concerned, however, with the results of the rectangular plan rather
than with the motives that lay behind its adoption throughout the
country.
The principal effect of the gridiron plan is that every street becomes
a thoroughfare, and that every thoroughfare is potentially a commercial
street. The tendency towards movement in such a city vastly outweighs
the tendency towards settlement. As a result of progressive shifts in
population, due to the changes to which commercial competition subjects
the use of land, the main institutions of the city, instead of cohering
naturally--as the museums, galleries, theatres, clubs, and public
offices group themselves in the heart of Westminster--are dispersed
in every direction. Neither Columbia University, New York University,
the Astor Library, nor the National Academy of Design--to seize but
a few examples--is on its original site. Yet had Columbia remained
at Fiftieth Street it might have had some effective working relation
with the great storehouse of books that now occupies part of Bryant
Park at Forty-second Street; or, alternatively, had the Astor Library
remained on its old site it might have had some connection with New
York University--had that institution not in turn moved!
What was called the growth of the commercial city was really a
manifestation of the absence of design in the gridiron plan. The
rectangular parcelling of ground promoted speculation in land-units
and the ready interchange of real property: it had no relation
whatever to the essential purposes for which a city exists. It is not
a little significant that Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, each
of which had space set aside for public purposes in their original
plans, had given up these civic holdings to the realty gambler before
half of the 19th century was over. The common was not the centre of
a well-rounded community life, as in New England, but the centre of
land-speculation--which was at once the business, the recreation, and
the religion of the commercial city. Under the influence of New York
the Scadders whom Martin Chuzzlewit encountered were laying down their
New Edens throughout the country.
* * * * *
It was during the commercial period that the evolution of the
Promenade, such as existed in New York at Battery Park, took place.
The new promenade was no longer a park but a shop-lined thoroughfare,
Broadway. Shopping became for the more domesticated half of the
community an exciting, bewildering amusement; and out of a combination
of Yankee “notions,” Barnum-like advertisement, and magisterial
organization arose that _omnium gatherum_ of commerce, the department
store. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the part that Broadway--I
use the term generically--has played in the American town. It is not
merely the Agora but the Acropolis. When the factory whistle closes the
week, and the factory hands of Camden, or Pittsburgh, or Bridgeport
pour out of the buildings and stockades in which they spend the more
exhausting half of their lives, it is through Broadway that the greater
part of their repressions seek an outlet. Both the name and the
institution extend across the continent from New York to Los Angeles.
Up and down these second-hand Broadways, from one in the afternoon
until past ten at night, drifts a more or less aimless mass of human
beings, bent upon extracting such joy as is possible from the sights in
the windows, the contacts with other human beings, the occasional or
systematic flirtations, and the risks and adventures of purchase.
In the early development of Broadway the amusements were adventitious.
Even at present, in spite of the ubiquitous movie, the crowded street
itself, at least in the smaller communities, is the main source of
entertainment. Now, under normal conditions, for a great part of
the population in a factory town one of the chief instincts to be
repressed is that of acquisition (collection). It is not merely that
the average factory worker cannot afford the luxuries of life: the
worst is that he must think twice before purchasing the necessities.
Out of this situation one of Broadway’s happiest achievements has
arisen: the five and ten cent store. In the five and ten cent store
it is possible for the circumscribed factory operative to obtain the
illusion of unmoderated expenditure--and even extravagance--without
actually inflicting any irreparable rent in his purse. Broadway is
thus, in more than one sense, the great compensatory device of the
American city. The dazzle of white lights, the colour of electric
signs, the alabaster architecture of the moving-picture palaces, the
æsthetic appeals of the shop windows--these stand for elements that are
left out of the drab perspectives of the industrial city. People who
do not know how to spend their time must take what satisfaction they
can in spending their money. That is why, although the five and ten
cent store itself is perhaps mainly an institution for the proletariat,
the habits and dispositions it encourages are universal. The chief
amusement of Atlantic City, that opulent hostelry-annex of New York
and Philadelphia, lies not in the beach and the ocean but in the shops
which line the interminable Broadway known as the Boardwalk.
Broadway, in sum, is the façade of the American city: a false front.
The highest achievements of our material civilization--and at their
best our hotels, our department stores, and our Woolworth towers are
achievements--count as so many symptoms of its spiritual failure. In
order to cover up the vacancy of getting and spending in our cities,
we have invented a thousand fresh devices for getting and spending. As
a consequence our life is externalized. The principal institutions of
the American city are merely distractions that take our eyes off the
environment, instead of instruments which would help us to mould it
creatively a little nearer to humane hopes and desires.
The birth of industrialism in America is announced in the opening of
the Crystal Palace in Bryant Park, Manhattan, in 1853. Between the
Crystal Palace Exhibition and the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 lies a
period whose defects were partly accentuated by the exhaustion that
followed the Civil War. The debasement of the American city during
this period can be read in almost every building that was erected.
The influence of colonial architecture had waned to extinction during
the first half of the century. There followed a period of eclectic
experiment, in which all sorts of Egyptian, Byzantine, Gothic, and
Arabesque ineptitudes were committed--a period whose absurdities we
have only in recent years begun to escape. The domestic style, as
the century progressed, became more limited. Little touches about
the doors, mouldings, fanlights, and balustrades disappeared, and
finally craftsmanship went out of style altogether and a pretentious
architectural puffery took its place. The “era of good feeling” was an
era of bad taste.
Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago give perhaps the most naked
revelation of the industrial city’s characteristics. There were two
institutions that set their mark upon the early part of this period.
One of them was the Mechanics’ Hall. This was usually a building of red
brick, structural iron, and glass, whose unique hideousness marks it as
a typical product of the age of coal-industrialism, to be put alongside
the “smoke-halls” of the railroad termini. The other institution was
the German beer-garden--the one bright spot on the edge of an urban
landscape that was steadily becoming more dingy, more dull, and more
depressing. The cities that came to life in this period had scarcely
any other civic apparatus to boast of. Conceive of Pittsburgh without
Schenley Park, without the Carnegie Institute, without the Library or
the Museum or the Concert Hall, and without the institutions that have
grown up during the last generation around its sub-Acropolis--and one
has a picture of Progress and Poverty that Henry George might have
drawn on for illustration. The industrial city did not represent the
creative values in civilization: it stood for a new form of human
barbarism. In the coal towns of Pennsylvania, the steel towns of the
Ohio and its tributaries, and the factory towns of Long Island Sound
and Narragansett Bay was an environment much more harsh, antagonistic,
and brutal than anything the pioneers had encountered. Even the fake
exhilaration of the commercial city was lacking.
The reaction against the industrial city was expressed in various ways.
The defect of these reactions was that they were formulated in terms
of an escape from the environment rather than in a reconstruction of
it. Symptomatic of this escape, along one particular alley, was the
architecture of Richardson, and of his apprentices, McKim and White.
No one who has an eye for the fine incidence of beautiful architecture
can avoid a shock at discovering a monumental Romanesque building at
the foot of Pittsburgh’s dingy “Hump,” or the hardly less monstrous
beauty of Trinity Church, Boston, as one approaches it from a waste
of railroad yards that lie on one side of it. It was no accident, one
is inclined to believe, that Richardson should have returned to the
Romanesque only a little time before Henry Adams was exploring Mont St.
Michel and Chartres. Both men were searching for a specific against
the fever of industrialism, and architects like Richardson were taking
to archaic beauty as a man who was vaguely ill might have recourse to
quinine, in the hope that his disease had sufficient similarity to
malaria to be cured by it.
The truth is that the doses of exotic architecture which Richardson and
his school sought to inject into the American city were anodynes rather
than specifics. The Latin Renaissance models of McKim and White--the
Boston Public Library and Madison Square Garden, for example--were
perhaps a little better suited to the concrete demands of the new
age; but they were still a long way from that perfect congruence
with contemporary habits and modes of thought which was recorded in
buildings like Independence Hall. Almost down to the last decade the
best buildings of the industrial period have been anonymous, and
scarcely ever recognized for their beauty. A grain elevator here, a
warehouse there, an office building, a garage--there has been the
promise of a stripped, athletic, classical style of architecture in
these buildings which shall embody all that is good in the Machine
Age: its precision, its cleanliness, its hard illuminations, its
unflinching logic. Dickens once poked fun at the architecture of
Coketown because its infirmary looked like its jail and its jail like
its town hall. But the joke had a sting to it only because these
buildings were all plaintively destitute of æsthetic inspiration.
In a place and an age that had achieved a well-rounded and balanced
culture, we should expect to find the same spirit expressed in the
simplest cottage and the grandest public building. So we find it, for
instance, in the humble market towns of the Middle Age: there is not
one type of architecture for 15th-century Shaftesbury and another for
London; neither is there one style for public London and quite another
for domestic London. Our architects in America have only just begun
to cease regarding the Gothic style as especially fit for churches
and schools, whilst they favour the Roman mode for courts, and the
Byzantine, perhaps, for offices. Even the unique beauty of the Bush
Terminal Tower is compromised by an antiquely “stylized” interior.
With the beginning of the second decade of this century there
is some evidence of an attempt to make a genuine culture out of
industrialism--instead of attempting to escape from industrialism into
a culture which, though doubtless genuine enough, has the misfortune
to be dead. The schoolhouses in Gary, Indiana, have some of the better
qualities of a Gary steel plant. That symptom is all to the good. It
points perhaps to a time when the Gary steel plant may have some of
the educational virtues of a Gary school. One of the things that has
made the industrial age a horror in America is the notion that there is
something shameful in its manifestations. The idea that nobody would
ever go near an industrial plant except under stress of starvation
is in part responsible for the heaps of rubbish and rusty metal, for
the general disorder and vileness, that still characterize broad
acres of our factory districts. There is nothing short of the Alkali
Desert that compares with the desolateness of the common American
industrial town. These qualities are indicative of the fact that we
have centred attention not upon the process but upon the return; not
upon the task but the emoluments: not upon what we can get out of our
work but upon what we can achieve when we get away from our work. Our
industrialism has been in the grip of business, and our industrial
cities, and their institutions, have exhibited a major preoccupation
with business. The coercive repression of an impersonal, mechanical
technique was compensated by the pervasive will-to-power--or at least
will-to-comfort--of commercialism.
We have shirked the problem of trying to live well in a régime that is
devoted to the production of T-beams and toothbrushes and TNT. As a
result, we have failed to react creatively upon the environment with
anything like the inspiration that one might have found in a group of
mediæval peasants building a cathedral. The urban worker escapes the
mechanical routine of his daily job only to find an equally mechanical
substitute for life and growth and experience in his amusements. The
Gay White Way with its stupendous blaze of lights, and Coney Island,
with its fear-stimulating roller coasters and chute-the-chutes, are
characteristic by-products of an age that has renounced the task of
actively humanizing the machine, and of creating an environment in
which all the fruitful impulses of the community may be expressed.
The movies, the White Ways, and the Coney Islands, which almost every
American city boasts in some form or other, are means of giving jaded
and throttled people the sensations of living without the direct
experience of life--a sort of spiritual masturbation. In short, we have
had the alternative of humanizing the industrial city or de-humanizing
the population. So far we have de-humanized the population.
* * * * *
The external reactions against the industrial city came to a head in
the World’s Fair at Chicago. In that strange and giddy mixture of
Parnassus and Coney Island was born a new conception of the city--a
White City, spaciously designed, lighted by electricity, replete with
monuments, crowned with public buildings, and dignified by a radiant
architecture. The men who planned the exposition knew something about
the better side of the spacious perspectives that Haussmann had
designed for Napoleon III. Without taking into account the fundamental
conditions of industrialism, or the salient facts of economics,
they initiated what shortly came to be known as the City Beautiful
movement. For a couple of decades Municipal Art societies were rampant.
Their programme had the defects of the régime it attempted to combat.
Its capital effort was to put on a front--to embellish Main Street and
make it a more attractive thoroughfare. Here in æsthetics, as elsewhere
in education, persisted the brahminical view of culture: the idea that
beauty was something that could be acquired by any one who was willing
to put up the cash; that it did not arise naturally out of the good
life but was something which could be plastered on impoverished life;
in short, that it was a cosmetic.
Until the Pittsburgh Survey of 1908 pricked a pin through superficial
attempts at municipal improvement, those who sought to remake the
American city overlooked the necessity for rectifying its economic
basis. The meanness, the spotty development, and the congestion of the
American city was at least in some degree an index of that deep disease
of realty speculation which had, as already noted, caused cities like
Chicago to forfeit land originally laid aside for public uses. Because
facts like these were ignored for the sake of some small, immediate
result, the developments that the early reformers were bold enough to
outline still lie in the realms of hopeless fantasy--a fine play of the
imagination, like Scadder’s prospectus of Eden. Here as elsewhere there
have been numerous signs of promise during the last decade; but it is
doubtful whether they are yet numerous enough or profound enough to
alter the general picture.
At best, the improvements that have been effected in the American city
have not been central but subsidiary. They have been improvements, as
Aristotle would have said, in the material bases of the good life: they
have not been improvements in the art of living. The growth of the
American city during the past century has meant the extension of paved
streets and sewers and gas mains, and progressive heightening of office
buildings and tenements. The outlay on pavements, sewers, electric
lighting systems, and plumbing has been stupendous; but no matter what
the Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce may think of them, these
mechanical ingenuities are not the indices of a civilization. There is
a curious confusion in America between growth and improvement. We use
the phrase “bigger and better” as if the conjunction were inevitable.
As a matter of fact, there is little evidence to show that the vast
increase of population in every urban area has been accompanied
by anything like the necessary increase of schools, universities,
theatres, meeting places, parks, and so forth. The fact that in
1920 we had sixty-four cities with more than 100,000 population,
thirty-three with more than 200,000, and twelve with more than 500,000
does not mean that the resources of polity, culture, and art have been
correspondingly on the increase. The growth of the American city has
resulted less in the establishment of civilized standards of life than
in the extension of Suburbia.
“Suburbia” is used here in both the accepted and in a more literal
sense. On one hand I refer to the fact that the growth of the
metropolis throws vast numbers of people into distant dormitories
where, by and large, life is carried on without the discipline of
rural occupations and without the cultural resources that the Central
District of the city still retains in its art exhibitions, theatres,
concerts, and the like. But our metropolises produce Suburbia not
merely by reason of the fact that the people who work in the offices,
bureaus, and factories live as citizens in a distant territory, perhaps
in another state: they likewise foster Suburbia in another sense. I
mean that the quality of life for the great mass of people who live
within the political boundaries of the metropolis itself is inferior to
that which a city with an adequate equipment and a thorough realization
of the creative needs of the community is capable of producing. In
this sense, the “suburb” called Brookline is a genuine city; while the
greater part of the “city of Boston” is a suburb. We have scarcely
begun to make an adequate distribution of libraries, meeting places,
parks, gymnasia, and similar equipment, without which life in the
city tends to be carried on at a low level of routine--physically
as well as mentally. (The blatantly confidential advertisements of
constipation remedies on all the hoardings tell a significant story.)
At any reasonable allotment of park space, the Committee on Congestion
in New York pointed out in 1911, a greater number of acres was needed
for parks on the lower East Side than was occupied by the entire
population. This case is extreme but representative.
It is the peculiarity of our metropolitan civilization, then, that in
spite of vast resources drawn from the ends of the earth, it has an
insufficient civic equipment, and what it does possess it uses only
transiently. Those cities that have the beginnings of an adequate
equipment, like New York--to choose no more invidious example--offer
them chiefly to those engaged in travelling. As a traveller’s city
New York is near perfection. An association of cigar salesmen or an
international congress of social scientists, meeting in one of the
auditoriums of a big hotel, dining together, mixing in the lounge, and
finding recreation in the theatres hard by, discovers an environment
that is ordered, within its limits, to a nicety. It is this hotel and
theatre district that we must charitably think of when we are tempted
to speak about the triumphs of the American city. Despite manifold
defects that arise from want of planning, this is the real civic centre
of America’s Metropolis. What we must overlook in this characterization
are the long miles of slum that stretch in front and behind and
on each side of this district--neighbourhoods where, in spite of
the redoubtable efforts of settlement workers, block organizers,
and neighbourhood associations, there is no permanent institution,
other than the public school or the sectarian church, to remind the
inhabitants that they have a common life and a common destiny.
Civic life, in fine, the life of intelligent association and common
action, a life whose faded pattern still lingers in the old New England
town, is not something that we daily enjoy, as we work in an office or
a factory. It is rather a temporary state that we occasionally achieve
with a great deal of time, bother, and expense. The city is not around
us, in our little town, suburb, or neighbourhood: it lies beyond us,
at the end of a subway ride or a railway journey. We are citizens
occasionally: we are suburbanites (_denizens_, _idiots_) by regular
routine. Small wonder that bathtubs and heating systems and similar
apparatus play such a large part in our conception of the good life.
Metropolitanism in America represents, from the cultural angle,
a reaction against the uncouth and barren countryside that was
skinned, rather than cultivated, by the restless, individualistic,
self-assertive American pioneer. The perpetual drag to New York, and
the endeavour of less favourably situated cities to imitate the virtues
and defects of New York, is explicable as nothing other than the
desire to participate in some measure in the benefits of city life.
Since we have failed up to the present to develop genuine regional
cultures, those who do not wish to remain barbarians must become
metropolitans. That means they must come to New York, or ape the ways
that are fashionable in New York. Here opens the breach that has begun
to widen between the metropolis and the countryside in America. The
countryman, who cannot enjoy the advantages of the metropolis, who has
no centre of his own to which he can point with pride, resents the
privileges that the metropolitan enjoys. Hence the periodical crusades
of our State Legislatures, largely packed with rural representatives,
against the vices, corruptions, and follies which the countryman
enviously looks upon as the peculiar property of the big city.
Perhaps the envy and resentment of the farming population is due to a
genuine economic grievance against the big cities--especially against
their banks, insurance companies, and speculative middlemen. Should
the concentration of power, glory, and privilege in the metropolis
continue, it is possible that the city will find itself subject to an
economic siege. If our cities cannot justify their existence by their
creative achievements, by their demonstration of the efficacy and grace
of corporate life, it is doubtful whether they will be able to persuade
the country to support them, once the purely conventional arrangements
by means of which the city browbeats the countryside are upset. This,
however, brings us to the realm of social speculation; and he who would
enter it must abandon everything but hope.
* * * * *
Metropolitanism is of two orders. At its partial best it is exhibited
in New York, the literal mother city of America. In its worst aspect
it shows itself in the sub-metropolises which have been spawning
so prolifically since the ’eighties. If we are to understand the
capacities and limitations of the other great cities in America, we
must first weigh the significance of New York.