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THE AMERICAN CREDO
A Contribution Toward the Interpretation
of the National Mind
BY
GEORGE JEAN NATHAN and H. L. MENCKEN
NEW YORK
ALFRED A. KNOPF
1920
* * * * *
_BY H. L. MENCKEN AND GEORGE JEAN NATHAN_
HELIOGABALUS: A BUFFOONERY
_BY H. L. MENCKEN_ _BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN_
THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ANOTHER BOOK ON THE THEATRE
A BOOK OF BURLESQUES MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS
IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN A BOOK WITHOUT A TITLE
A BOOK OF PREFACES THE POPULAR THEATRE
PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES COMEDIANS ALL
* * * * *
PREFACE
I
The superficial, no doubt, will mistake this little book for a somewhat
laborious attempt at jocosity. Because, incidentally to its main
purpose, it unveils occasional ideas of so inordinate an erroneousness
that they verge upon the ludicrous, it will be set down a piece of
spoofing, and perhaps denounced as in bad taste. But all the while that
main purpose will remain clear enough to the judicious. It is, in brief,
the purpose of clarifying the current exchange of rhetorical gas bombs
upon the subject of American ideals and the American character, so
copious, so cocksure and withal so ill-informed and inconclusive, by
putting into plain propositions some of the notions that lie at the
heart of those ideals and enter into the very substance of that
character. "For as he thinketh in his heart," said Solomon, "so _is_
he." It is a saying, obviously, that one may easily fill with fantastic
meanings, as the prevailing gabble of the mental healers, New
Thoughters, efficiency engineers, professors of scientific salesmanship
and other such mountebanks demonstrates, but nevertheless it is one
grounded, at bottom, upon an indubitable fact. Deep down in every man
there is a body of congenital attitudes, a corpus of ineradicable
doctrines and ways of thinking, that determines his reactions to his
ideational environment as surely as his physical activity is determined
by the length of his _tibiae_ and the capacity of his lungs. These
primary attitudes, in fact, constitute the essential man. It is by
recognition of them that one arrives at an accurate understanding of his
place and function as a member of human society; it is by a shrewd
reckoning and balancing of them, one against another, that one forecasts
his probable behaviour in the face of unaccustomed stimuli.
All the arts and sciences that have to do with the management of men in
the mass are founded upon a proficient practice of that sort of
reckoning. The practical politician, as every connoisseur of ochlocracy
knows, is not a man who seeks to inoculate the innumerable caravan of
voters with new ideas; he is a man who seeks to search out and prick
into energy the basic ideas that are already in them, and to turn the
resultant effervescence of emotion to his own uses. And so with the
religious teacher, the social and economic reformer, and every other
variety of popular educator, down to and including the humblest
press-agent of a fifth assistant Secretary of State, moving-picture
actor, or Y.M.C.A. boob-squeezing committee. Such adept professors of
conviction and enthusiasm, in the true sense, never actually teach
anything new; all they do is to give new forms to beliefs already in
being, to arrange the bits of glass, onyx, horn, ivory, porphyry and
corundum in the mental kaleidoscope of the populace into novel
permutations. To change the figure, they may give the medulla oblongata,
the cerebral organ of the great masses of simple men, a powerful
diuretic or emetic, but they seldom, if ever, add anything to its
primary supply of fats, proteids and carbohydrates.
One speaks of the great masses of simple men, and it is of them, of
course, that the ensuing treatise chiefly has to say. The higher and
more delicately organized tribes and sects of men are susceptible to no
such ready anatomizing, for the body of beliefs upon which their
ratiocination grounds itself is not fixed but changing, and not artless
and crystal-clear but excessively complex and obscure. It is, indeed,
the chief mark of a man emerged from the general that he has lost most
of his original certainties, and is full of a scepticism which plays
like a spray of acid upon all the ideas that come within his purview,
including especially his own. One does not become surer as one advances
in knowledge, but less sure. No article of faith is proof against the
disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost
describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion. But
among the humbler ranks of men who make up the great bulk of every
civilized people the increase of information is so slow and so arduous
that this effect is scarcely to be discerned. If, in the course of long
years, they gradually lose their old faiths, it is only to fill the gaps
with new faiths that restate the old ones in new terms. Nothing, in
fact, could be more commonplace than the observation that the crazes
which periodically ravage the proletariat today are, in the main, no
more than distorted echoes of delusions cherished centuries ago. The
fundamental religious ideas of the lower orders of Christendom have not
changed materially in two thousand years, and they were old when they
were first borrowed from the heathen of northern Africa and Asia Minor.
The Iowa Methodist of today, imagining him competent to understand them
at all, would be able to accept the tenets of Augustine without changing
more than a few accents and punctuation marks. Every Sunday his raucous
ecclesiastics batter his ears with diluted and debased filches from _De
Civitate Dei_, and almost every article of his practical ethics may be
found clearly stated in the eminent bishop's Ninety-third Epistle. And
so in politics. The Bolsheviki of the present not only poll-parrot the
balderdash of the French demagogues of 1789; they also mouth what was
gospel to every _bete blonde_ in the Teutonic forest of the fifth
century. Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its
aspect is never precisely the same at two successive instants. But error
flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or
infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a
world of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that gives human society
the small stability that it needs, amid all the oscillation of a
gelatinous cosmos, to save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Without
their dreams men would have fallen upon and devoured one another long
ago--and yet every dream is an illusion, and every illusion is a lie.
Nevertheless, this immutability of popular ideas is not quite perfect.
The main current, no doubt, goes on unbrokenly, but there are many
eddies along the edges and many small tempests on the surface. Thus the
aspect changes, if not the substance. What men believe in one century is
apparently abandoned in some other century, and perhaps supplanted by
something quite to the contrary. Or, at all events, to the contrary in
appearance. Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to
freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom
hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another
cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is
something fundamental and permanent--the basic delusion that men may be
governed and yet be free. It is only on the surface that there are
transformations--and these we must study and make the most of, for of
what is underneath men are mainly unconscious. The thing that colours
the upper levels is largely the instinctive functioning of race and
nationality, the ineradicable rivalry of tribe and tribe, the primary
struggle for existence. At bottom, no doubt, the plain men of the whole
world are almost indistinguishably alike; a learned anthropologist,
Prof. Dr. Boas, has written a book to prove it. But, collected into
herds, they gather delusions that are special to herds. Beside the
underlying mass thinking there is a superimposed group thinking--a sort
of unintelligent class consciousness. This we may prod into. This, in
the case of the _Homo americanus_, is what is prodded into in the
present work. We perform, it seems to us, a useful pioneering.
Incomplete though our data may be, it is at least grounded upon a
resolute avoidance of _a priori_ methods, an absolutely open-minded
effort to get at the facts. We pounce upon them as they bob up,
convinced that even the most inconsiderable of them may have its
profound significance--that the essential may be hidden in the trivial.
All we aim at is a first marshalling of materials, an initial running of
lines. We are not architects, but furnishers of bricks, nails and laths.
But it is our hope that what we thus rake up and pile into a rough heap
may yet serve the purposes of an organizer, and so help toward the
establishment of the dim and vacillating truth, and rid the scene of, at
all events, the worst and most obvious of its present accumulation of
errors.
II
In the case of the American of the multitude that accumulation of errors
is of astounding bulk and consequence. His ideas are not only grossly
misapprehended by all foreigners; they are often misapprehended by his
own countrymen of superior education, and even by himself.
This last, at first blush, may seem a mere effort at paradox, but
its literal truth becomes patent on brief inspection. Ask the
average American what is the salient passion in his emotional
armamentarium--what is the idea that lies at the bottom of all his other
ideas--and it is very probable that, nine times out of ten, he will
nominate his hot and unquenchable rage for liberty. He regards himself,
indeed, as the chief exponent of liberty in the whole world, and all its
other advocates as no more than his followers, half timorous and half
envious. To question his ardour is to insult him as grievously as if one
questioned the honour of the republic or the chastity of his wife. And
yet it must be plain to any dispassionate observer that this ardour, in
the course of a century and a half, has lost a large part of its old
burning reality and descended to the estate of a mere phosphorescent
superstition. The American of today, in fact, probably enjoys less
personal liberty than any other man of Christendom, and even his
political liberty is fast succumbing to the new dogma that certain
theories of government are virtuous and lawful and others abhorrent and
felonious. Laws limiting the radius of his free activity multiply year
by year: it is now practically impossible for him to exhibit anything
describable as genuine individuality, either in action or in thought,
without running afoul of some harsh and unintelligible penalty. It would
surprise no impartial observer if the motto, _In God we trust_, were one
day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at
Washington, and the far more appropriate word, _Verboten_, substituted.
Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time,
the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room
for a bas relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet.
Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay of
freedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown so
accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute
regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers
and _agents provocateurs_ that he no longer makes any serious protest.
It is surely a significant fact that, in the face of the late almost
incredible proceedings under the so-called Espionage Act and other such
laws, the only objections heard of came either from the persons directly
affected--nine-tenths of them Socialists, pacifists, or citizens accused
of German sympathies, and hence without any rights whatever in American
law and equity--or from a small group of professional libertarians,
chiefly naturalized aliens. The American people, as a people, acquiesced
docilely in all these tyrannies, both during the war and after the war,
just as they acquiesced in the invasion of their common rights by the
Prohibition Amendment. Worse, they not only acquiesced docilely; they
approved actively; they were quite as hotly against the few protestants
as they were against the original victims, and gave their hearty
approbation to every proposal that the former be punished too. The
really startling phenomenon of the war, indeed, was not the grotesque
abolition of liberty in the name of liberty, but the failure of that
usurpation to arouse anything approaching public indignation. It is
impossible to imagine the men of Jackson's army or even of Grant's army
submitting to any such absolutism without a furious struggle, but in
these latter days it is viewed with the utmost complacency. The
descendants of the Americans who punished John Adams so melodramatically
for the Alien and Seditions Acts of 1789 failed to raise a voice against
the far more drastic legislation of 1917. What is more, they failed to
raise a voice against its execution upon the innocent as well as upon
the guilty, in gross violation of the most elemental principles of
justice and rules of law.
Thus the Americano, put to the test, gave the lie to what is probably
his proudest boast, and revealed the chronic human incapacity for
accurate self-analysis. But if he thereby misjudged and misjudges
himself, he may find some consolation for his error in the lavishness
with which even worse misjudgment is heaped upon him by foreigners. To
this day, despite the intimate contact of five long years of joint war,
the French and the English are ignorant of his true character, and show
it in their every discussion of him, particularly when they discuss him
in camera. It is the secret but general view of the French, we are
informed by confidential agents, that he is a fellow of loose life and
not to be trusted with either a wine-pot, a virgin or a domestic
fowl--an absurdly inaccurate generalization from the aberrations of
soldiers in a far land, cut off from the moral repressions that lie upon
them and colour all their acts at home. It is the view of the English,
so we hear upon equally reliable authority, that he is an earnest but
extremely inefficient oaf, incapable of either the finer technic of war
or of its machine-like discipline--another thumping error, for the
American is actually extraordinarily adept and ingenious in the very
arts that modern war chiefly makes use of, and there is, since the
revolt of the Prussian, no other such rigidly regimented man in the
world. He has, indeed, reached such a pass in the latter department that
it has become almost impossible for him to think of himself save as an
obedient member of some vast, powerful and unintelligibly despotic
organization--a church, a trades-union, a political party, a tin-pot
fraternal order, or what not--, and often he is a member of more than
one, and impartially faithful to all. Moreover, as we have seen, he
lives under laws which dictate almost every detail of his public and
private conduct, and punish every sign of bad discipline with the most
appalling rigour; and these laws are enforced by police who supply the
chance gaps in them extempore, and exercise that authority in the best
manner of prison guards, animal trainers and drill sergeants.
The English and the French, beside these special errors, have a full
share in an error that is also embraced by practically every other
foreign people. This is the error of assuming, almost as an axiom beyond
question, that the Americans are a sordid, money-grubbing people, with
no thought above the dollar. You will find it prevailing everywhere on
the Continent of Europe. To the German the United States is Dollarica,
and the salient American personality, next to the policeman who takes
bribes and the snuffling moralist in office, is the Dollarprinzessin. To
the Italian the country is a sort of savage wilderness in which
everything else, from religion to beauty and from decent repose to
human life, is sacrificed to profit. Italians cross the ocean in much
the same spirit that our runaway school-boys used to go off to fight the
Indians. Some, lucky, return home in a few years with fortunes and gaudy
tales; others, succumbing to the natives, are butchered at their labour
and buried beneath the cinders of hideous and God-forsaken mining towns.
All carry the thought of escape from beginning to end; every Italian
hopes to get away with his takings as soon as possible, to enjoy them on
some hillside where life and property are reasonably safe from greed. So
with the Russian, the Scandinavian, the Balkan hillman, even the Greek
and Armenian. The picture of America that they conjure up is a picture
of a titanic and merciless struggle for gold, with the stakes high and
the contestants correspondingly ferocious. They see the American as one
to whom nothing under the sun has any value save the dollar--not truth,
or beauty, or philosophical ease, or the common decencies between man
and man.
This view, of course, is full of distortion and misunderstanding,
despite the fact that even Americans, by hearing it stated so often,
have come to allow it a good deal of soundness. The American's concept
of himself, as we have seen, is sometimes anything but accurate; in this
case he errs almost as greatly as when he venerates himself as the
prince of freemen, with gyveless wrists and flashing eyes. As for the
foreigner, what he falls into is the typically Freudian blunder of
projecting his own worst weakness into another. The fact is that it is
he, and not the native American, who is the incorrigible and
unimaginative money-grubber. He comes to the United States in search of
money, and in search of money alone, and pursuing that single purpose
without deviation he makes the mistake of assuming that the American is
at the same business, and in the same fanatical manner. From all the
complex and colourful life of the country, save only the one enterprise
of money-making, he is shut off almost hermetically, and so he concludes
that that one enterprise embraces the whole show. Here the unreliable
promptings of his sub-conscious passion are helped out by observations
that are more logical. Unfamiliar with the language, excluded from all
free social intercourse with the native, and regarded as, if actually
human at all, then at least a distinctly inferior member of the species,
he is forced into the harshest and most ill-paid labour, and so he
inevitably sees the American as a pitiless task-master and ascribes the
exploitation he is made a victim of to a fabulous exaggeration of his
own avarice.
Moreover, the greater success and higher position of the native seem to
bear out this notion. In a struggle that is free for all and to the
death, the native grabs all the shiniest stakes. _Ergo_, he must love
money even more than the immigrant. This logic we do not defend, but
there is--and out of it grows the prevailing foreign view of America and
the Americans, for the foreigner who stays at home does not derive his
ideas from the glittering, lascivious phrases of Dr. Wilson or from the
passionate idealism of such superior Americans as Otto H. Kahn, Adolph
S. Ochs, S. Stanwood Menken, Jacob H. Schiff, Marcus Loew, Henry
Morgenthau, Abram Elkus, Samuel Goldfish, Louis D. Brandeis, Julius
Rosenwald, Paul Warburg, Judge Otto Rosalsky, Adolph Zukor, the Hon.
Julius Kahn, Simon Guggenheim, Stephen S. Wise and Barney Baruch, but
from the hair-raising tales of returned "Americans," _i.e._, fellow
peasants who, having braved the dragons, have come back to the
fatherland to enjoy their booty and exhibit their wounds.
The native, as we say, has been so far influenced by this error that he
cherishes it himself, or, more accurately, entertains it with shame.
Most of his windy idealism is no more than a reaction against it--an
evidence of an effort to confute it and live it down. He is never more
sweetly flattered than when some politician eager for votes or some
evangelist itching for a good plate tells him that he is actually a
soaring altruist, and the only real one in the world. This is the surest
way to fetch him; he never fails to swell out his chest when he hears
that buncombe. In point of fact, of course, he is no more an altruist
than any other healthy mammal. His ideals, one and all, are grounded
upon self-interest, or upon the fear that is at the bottom of it; his
benevolence always has a string tied to it; he could no more formulate a
course of action to his certain disadvantage than an Englishman could,
or a Frenchman, or an Italian, or a German. But to say that the
advantage he pursues is always, or even usually, a monetary one--to
argue that he is avaricious, or even, in these later years, a sharp
trader--is to spit directly into the eye of the truth. There is
probably, indeed, no country in the world in which mere money is held
in less esteem than in these United States. Even more than the Russian
Bolshevik the American democrat regards wealth with suspicion, and its
too eager amassment with a bilious eye. Here alone, west of the Dvina,
rich men are _ipso facto_ scoundrels and _ferae naturae_, with no rights
that any slanderer is bound to respect. Here alone, the possession of a
fortune puts a man automatically upon the defensive, and exposes him to
special legislation of a rough and inquisitorial character and to the
special animosity of judges, district attorneys and juries. It would be
a literal impossibility for an Englishman worth $100,000,000 to avoid
public office and public honour; it would be equally impossible for an
American worth $100,000,000 to obtain either.
Americans, true enough, enjoy an average of prosperity that is above
that witnessed in any other country. Their land, with less labour,
yields a greater usufruct than other land; they get more money for their
industry; they jingle more coin in their pockets than other peoples. But
it is a grievous error to mistake that superior opulence for a sign of
money-hunger, for they actually hold money very lightly, and spend a
great deal more of it than any other race of men and with far less
thought of values. The normal French family, it is often said, could
live very comfortably for a week upon what the normal American family
wastes in a week. There is, among Americans, not the slightest sign of
the unanimous French habit of biting every franc, of calculating the
cost of every luxury to five places of decimals, of utilizing every
scrap, of sleeping with the bankbook under the pillow. Whatever is showy
gets their dollars, whether they need it or not, even whether they can
afford it or not. They are, so to speak, constantly on a bust, their
eyes alert for chances to get rid of their small change.
Consider, for example, the amazing readiness with which they succumb to
the imbecile bait of advertising! An American manufacturer, finding
himself with a stock of unsalable goods or encountering otherwise a
demand that is less than his production, does not have to look, like his
English or German colleague, for foreign dumping grounds. He simply
packs his surplus in gaudy packages, sends for an advertising agent,
joins an Honest-Advertising club, fills the newspapers and magazines
with lying advertisements, and sits down in peace while his countrymen
fight their way to his counters. That they will come is almost
absolutely sure; no matter how valueless the goods, they will leap to
the advertisements; their one desire seems to be to get rid of their
money. As a consequence of this almost pathological eagerness, the
advertising bill of the American people is greater than that of all
other peoples taken together. There is scarcely an article within the
range of their desires that does not carry a heavy load of advertising;
they actually pay out millions every year to be sold such commonplace
necessities as sugar, towels, collars, lead-pencils and corn-meal. The
business of thus bamboozling them and picking their pockets enlists
thousands and thousands of artists, writers, printers, sign-painters and
other such parasites. Their towns are bedaubed with chromatic eye-sores
and made hideous with flashing lights; their countryside is polluted;
their newspapers and magazines become mere advertising sheets; idiotic
slogans and apothegms are invented to enchant them; in some cities they
are actually taxed to advertise the local makers of wooden nutmegs.
Multitudes of swindlers are naturally induced to adopt advertising as a
trade, and some of them make great fortunes at it. Like all other men
who live by their wits, they regard themselves as superior fellows, and
every year they hold great conventions, bore each other with learned
papers upon the psychology of their victims, speak of one another as men
of genius, have themselves photographed by the photographers of
newspapers eager to curry favour with them, denounce the government for
not spending the public funds for advertising, and summon United States
Senators, eminent chautauquans and distinguished vaudeville stars to
entertain them. For all this the plain people pay the bill, and never a
protest comes out of them.
As a matter of fact, the only genuinely thrifty folks among us, in the
sense that a Frenchman, a Scot or an Italian is thrifty, are the
immigrants of the most recent invasions. That is why they oust the
native wherever the two come into contact--say in New England and in the
Middle West. They acquire, bit by bit, the best lands, the best stock,
the best barns, not because they have the secret of _making_ more money,
but because they have the resolution to _spend_ less. As soon as they
become thoroughly Americanized they begin to show the national
prodigality. The old folks wear home-made clothes and stick to the
farm; the native-born children order their garments from mail-order
tailors and expose themselves in the chautauquas and at the great orgies
of Calvinism and Wesleyanism. The old folks put every dollar they can
wring from a reluctant environment into real property or the banks; the
young folks put their inheritance into phonographs, Fords, boiled
shirts, yellow shoes, cuckoo clocks, lithographs of the current
mountebanks, oil stock, automatic pianos and the works of Harold Bell
Wright, Gerald Stanley Lee and O. Henry.
III
But what, then, is the character that actually marks the American--that
is, in chief? If he is not the exalted monopolist of liberty that he
thinks he is nor the noble altruist and idealist he slaps upon the chest
when he is full of rhetoric, nor the degraded dollar-chaser of European
legend, then what is he? We offer an answer in all humility, for the
problem is complex and there is but little illumination of it in the
literature; nevertheless, we offer it in the firm conviction, born of
twenty years' incessant meditation, that it is substantially correct.
It is, in brief, this: that the thing which sets off the American from
all other men, and gives a peculiar colour not only to the pattern of
his daily life but also to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for
want of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration. That is to
say, his dominant passion is a passion to lift himself by at least a
step or two in the society that he is a part of--a passion to improve
his position, to break down some shadowy barrier of caste, to achieve
the countenance of what, for all his talk of equality, he recognizes and
accepts as his betters. The American is a pusher. His eyes are ever
fixed upon some round of the ladder that is just beyond his reach, and
all his secret ambitions, all his extraordinary energies, group
themselves about the yearning to grasp it. Here we have an explanation
of the curious restlessness that educated foreigners, as opposed to mere
immigrants, always make a note of in the country; it is half aspiration
and half impatience, with overtones of dread and timorousness. The
American is violently eager to get on, and thoroughly convinced that his
merits entitle him to try and to succeed, but by the same token he is
sickeningly fearful of slipping back, and out of the second fact, as we
shall see, spring some of his most characteristic traits. He is a man
vexed, at one and the same time, by delusions of grandeur and an
inferiority complex; he is both egotistical and subservient, assertive
and politic, blatant and shy. Most of the errors about him are made by
seeing one side of him and being blind to the other.
Such a thing as a secure position is practically unknown among us. There
is no American who cannot hope to lift himself another notch or two, if
he is good; there is absolutely no hard and fast impediment to his
progress. But neither is there any American who doesn't have to keep on
fighting for whatever position he has; no wall of caste is there to
protect him if he slips. One observes every day the movement of
individuals, families, whole groups, in both directions. All of our
cities are full of brummagem aristocrats--aristocrats, at all events, in
the view of their neighbours--whose grandfathers, or even fathers, were
day labourers; and working for them, supported by them, heavily
patronized by them, are clerks whose grandfathers were lords of the
soil. The older societies of Europe, as every one knows, protect their
caste lines a great deal more resolutely. It is as impossible for a
wealthy pork packer or company promoter to enter the _noblesse_ of
Austria, even today, as it would be for him to enter the boudoir of a
queen; he is barred out absolutely and even his grandchildren are under
the ban. And in precisely the same way it is as impossible for a count
of the old Holy Roman Empire to lose caste as it would be for the Dalai
Lama; he may sink to unutterable depths within his order, but he cannot
get himself out of it, nor can he lose the peculiar advantages that go
with membership; he is still a _Graf_, and, as such, above the herd.
Once, in a Madrid cafe, the two of us encountered a Spanish marquis who
wore celluloid cuffs, suffered from pediculosis and had been drunk for
sixteen years. Yet he remained a marquis in good standing, and all
lesser Spaniards, including Socialists, envied him and deferred to him;
none would have dreamed of slapping him on the back. Knowing that he was
quite as safe within his ancient order as a dog among the _canidae_, he
gave no thought to appearances. But in the same way he knew that he had
reached his limit--that no conceivable effort could lift him higher. He
was a grandee of Spain and that was all; above glimmered royalty and
the hierarchy of the saints, and both royalty and the hierarchy of the
saints were as much beyond him as grandeeism was beyond the polite and
well-educated head-waiter who laved him with ice-water, when he had
_mania-a-potu_.
No American is ever so securely lodged. There is always something just
ahead of him, beckoning him and tantalizing him, and there is always
something just behind him, menacing him and causing him to sweat. Even
when he attains to what may seem to be security, that security is very
fragile. The English soap-boiler, brewer, shyster attorney or
stock-jobber, once he has got into the House of Lords, is reasonably
safe, and his children after him; the possession of a peerage connotes a
definite rank, and it is as permanent as anything can be in this world.
But in America there is no such harbour; the ship is eternally at sea.
Money vanishes, official dignity is forgotten, caste lines are as full
of gaps as an ill-kept hedge. The grandfather of the Vanderbilts was a
bounder; the last of the Washingtons is a petty employe in the Library
of Congress.
It is this constant possibility of rising, this constant risk of
falling, that gives a barbaric picturesqueness to the panorama of what
is called fashionable society in America. The chief character of that
society is to be found in its shameless self-assertion, its almost
obscene display of its importance and of the shadowy privileges and
acceptances on which that importance is based. It is assertive for the
simple reason that, immediately it ceased to be assertive, it would
cease to exist. Structurally, it is composed in every town of a nucleus
of those who have laboriously arrived and a chaotic mass of those who
are straining every effort to get on. The effort must be made against
great odds. Those who have arrived are eager to keep down the
competition of newcomers; on their exclusiveness, as the phrase is,
rests the whole of their social advantage. Thus the candidate from
below, before horning in at last, must put up with an infinity of rebuff
and humiliation; he must sacrifice his self-respect today in order to
gain the hope of destroying the self-respect of other aspirants
tomorrow. The result is that the whole edifice is based upon fears and
abasements, and that every device which promises to protect the
individual against them is seized upon eagerly. Fashionable society in
America therefore has no room for intelligence; within its fold an
original idea is dangerous; it carries regimentation, in dress, in
social customs and in political and even religious doctrines, to the
last degree. In the American cities the fashionable man or woman must
not only maintain the decorum seen among civilized folks everywhere; he
or she must also be interested in precisely the right sports, theatrical
shows and opera singers, show the right political credulities and
indignations, and have some sort of connection with the right church.
Nearly always, because of the apeing of English custom that prevails
everywhere in America, it must be the so-called Protestant Episcopal
Church, a sort of outhouse of the Church of England, with ecclesiastics
who imitate the English sacerdotal manner much as small boys imitate the
manner of eminent baseball players. Every fashionable Protestant
Episcopal congregation in the land is full of ex-Baptists and
ex-Methodists who have shed Calvinism, total immersion and the
hallelujah hymns on their way up the ladder. The same impulse leads the
Jews, whenever the possibility of invading the citadel of the Christians
begins to bemuse them (as happened during the late war, for example,
when patriotism temporarily adjourned the usual taboos), to embrace
Christian Science--as a sort of halfway station, so to speak, more
medical than Christian, and hence secure against ordinary derisions. And
it is an impulse but little different which lies at the bottom of the
much-discussed title-hunt.
A title, however paltry, is of genuine social value, more especially in
America; it represents a status that cannot be changed overnight by the
rise of rivals, or by personal dereliction, or by mere accident. It is a
policy of insurance against dangers that are not to be countered as
effectively in any other manner. Miss G----, the daughter of an
enormously wealthy scoundrel, may be accepted everywhere, but all the
while she is insecure. Her father may lose his fortune tomorrow, or be
jailed by newspaper outcry, or marry a prostitute and so commit social
suicide himself and murder his daughter, or she herself may fall a
victim to some rival's superior machinations, or stoop to fornication of
some forbidden variety, or otherwise get herself under the ban. But once
she is a duchess, she is safe. No catastrophe short of divorce can take
away her coronet, and even divorce will leave the purple marks of it
upon her brow. Most valuable boon of all, she is now free to be
herself,--a rare, rare experience for an American. She may, if she
likes, go about in a Mother Hubbard, or join the Seventh Day Adventists,
or declare for the Bolsheviki, or wash her own lingerie, or have her
hair bobbed, and still she will remain a duchess, and, as a duchess,
irremovably superior to the gaping herd of her political equals.
This social aspiration, of course, is most vividly violent and idiotic
on its higher and more gaudy levels, but it is scarcely less earnest
below. Every American, however obscure, has formulated within his secret
recesses some concept of advancement, however meagre; if he doesn't
aspire to be what is called fashionable, then he at least aspires to
lift himself in some less gorgeous way. There is not a social
organization in this land of innumerable associations that hasn't its
waiting list of candidates who are eager to get in, but have not yet
demonstrated their fitness for the honour. One can scarcely go low
enough to find that pressure absent. Even the tin-pot fraternal orders,
which are constantly cadging for members and seem to accept any one not
a downright felon, are exclusive in their fantastic way, and no doubt
there are hundreds of thousands of proud American freemen, the heirs of
Washington and Jefferson, their liberty safeguarded by a million guns,
who pine in secret because they are ineligible to membership in the
Masons, the Odd Fellows or even the Knights of Pythias. On the distaff
side, the thing is too obvious to need exposition. The patriotic
societies among women are all machines for the resuscitation of lost
superiorities. The plutocracy has shouldered out the old gentry from
actual social leadership--that gentry, indeed, presents a prodigious
clinical picture of the insecurity of social rank in America--but there
remains at least the possibility of insisting upon a dignity which
plutocrats cannot boast and may not even buy. Thus the county judge's
wife in Smithville or the Methodist pastor's daughter in Jonestown
consoles herself for the lack of an opera box with the thought
(constantly asserted by badge and resolution) that she had a nobler
grandfather, or, at all events, a decenter one, than the Astors, the
Vanderbilts and the Goulds.
IV
It seems to us that the genuine characters of the normal American, the
characters which set him off most saliently from the men of other
nations, are the fruits of all this risk of and capacity for change in
status that we have described, and of the dreads and hesitations that go
therewith. The American is marked, in fact, by precisely the habits of
mind and act that one would look for in a man insatiably ambitious and
yet incurably fearful, to wit, the habits, on the one hand, of
unpleasant assertiveness, of somewhat boisterous braggardism, of
incessant pushing, and, on the other hand, of conformity, caution and
subservience. He is forever talking of his rights as if he stood ready
to defend them with his last drop of blood, and forever yielding them up
at the first demand. Under both the pretension and the fact is the
common motive of fear--in brief, the common motive of the insecure and
uncertain man, the _average_ man, at all times and everywhere, but
especially the motive of the average man in a social system so crude and
unstable as ours.
"More than any other people," said Wendell Phillips one blue day, "we
Americans are afraid of one another." The saying seems harsh. It goes
counter to the national delusion of uncompromising courage and limitless
truculence. It wars upon the national vanity. But all the same there is
truth in it. Here, more than anywhere else on earth, the status of an
individual is determined by the general consent of the general body of
his fellows; here, as we have seen, there are no artificial barriers to
protect him against their disapproval, or even against their envy. And
here, more than anywhere else, the general consent of that general body
of men is coloured by the ideas and prejudices of the inferior majority;
here, there is the nearest approach to genuine democracy, the most
direct and accurate response to mob emotions. Facing that infinitely
powerful but inevitably ignorant and cruel corpus of opinion, the
individual must needs adopt caution and fall into timorousness. The
desire within him may be bold and forthright, but its satisfaction
demands discretion, prudence, a politic and ingratiating habit. The
walls are not to be stormed; they must be wooed to a sort of Jerichoan
fall. Success thus takes the form of a series of waves of protective
colouration; failure is a succession of unmaskings. The aspirant must
first learn to imitate exactly the aspect and behaviour of the group he
seeks to penetrate. There follows notice. There follows toleration.
There follows acceptance.
Thus the hog-murderer's wife picks her way into the society of Chicago,
the proud aristocracy of the abbatoir. And thus, no less, the former
whiskey drummer insinuates himself into the Elks, and the rising
retailer wins the _imprimatur_ of wholesalers, and the rich peasant
becomes a planter and the father of doctors of philosophy, and the
servant girl enters the movies and acquires the status of a princess of
the blood, and the petty attorney becomes a legislator and statesman,
and Schmidt turns into Smith, and the newspaper reporter becomes a
_litterateur_ on the staff of the _Saturday Evening Post_, and all of us
Yankees creep up, up, up. The business is never to be accomplished by
headlong assault. It must be done circumspectly, insidiously, a bit
apologetically, _pianissimo_; there must be no flaunting of unusual
ideas, no bold prancing of an unaccustomed personality. Above all, it
must be done without exciting fear, lest the portcullis fall and the
whole enterprise go to pot. Above all, the manner of a Jenkins must be
got into it.
That manner, of course, is not incompatible with a certain superficial
boldness, nor even with an appearance of truculence. But what lies
beneath the boldness is not really an independent spirit, but merely a
talent for crying with the pack. When the American is most dashingly
assertive it is a sure sign that he feels the pack behind him, and hears
its comforting baying, and is well aware that his doctrine is approved.
He is not a joiner for nothing. He joins something, whether it be a
political party, a church, a fraternal order or one of the idiotic
movements that incessantly ravage the land, because joining gives him a
feeling of security, because it makes him a part of something larger and
safer than he is himself, because it gives him a chance to work off
steam without running any risk. The whole thinking of the country thus
runs down the channel of mob emotion; there is no actual conflict of
ideas, but only a succession of crazes. It is inconvenient to stand
aloof from these crazes, and it is dangerous to oppose them. In no other
country in the world is there so ferocious a short way with dissenters;
in none other is it socially so costly to heed the inner voice and to
be one's own man.
Thus encircled by taboos, the American shows an extraordinary
timorousness in all his dealings with fundamentals, and the fact that
many of these taboos are self-imposed only adds to their rigour. What
every observant foreigner first notices, canvassing the intellectual
life of the land, is the shy and gingery manner in which all the larger
problems of existence are dealt with. We have, for example, positive
laws which make it practically impossible to discuss the sex question
with anything approaching honesty. The literature of the subject is
enormous, and the general notion of its importance is thereby made
manifest, but all save a very small part of that literature is produced
by quacks and addressed to an audience that is afraid to hear the truth.
So in politics. Almost alone among the civilized nations of the world,
the United States pursues critics of the dominant political theory with
mediaeval ferocity, condemning them to interminable periods in prison,
proceeding against them by clamour and perjury, treating them worse than
common blacklegs, and at times conniving at their actual murder by the
police. And so, above all, in religion. This is the only country of
Christendom in which there is no anti-clerical party, and hence no
constant and effective criticism of clerical pretension and corruption.
The result is that all of the churches reach out for tyranny among us,
and that most of them that show any numerical strength already exercise
it. In half a dozen of our largest cities the Catholic Church is
actually a good deal more powerful than it is in Spain, or even in
Austria. Its acts are wholly above public discussion; it makes and
breaks public officials; it holds the newspapers in terror; it
influences the police and the courts; it is strong enough to destroy and
silence any man who objects to its polity. But this is not all. The
Catholic Church, at worst, is an organization largely devoted to
perfectly legitimate and even laudable purposes, and it is controlled by
a class of men who are largely above popular passion, and intelligent
enough to see beyond the immediate advantage. More important still, its
international character gives it a detached and superior point of view,
and so makes it stand aloof from some of the common weaknesses of the
native mob. This is constantly revealed by its opposition to
Prohibition, vice-crusading and other such crazes of the disinherited
and unhappy. The rank and file of its members are ignorant and emotional
and are thus almost ideal cannon-fodder for the bogus reformers who
operate upon the proletariat, but they are held back by their clergy, to
whose superior interest in genuine religion is added a centuries-old
heritage of worldly wisdom. Thus the Church of Rome, in America at
least, is a civilizing agency, and we may well overlook its cynical
alliance with political corruption in view of its steady enmity to that
greater corruption which destroys the very elements of liberty, peace
and human dignity. It may be a bit too intelligently selfish and harshly
realistic, but it is assuredly not swinish.