AMERICA OF TO-DAY VIEWED FROM NEW YORK
1
"We don't know where we are going, but we're on the way," runs a
light-hearted, popular saying. "Heaven or Hell--which?" the evangelists
ask in one breath. No national answer will be given to the query, but
if some one replies "Hell," no one will be greatly shocked, whereas, if
some one replies "Heaven," his neighbor will turn upon him with a smile
and a rude handshake and a "I'm with you, so glad that you're on our
side."
If you say, "Roses spring up in the footsteps of America," Americans
will believe you. But if you say, "Curses follow the Gringo in his
march of destiny," the American interest in your opinion will rapidly
grow less. America's faith in that America is doing right, that she has
a divinely appointed mission, is short of nothing save the faith of the
Catholic Church. Naturally such a faith is the main vital current of
her existence. The saying, "I believe, therefore I am," may be changed
for America into "I believe, therefore I do."
This faith, however, reacts badly upon critical literature. Many books
on America are written for an American public which demands praise. The
rest of the world is profoundly affected by what America does, and
will be even more so by what she will do. For as she plunges forward
along her way of destiny, be it blindly or with open eyes, she not only
achieves for herself but makes way and changes the way of other peoples
and other nations.
Some study in a scientific spirit seems necessary at this hour, not
one tinged with the spleen of France, or the self-conscious spirit of
comparison of England; not a pro-Latin study, nor a study conceived in
_parti pris_ from a socialistic or capitalistic end--but a dead level
dispassionate facing of things as they are and as to honest eyes they
tend to be.
2
In England and Scotland the working-class population far exceeds
in number the middle and upper classes. Enfranchised as it is, men
and women both, it has the political power to seize the reins of
government and take control into its hands. In America the situation is
considerably different. Numerous as is the working class in America,
it is outnumbered by the middle class. And the middle class is more
comfortable, more self-assured, than that class in England. In England
many middle-class people are so cramped and pinched economically that
they are embittered against the rest of society and are ready to throw
in their lot politically with Socialists and Radicals.
In British journalism there is much talk of the "Have-nots"--but such
an expression would mean little in America: the Haves are so numerous
that other people are not heard. What I mean is: the sense of property
is capable of being more widely and more strongly developed even than
in Britain.
With other nations one might make an even more striking comparison.
Russia is a nation of "Have-nots"; Germany is a nation of a few
rich and of broad poverty-stricken masses. Or to come nearer to the
countries now under view, one may say of Mexico that poverty is
national there. In America possession is national. The dollar is in
America almost a national emblem.
There we have a very marked fundamental condition for future
development. Britain is in danger because her masses do not obtain a
fair share of the prosperity of the country as a whole. America is not
in that sort of danger.
It may be urged that America has a violent Labor element, and that
she has been harassed by such prolonged strikes as that of the coal
operatives, the steel workers, the railway men. It is true that there
is a violent element, but that element is foreign and illiterate. The
real under-dog in America is the foreigner and the colored man. He is
not regarded as a fellow citizen but as a hired mercenary, one in a
gang of Chinese, a member of a slave caste. Even if he has his papers
as a United States citizen he finds, like Eugene O'Neill's stoker--the
"Hairy Ape"--that he does not really "belong."
Skilled men, craftsmen, artisans, shopmen, what in England we call
the "respectable" working class, have in America no consciousness of
inferiority. They have their Ford cars and their "Victrolas," they
dance, the men wear ironed trousers, the women "bob" their hair. They
are affiliated to religious organizations, they are also masons of
some rite, probably not Rotarians or Kiwanis, but Red Men perhaps. In
politics, they almost infallibly vote Democrat or Republican. Labor
politics make no progress, because in the many millions they have only
many thousand votes.
The American government machine is guaranteed against Radical
interference for a long time. For Republicanism is founded on the Banks
of America, and Democratism on the industries. Both parties are based
solidly on the rights of possession, the rights of property, the rights
of capital.
3
American commerce, therefore, enjoys a remarkable sense of security. No
draught blows from Russia or elsewhere into the comfortable interior
where the game is being played. Production on an ever grander scale
is achieved; the wealth of the nation is enhanced, the buying power
of every individual is increased, the triumphs of salesmanship are
eclipsed, the glory of the great firms is brighter and fuller, their
advertisements more extensive.
The enormous production is a fact, and not to be gainsaid. But in
their commerce as a whole there are certain very important artificial
elements which show it in part not as a reality but as a great game.
A number of fortunes are made; that again is not to be gainsaid, and
material luxuries are widely distributed--but the picture of American
comfort is not quite so good as it looks. "There's a catch somewhere."
The catch is in the tariff. The tariff makes sure that Americans shall
buy American-made goods at the American price. Salesman and buyer are
tied together in a three-legged race, and the tariff is the binding
matter. For if the tariff were removed there would be a bad falling
apart of producer and consumer. All prices in the United States seem
to me higher than world prices. Therefore, if the tariff were removed,
cheap foreign goods would naturally rush in. America can make a good
article at a good price; it is yet to be proved that, like pre-war
Germany, she might make the best article at the lowest price.
This not only affects manufactured goods, but food. The tariff plus
commercial organization has raised the cost of food to fifty per cent
above world price. The mere food budget of the American housewife is
nearly double that of her European sister, though the food be of the
same quantity. I say not quality, because in my opinion European food
is generally more fresh than American food: "Storage" is the enemy of
good quality.
American salesmen outside of the New World fail to obtain the quantity
of business which their enormous commercial background would suggest.
It may be said, if with pardonable exaggeration, America is not as
aggressive in world-markets as she is at home. In finance she has
become a world power, but the bulk of her trade is in North and South
America.
Within America, within the American Empire, in Latin America
generally, the American salesman has matters more and more his own way.
It may well be asked--If he possess the New World what need has he of
the Old?
The Old World has not, however, necessarily finished with America,
and European business only awaits its chance to descend upon American
lands. A great economic competition between East and West is not one of
the least likely developments of the future--let but Europe find peace
once more.
4
Meanwhile American prosperity increases on a grand scale, and the
chief sign of it is increased leisure. The leisure class grows. It
far outnumbers the leisure class of England or of any other nation.
There are more Americans than English at Monte Carlo, more Americans
in Switzerland, in Egypt, on the Norwegian fjords, in Athens, in Rome,
in Northern Africa. There are many thousands of leisure Americans in
London and at the shrines of England and ensconced in English country
houses or enjoying the hospitality of country gentry--very greatly more
than there are leisure Englishmen or Frenchmen or any other nationality
at the shrines or country houses of America.
In America the leisured appear everywhere. The East is larded with
leisure; the West runs on it as on oil. Care-free children in tens of
thousands get educated, graduate, and have leisure. Something has to be
done for the children of leisure--to make life more interesting.
A life of cars and country clubs will not suffice--especially for the
women, who are almost always more ambitious than the men. There is a
demand for careers by those who do not necessarily demand pay, a demand
for greater interest. The Astors have found admirable scope in British
politics. Such success as Lady Astor has attained is doubtless open to
a few more. Americans range in surprising numbers behind successful
British politicians, delighting in entertaining them when they can.
Various very good looking and capable Americans hold, as it were,
advanced posts in English society life. The competition to be presented
at Court is greater each year, though greater numbers are actually
received. The American Embassy is broadened out to an extensive social
platform crowded with people whose estate and position in American life
is such that they can hardly be ignored.
The diplomatic service generally in Europe is greatly used by the
leisured Americans, and there come people with academic missions,
advisory people of various kinds, who for one reason or another obtain
interviews with distinguished men and then arrange dinner parties and
talk, obtain impressions, get inside, have a finger in the pie.
That same force drives in American politics at home, by intrigue and
by lobbying, trying to find a way of life, a larger interest, for the
leisured. The American Republic, the old United States, affords little
scope for the new ever-increasing class. But America as an Empire,
America with a great Army and a great Fleet, America with a deep
foreign policy which kept foreign powers all speculating on her next
move, America as a world power, would give scope.
Most abhorrent to the leisured class is the primitive State; most
desired is the State in its highest development. For a leisured class
is not compatible with pure democracy. The present commercial system,
however, is producing a leisured class in ever greater numbers.
Does it not, therefore, follow that the commercial system itself is
incompatible with pure democracy?
5
But of course it is not the four hundred of New York who are New York,
but, as O. Henry briefly and brilliantly suggested in his book of
stories, it is the four million--and no upper four thousand or upper
forty thousand can be America.
Indeed, in many vital matters, the forty thousand have been thwarted
by the hundred million. The forty thousand did not want Prohibition
and they were not eager for the enfranchisement of women. The forty
thousand at least professed themselves in favor of the Versailles
Treaty and ready to help Europe to peace. The "representative" American
in Europe nearly always treats Prohibition as a joke, or blames it on
the women's vote, and as regards our European tangle is all optimism
and happy encouragement.
English celebrities visiting America are usually entertained by one of
the forty thousand who make a display of liquor, warming the vitals of
our said celebrities who come back to England with an idea of a new
drunken America.
You would not think that America was a pious, God-fearing country
with some millions of people leading sober and righteous lives and
yearning for the establishment of the Kingdom. The moral passion of the
American masses is kept out of sight as if it were something pitiful
or disgraceful. The forty thousand would not care to see America
defined as--_the nation which voted itself dry_. It would rather define
America as--_the nation which built the Panama Canal_. There is in a
way a conflict between the claims of moral achievement and material
achievement. Thus again in some minds America is _the nation which
won the war_, but in many more she is _the nation which fed starving
Europe_. To many she is _the nation of Roosevelt_, but to many more she
is _the nation of Abraham Lincoln_.
Still to-day, the moral passion of America identifies America, and it
is a pity that the world outside, and even part of America herself,
should be deceived by the noisy Jazz band exterior by which America
seems to choose to signalize herself to the world.
To what extent America has been "cleaned up" has never been divulged
to the outside world. The forty thousand are ashamed of it. The others
do not travel much and have little means of comparison. It is not only
that drunkenness has been eliminated, but vices of other kinds.
"What an extraordinary moral city, compared with Paris or London!"
was Wilfrid Ewart's surprised remark to me. And he had been walking
Broadway at midnight without remarking a single _fille de joie_. And
in order to make a test of the alleged "wetness" of America, Vachel
Lindsay and I made a tour of the old barrooms of New York. The poet was
for several years a Y. M. C. A. worker, and he had a round of barrooms,
visiting them all regularly, and distributing literature relating to
activities other than the consumption of beer. We made a remarkable
pilgrimage together.
By every reckoning New York and Chicago are the richest fields for
the "boot-legger" that America holds. If you can prove that these are
relatively free of liquor you can be sure that the rest of America is
very free. What did we find?
In one old bar, one bartender, four or five loungers with pots, and in
the back a solitary foreign woman resting her bare arms on a sodden
table, waiting for a customer. Every one regarded us suspiciously and
nervously. Another bar had been converted into a restaurant; there was
a lookout man at the door, and he worked a STOP-GO indicator in the
restaurant. When the indicator turned to STOP the customers put their
drinks under the table; when it returned to GO they brought it out
again. That seemed to us a pretty flagrant case of "wetness." But as
Vachel remarked to me--even there all the objectionable aspects of the
saloon have been removed. No one objects on moral grounds to people
having wine with their meals. It is the filth, the vice, the point of
view of the barroom, that America fought and these can never come back.
Five or six large saloons had been converted into shops; sometimes one
saloon into three shops, leased for considerable spaces of time and
quite lost to drinking. Those bars which remained, shut or selling root
beer, seemed to be holding on to valuable sites in the hope that after
all there might be a reversal of the Prohibition Law.
But, as Lindsay pointed out, Prohibition is now part of the
Constitution; it was adopted by many States prior to 1917, it has
been enacted separately by all the States as well as by the Federal
Government, and to go back on it it would have to be voted out by a
majority of the States of the Union once more--which is unthinkable.
Wilfrid Ewart made many jests at the expense of the Statue of Liberty.
All new-come Englishmen do. How can it be a "sweet land of liberty when
one's liberty to have a drink is taken away?" is a favorite query.
The true answer to that question is that America, like England, is
governed by majority opinions. The majority of American citizens wanted
the abolition of the saloon, and they got it.
As regards the advantage of it, I saw New York in 1913 and can compare
its huge gin-palaces of that time, the swarms of unfortunate girls
going in and out, the police exploitation of them, the night court for
women on Sixth Avenue, with cleaned-up New York in 1922. The advantage
seems inestimable.
As regards the reality of Prohibition, I will say this--Even near the
Mexican Border, after a forty-mile ride in the snow, when one would
give a good deal for a stiff drink, not a rancher but was a teetotaler.
The little cities of America are now totally devoid of public vice. The
prisons of Kansas are empty. In the large cities the police are notably
impoverished. It is no use the foreign tourist going to the police and
saying, "Show me the vice of your city." There is nothing to show. Go
a round of the ice cream parlors. Yonder in a small den loving couples
are eating hot tamales. On a corner a youth is surreptitiously lighting
a cigarette. The nation is on a high level of morality, and this is
reflected in the physique of its children. With all this, I ought
perhaps to make a warning--there is almost no religion. Moral fervor
stands instead of religion. The note of wonder, of awe, of divine
praise, is almost entirely absent.
The upper forty thousand, as I have said, take little heed of this.
They believe that they control the springs of action and can make
the hundred million do what they want them to do. The party system
in politics with no other choice but that of Republican or Democrat
seems to facilitate their influence. "Cleaning up" is a passion of
the hundred million; very well, it can be harnessed to the designs of
the forty thousand. Let them "clean up" Cuba, "clean up" the Central
American Republics, "clean up" Mexico.
6
One thing the hundred million will not tolerate in their midst and
that is, a foreign point of view in morals. The "dago" will do things
no "white man" will stand. So also will the Hun and the "Hunky," the
Slav, the "Greaser," the "nigger." An associating of foreigners
with unnatural vice is all too common. The fairskinned Anglo-Saxon,
despite all admixtures, remains the dominant type. He rejects the
melting pot. He alone is the hundred-per-cent American and will not be
adulterated. He is opposed to color, to all dark skins, be they Italian
or Ethiopian, and he is opposed to European religions which seem to
permit low morals. Out of this has arisen on the one hand the spirit of
Hearst's newspapers, on the other the new development of the Ku Klux
Klan.
It is this movement largely which has shut the door to further
immigration from Europe. The idea was obtained during the War that
American ideals and standards had become endangered by a too great
influx of foreigners into America. The Germans, the Russians, the
Irish, all forgot that they were Americans first--all the "hyphenates"
waved their flags of origin. This naturally caused the lurid limelight
of the Press to be turned upon the foreign elements in the midst, and
it was seen how differently the foreigners lived and how much lower
were their moral standards.
Even while America seemed to be fighting for Europe, her opinion of
Europeans, never high, was suffering a severe depression. It is a
national fact to-day that America trusts no foreigners.
7
Provincialism is widely spread. People are not only ill-informed
regarding foreign countries, but credulous, and the press reflects
their state of mind. A country like Russia might almost be in the
moon, to judge by current opinions concerning her. Doubtless it would
be absurd to go to America to obtain information about Europe.
On the other hand, education goes further in America than in any other
country. You often hear exaggerated statements of what the Russian
Bolsheviks are doing for the education of the Russian masses--they have
"voted" and "assigned" and "planned"--and they have no teachers. But
America has teachers and schools, the best equipped in the world. She
is ready to spend money; she has faith in education, she has the will
to get it. The High Schools of America are very remarkable, both in the
number of them and in their size. Americans who have not traveled in
the old home countries of Europe can hardly measure what magnificent
institutions they have in their public schools, and what an advantage
the average American child holds over the average child of any other
nation.
Again, the number of colleges and universities is phenomenal. It
reflects no doubt the wealth of America and also the turning of the
back upon America's raw, primitive, uncouth past. England, by virtue of
her history, is too phlegmatic to do much for the higher education of
the masses.
I sent ye to school and ye wadna learn,
I bought ye books and ye wadna read,
is the traditional attitude of the Englishman. "Too much of school
makes Jack a dull boy," says he, and takes his boy away. In this I
believe the Englishman is largely wrong. The dull, ignorant part of
our population is far larger than it ought to be, and constitutes a
national danger.
How far education in America is ahead of education in England may be
judged by the size of the reading public. Lytton Strachey's _Queen
Victoria_ has five readers in America for every one in England. A
similar ratio existed for Maynard Keynes' _Economic Consequences of the
Peace Treaty_ and for Wells' _Outline of History_.
There is, therefore, an educated class far in excess of the upper forty
thousand. There may be a whole million of well-read people. And the
number progresses with the children who swarm through new big schools
and universities.
8
Where is it all going? Is it drifting southward as I am, to Mexico,
to Empire? Will it stay where it is and wax more illustrious? "Tell
me where you have come from and I will tell you where you are going,"
saith the Cynic. "An evil crow, an evil egg." America as a nation was
born in the throes of the War of North and South. Or it rose out of
Washingtonian independence and Jeffersonian idealism. Or it arose from
the Puritanism of the Pilgrim Fathers, or from the adventure spirit
of the gentlemen of Virginia. From such origins one could chart some
kind of destiny. But not with surety. One must go further back to the
spirit of Elizabethan sailors, to Drake, and a thousand others. Latin
America derives from the Conquistadores of Spain, but Anglo-Saxon
America derives as surely from the English conquerors. America
was Imperial before she was Democratic, and English before she was
American. But then again the English, or at least the Saxons, were a
sturdy, independent race, intolerant of bondage, urgent for their civic
rights, always proud of freedom. If there is one thing that is with
difficulty soluble in Anglo-Saxondom, it is character. It is by virtue
of character that England has been a ruler of peoples, and possibly
again it is character as much as business and excessive wealth and a
leisured class that will lead America along her road of destiny. It is
still in the air as to which road that will be--the way of Roosevelt or
the way of Lincoln.