Refutation of Statement That Our Ancestors Were Wont to Dine on Pork and
Doughnuts.
One English historian began to write a history of the United States,
from the adoption of the Constitution to the fall of the Republic. The
battle of Gettysburg stopped him.
Professor John Mason Tyler, of Amherst, lecturing at the University of
Chicago, said that climate had been the principal cause of America’s
phenomenal development, and that climate ultimately would cause its
degeneracy.
The Baltimore _American_ argues against Professor Tyler, as follows:
Says the frenzied prophet: “Americans one hundred years ago lived on
pork and doughnuts to a great extent. Before going to bed they were
not satisfied unless they ate a large piece of mince-pie. We say
to-day, ‘What a barbarous bill of fare!’ We, who can’t stand anything
stronger than tea and crackers.”
In this lively sketch that, in a breath, spans a century and grasps
unerringly the social and culinary philosophy of a people, the learned
professor has done credit to the environment of his lecture. The
doughnut philosophy here propounded is worthy to rank with the potato
philosophy of an economic school that has long gone into extinction,
while the dire predictions it made are embalmed in the history of
intellectual errors.
The notion of a doughnut and salt pork diet, with a hunk of mince-pie
as a nightcap, is a gentle evolution in social fiction. The American
palate of a hundred years ago was as susceptible to the temptation of
fried chicken and apple cider as it is to-day.
If the Amherst teacher could sit down to the cuisine upon which the
Americans of a hundred years ago dined, he would be apt to revise his
estimate of it as a “barbarous diet.” If he does not believe this, let
him peruse a colonial cook-book, but with the warning that thereafter
the diet of the present day will appear flaccid and unprofitable.
As to the charge that we of this age coddle our palates with tea and
crackers, let the anemic professor speak for himself. The healthy
American digestion tackles fearlessly canvasback duck, diamondback
terrapin, and Welsh rarebit, highly condimented and in complemental
relation with beverages more exhilarating, though, perhaps, less
deadly, than tea, and his slumber makes no record of a wrecking of the
American constitution by nightmares or disturbing physical emotions.
The breakdown of the American nation is conditional upon the collapse
of the American constitution, then long after Macaulay’s solitary New
Zealander seats himself on a broken span of London Bridge to view the
débris of the English nation, the Stars and Stripes will still be
waving over the American “constitution.”
In the meanwhile, some consolation may be derived from the fact that
the American type of soldier is the finest the world affords. Darwin
drew attention to the fact that the European in the American army
tended to conform to the American type in stature and vigor under the
influence of the American climate.