ARE WE STANDARDIZED?
Almost all modern European critics of the United States agree in
complaining that our telephones and sleeping cars are objectionable, and
that we are "standardized" in everything. Their criticism of the
telephone seems to be that the state of perfection to which it has been
brought in this country causes it to be widely used, while their
disapproval of our sleeping cars is invariably based on the assumption
that they have no compartments--which is not the fact, since most of the
great transcontinental railroads do run compartment cars, and much
better ones than the best _wagons lits_, and since, also, all our
sleeping cars have drawing-rooms which are incomparably better than the
most comfortable European compartments.
The charge of standardization will, however, bear a little thought. It
is true that most American cities have a general family
resemblance--that a business street in Atlanta or Memphis looks much
like a business street in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee, St.
Paul, Kansas City, or St. Louis--and that much the same thing may be
said of residence streets. Houses and office buildings in one city are
likely to resemble those of corresponding grade in another; the men who
live in the houses and go daily to the offices are also similar; so are
the trolley cars in which they journey to and fro; still more so the
Fords which many of them use; the clothing of one man is like that of
another, and all have similar conventions concerning the date at
which--without regard to temperature--straw hats should be discarded.
Their womenfolk, also, are more or less alike, as are the department
stores in which they shop and the dresses they buy. And the same is true
of their children, the costumes of those children, and the schools they
attend.
Every American city has social groups corresponding to similar groups in
other cities. There is always the small, affluent group, made up of
people who keep butlers and several automobiles, and who travel
extensively. In this group there are always some snobs: ladies who give
much time to societies founded on ancestry, and have a Junkerish feeling
about "social leadership."
Every city has also its "fast" group: people who consider themselves
"unconventional," who drink more than is good for them, and make much
noise. Some members of this group may belong to the first group, as
well, but in the fast group they have a following of well-dressed
hangers-on: unmarried men and women, youngish rather than young, who,
with little money, yet manage to dress well and to be seen eating and
drinking and dancing in public places. There is usually to be found in
this group a hectic widow or two--be it grass or sod--and a few pretty
girls who, having been given too much freedom at eighteen, begin to
wonder at twenty-eight, why, though they have always been "good
fellows," none of the dozens of men who take them about have married
them. To this aggregation drift also those restless husbands and wives
whose glances rove hopefully away from their mates, a few well-bred
drunkards, and a few men and women who are trying to forget things they
cannot forget.
Then there is always the young married group--a nice group for the most
part--living in comfortable new houses or apartments, and keeping,
usually, both a small automobile and a baby carriage. They also go to
the Country Club on Saturday nights, leave their motors standing in the
drive, eat a lukewarm supper that tastes like papier-mâché, and dance
themselves to wiltedness.
Another group is entirely masculine, being made up of husbands of
various ages, their mutual bond being the downtown club to which they go
daily, and in which the subjects discussed are politics, golf, and the
evils of prohibition. To this group always belong the black-sheep
husbands who, after taking their wives to the Country Club, disappear
and remain away until they are sent for because it is time to go home,
when they come back shamefaced and scented with Scotch.
Every American city has also what Don Marquis calls its "little group of
serious thinkers"--women, most of them--possessed of an ardent desire to
"keep abreast of the times." These women belong to clubs and literary
societies which are more serious than war. They are always reading
papers or attending lectures, and at these lectures they get a strange
assortment of "cultural" information and misinformation, delivered with
ghastly assurance by heterogeneous gentlemen in cutaway coats, who go
about and spout for pay. If you meet these ladies, and they suspect you
of being infested by the germs of "culture," they will open fire on you
with a "thought," about which you may detect a curious ghostly
fragrance, as of Alfred Noyes's lecture, last week, or of "the New
Republic" or the "Literary Digest." The most "liberal" of them may even
take "The Masses," precisely as people rather like them used to take
"The Philistine," a generation or two ago. Among the members of this
group are the women who work violently for suffrage--something in which
I personally believe, but which, merely because I believe in it, I do
not necessarily like to take in my coffee as a substitute for sugar, on
my bread as a substitute for butter, and in my ear as a substitute for
pleasant general conversation.
I do not wish to seem to speak disparagingly of women of this type, for
they are doing good, and they will do more good when they have become
more accustomed to possessing minds. Having but recently discovered
their minds, they are playing with them enthusiastically, like children
who have just discovered their new toys on Christmas morning. It is
delightful to watch them. It is diverting to have them pop ideas at you
with that bright-eyed, efficient, assertive look which seems to say:
"See! I am a liberal woman--a woman of the new type. I meet men on their
own ground. Do you wish to talk of birth control, social hygiene, and
sex attraction? Or shall we reverse the order? Or shall I show you how
much I know about Brieux, and household economics, and Ellen Key, and
eugenics, and George Meredith, and post-impressionism, and "Roberts'
Rules of Order," and theosophy, and conditions in the Sixteenth Ward?"
When one thinks of these city groups, and of mail-order houses, and
Fords, one may begin to fear it is indeed true that we are becoming
standardized, but when one lets one's mind drift over the country as the
eye drifts over a map; when one thinks of the quantities of modest,
thoughtful, gentle, generous, intelligent, sound American families which
are to be found in every city and every town, and thinks again, in a
twinkling, of sheriffs and mining-camp policemen in the Far West, of
boys going to Harvard, and other boys going to the University of Kansas,
others to the old Southern universities, so rich in tradition, and still
others to Annapolis or West Point; when one thinks of the snow
glittering on the Rocky Mountain wall, back of Denver; of sleepy little
towns drowsing in the sun beside the Mississippi; of Charles W. Eliot of
Cambridge, and Hy Gill of Seattle; of Dr. Lyman Abbott of New York and
Tom Watson of Georgia; of General Leonard Wood and Colonel William
Jennings Bryan; of ex-slaves living in their cabins behind Virginia
manor houses, and Filipino and Kanaka fishermen living in villages
built on stilts beside the bayous below New Orleans; of the dry salt
desert of Utah, and two great rivers meeting between green rocky hills,
at Harper's Ferry; of men working in offices at the top of the Woolworth
Building in New York, and other men working thousands of feet below the
ground, in the copper mines of Butte and the iron and coal mines of
Birmingham--when one thinks of these things one quickly ceases to fear
that the United States is standardized, and instead begins to fear that
few Americans will ever know the varied wonder of their country, and the
varied character of its inhabitants, their problems, hopes, and views.
If I lived somewhere in the region of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia
and wished quickly to learn whether the country were really standardized
or not, I should get into my automobile--or into some one else's--and
take an autumn tour through Baltimore, past Doughoregan Manor, some
miles to the west of Baltimore, on to Frederick, Maryland (where they
dispute, quite justly, I believe, the truth of the Barbara Frietchie
legend), and thence "over the mountain wall" and down into the
northeastern corner of the most irregularly shaped State in the Union,
West Virginia. I should strike for Harper's Ferry, and from there run to
Charles Town, a few miles distant (where John Brown was tried and
executed for the Harper's Ferry raid), and after circulating about that
corner of the State, I should go down into Virginia by the good highway
which leads from Charles Town to Berryville--"Bur'v'l," they pronounce
it--and to "Winchester twenty miles away" (where they say that
Sheridan's Ride was nothing to make such a lot of talk about!), and then
back, by way of Berryville, and over the Blue Ridge Mountains into the
great fox-hunting counties of Virginia: Clark, Loudon, and Fauquier.
Here I should see a hunt meet or a race meet. There are many other
places to which I might go after that, but as I meant only to suggest an
easy little tour, I shall stop at this point, contenting myself with
saying that not far to the south is Charlottesville, where Jefferson
built that most beautiful of all universities, the University of
Virginia, and his wonderful house Monticello; that Staunton (pronounced
as without the "u"), where Woodrow Wilson was born, lies west of
Charlottesville, while Fredericksburg, where Washington's mother lived,
lies to the northeast.
Some such trip as this I should take instead of a conventional New
England tour. And before starting I should buy a copy of Louise Closser
Hale's delightful book, "Into the Old Dominion."
One beauty of the trip that I suggest is that it isn't all the same. In
one place you get a fair country hotel, in another an inn, and somewhere
along the way you may have to spend a night in a private house. Also,
though the roads through Maryland, and the part of West Virginia I speak
of, are generally good, my experience of Virginia roads, especially
through the mountains, leads me to conclude that in respect to highways
Virginia remains a backward State. But who wants to ride always over
oiled roads, always to hotels with marble lobbies, or big white porches
full of hungry-eyed young women, and old ladies, knitting? Only the
standardized tourist. And I am not addressing him.
I am talking to the motorist who is not ossified in habit, who has a
love of strangeness and the picturesque--not only in scenery but in
houses and people and the kind of life those people lead. For it is
quite true that, as Professor Roland C. Usher said in his "Pan
Americanism," "the information in New York about Buenos Aires is more
extended, accurate, and contemporaneous than the notions in Maine about
Alabama.... Isolation is more a matter of time than of space, and common
interests are due to the ease of transportation and communication more
often than geographical location."