STRANGE as it may seem, some are puzzled because I hate Americanization and do not hate America. I should have thought that I had earned some right to apply this obvious distinction to any foreign country, since I have consistently applied it to my own country. If the egoism is excusable, I am myself an Englishman (which some identify with an egoist) and I have done my best to praise and glorify a number of English things: English inns, English roads, English jokes and jokers; even to the point of praising the roads for being crooked or the humour for being Cockney; but I have invariably written, ever since I have written at all, against the cult of British Imperialism.And when that perilous power and opportunity, which is given by wealth and worldly success, largely passed from the British Empire to the United States, I have applied exactly the same principle to the United States. I think that Imperialism is none the less Imperialism because it is spread by economic pressure or snobbish fashion rather than by conquest; indeed I have much more respect for the Empire that is spread by fighting than for the Empire that is spread by finance.
Anyhow, in both cases there is one constant factor: that it is invariably the worst things that are spread. International imitation, like Imperialism, is nearly always servile in spirit; that is, it exhibits the taste of a slave even in the things to be imitated. The naked Negro wearing a top-hat is a criticism on the top-hat as well as on the Negro. And white men have succeeded in imposing black clothes upon the bodies of black men better than they have succeeded in imposing what are sometimes called white souls, or white standards of dignity and honour. It is an extraordinary thought: that among the thousand beautiful things that Europe has produced, from the Parthenon to the poetry of Keats, there is not one such thing that has been successfully copied; and the ugliest thing that Europe ever produced, which is its modern dress, has been copied by the whole world. What is true of races, like the white and the black, is equally true of nations, like the English and the American. A man can watch in every detail, day after day and year after year, the Americanization of London, and there will never come to him, even as a faint and far-off breath of any wind of the prairies, a whisper of the real virtues of America.
The great virtue of America is that, in spite of industry and energy, in spite of progress and practical success, in spite of Edison and electricity, in spite of Ford and Fords, in spite of science and organization and enterprise and every evil work, America does really remain democratic; not perhaps in the literal sense of being a democracy, but in the moral sense of consisting of democrats. The citizens feel equal, even if they feel equally impotent. There may not be government of the people, by the people, for the people, but there is not government of the people, by the governing class, still less for the governing class. For any one who knows anything of human history, with its heroic ideals and its prosaic disappointments, this really is and remains a remarkable achievement.
But it is impossible to get even a breath of this actual brotherhood without coming close to it, in its own plainest and even poorest habitations. The best American people are in the back-blocks and the by-streets; where even the rich Americans do not look for them, let alone the European travellers. It is in them that there endures an indescribable decency and security of soul; not poisoned by servility; not poisoned by pessimism. The good that is in them is naturally not known to globe-trotters, for it is not known to themselves. A Catholic priest said to me of some people in the Middle West: “They know nothing of their virtues and that must be pleasing to God.” Main Street has been held up to the world as the worst thing in America. I think it is almost the best.
When we have allowed for this great American advantage we can speak equally plainly about the great American disadvantage. I do not say that the wealth of America was a vice; it was merely a calamity. Also, whatever it was, it was. The calamity of riches has already been removed by the mercy of heaven. No; the real disadvantage of American civilization, the bad luck that balances the sincerity and simplicity of its main democratic design, lay in the relation between culture and creed. At the very beginning it got off on the wrong foot in the matter of faith and morals; and therefore its morals have been imperfect even when they were idealistic; we might say that they were the less perfect the more they were ideal. America had a great political idea, but it had a small religious idea. The spiritual vision was not wide enough for the breadth and variety of the brotherhood that was to be established among men.
America has never been quite normal. Anybody who has ever seen a normal populace will know what I mean at once, when I say that it is proved in the attitude toward drink and the attitude toward religion. As there is none of the sort of drink that sends men to sleep, so there is none of the sort of religion that gives men rest. The nation has numberless virile and independent farmers; yet they are not a normal peasantry. The farmers are often owners of solid and prosperous farms; yet it is not normal property. Something at once starved and strained, something too wide-awake to be fully human, belongs to the history of the Republic of the pioneers. It can be traced back, like everything else, to religion.
Somebody recently reproached me with living a double life; disguising myself as a Regular Guy and a citizen of Gopher Prairie, while I secretly kept another establishment and abandoned myself to dissipation as an English rustic, in the twenty-seven pubs of Auburn, sweetest village of the plain. In other words, he was puzzled because I had defended the manlier qualities of Main Street against the mere artificial anarchy of Greenwich Village, and yet declared (in a totally different connection) that an American village is much uglier than an English village.
It did not occur to him that both these statements are perfectly true, perfectly compatible with each other and perfectly relevant to the truth I was concerned to prove. Journalistically speaking, one was The Attack on America and the other was The Defence of America — both excellent stunts, but needing to be taken up by two separate sentimentalists and not by one rationalist.
Of course, in so far as I was attacking or defending anything, it was not America at all. In the first case I was defending the normal life of man, and in the second the special landscape of England. In the first, I pointed out that Mencken and Lewis, being heathens and therefore pessimists, had really passed from deriding Main Street to deriding Man State, the city of Mansoul; the heart of man. Sceptics of that school have got down to asking, not whether there is good cultural tradition in a town full of chewing-gum and chatter about dollars, but whether there is any good in a life that revolves around the baby and the wife and the working day. They are no longer merely mocking the provincial vices, but also the primeval virtues of the American village. To that question it is quite irrelevant that the American village is ugly.
In dealing with that question, I did not discuss whether it is ugly or not. But in the other case I had quite another logical aim. I was pointing out that touching the beauty of the countryside, England is (as Shakespeare said) a precious gem — not only in being beautiful, but in being rare. Untravelled people think their own grass and woods stretch to the ends of the earth; they do not know they are living in a garden in a wilderness. And I gave the example that America, though it produces superb architecture in cities, has nowhere in its vast expanse produced anything but ugliness in its villages. Both points were directly relevant to what I had to explain, and, indeed, had been specially asked to explain. But one was A.A. (Against America) and the other was F.A. (For America). How could this mystery be explained, except by a Double Life, or perhaps a Dual Personality? I therefore assure my American friend that I am not inconsistent, but on the contrary, strictly consistent, in saying that an English village looks more human than an American village, but that even an American village is more human than an art colony or a Communist settlement.
Among the last of these last words on America may well be this: that the Republic is anything except a Republic. I have remarked that it is in a sense a democracy, though mostly in that loose and inaccurate modern sense, by which we say democratic when we should say egalitarian. The average private person does have that sort of self-respect which is no respecter of persons; though it may be answered that this is easier in a political world where persons are not so respectable. This may be called democracy in the sense that the democracy does not look up to the demagogue. The mob rather looks down on its masters than looks up to them.
But in that ancient and majestic name of the Republic inherited from the very fundamentals of Rome, there is another idea present, and in the American Republic it is entirely absent. It is indeed a quaint paradox to suggest that there could be any meaning in the distinction between the names of two modern political parties. But in the case of Democrats and Republicans there is a difference in the names, even if there is no difference in the parties. And a man might be democratic, in the general sense of sympathizing with the mob rather than it masters, without being Republican at all.
The citizens of the United States are not Republican at all; least of all the Republicans. For that old-world title of The Public Thing, which was still used in the feudal Middle Ages as well as in the Roman Empire, had in it the idea that every man has a direct relation to the realm or commonweal, more direct than he has to any masters or patrons in private life; that whatever he does in bargaining with equals or in the relations of client or advocate, he should be conscious of the great background of the Forum and the Capitol.
Every State in the Union has a Capitol in that old classical style, and some of them in a very fine architectural style. But the one place where it is present to the eye is the one place where it has entirely vanished from the mind. The Capitol does not dominate the skyscrapers and the sky signs; it certainly does not intimidate the people who put up the sky signs. Americans are good neighbours rather than good citizens. That pine and positive public spirit has faded from their life more than from that of any people in the world.
What is the matter with America is that every American has been tacitly or loudly taught that his job is not only more vital than his vote, but more vital than that virtue of public spirit which the vote represents. But because of his private virtue, which is stronger than his public virtue, this has not produced mere selfishness. What it has produced is a queer sort of feudal loyalty. And, just as in the Dark Ages, the result of mere feudal loyalty has been mere feudal anarchy. The reporter whose only duty is to report for his paper, the salesman whose only duty is to call for his boss, have created an atmosphere like that of the half-barbarous heroism of the Song of Roland, in which a man must lose hair and hide for his lord.
Hence America is full of organizations, but not of organization; in the sense of order. It is utterly disorganized by its organizations. They all have a sort of feudal fidelity and ferocity; they are all, in that sense, like the criminal organizations. Nowhere do they so completely despise the State, nowhere do they so utterly disunite the State, as in what we call the United States. There is a danger that what Grant and Lincoln saved under the name of the Union may deserve the special name of the Disunion.
Things might have been different if the political successors of Grant and Lincoln had understood the State in the old simpler sense; or, in other words, if the Republicans had been Republicans. Unfortunately it was they, even more than their opponents, who encouraged this commercial scramble, as if it were part of the vigour and therefore the virtue of America. Consequently it is very difficult to get the individual wage-earner to consider seriously whether it is good for the nation that newspapers should succeed in their stunts, that salesmen should succeed in their sales, that advertisers should advertise and boosters should boost. He feels in a very human way that it is good for his salary; he feels in a very proper way that it is good for his family; he feels in a sort of feudal way that it is good for his firm. I doubt whether he feels, or specially pretends to feel, that it is good for his country.
Anyhow, it is very bad for his country. It is the beginning of all the crime and corruption and over-production and under-employment against which he himself is beginning to react and rebel. And its causes lie far back in the spiritual story of the people, in the religious rather than in the political history of America. All this worldliness had a strange root in unworldliness. It arose because the nation arose not with unity in philosophy, but with variety in fanaticism; with sects built on special dogmas or on the denial of special dogmas; on something that was not merely private judgment, but also particular judgment.
It would be very difficult to draw the line, or to fix the date, between the last officialism of the dying Roman Empire and the first feudalism of the Dark Ages. But we could say with confidence that by the sixth or seventh centuries, organized society had passed its zenith and was declining toward a lower state of culture. I think the zenith of Christian ideas was at the moment when men had got rid of slavery and were beginning to attempt small property — before small property had been swallowed up in large property. I think it was at the moment when men were already national but were still capable of being international.
I think the collapse into capitalism is very like the collapse into feudalism; and in that way is not unlike a collapse into barbarism. Men may come to like being herded and guarded by big firms, as they came to like being herded and guarded by big feudal lordships. But it is a fall, and in the special case of America, it is especially a fall of the Republic. But men still talked of the Roman Empire as the Republic, even when everything was in fact becoming feudal; and similarly the Republic is still often mentioned, even in capitalist America.
But in America these lesser loyalties, the duty of holding down the job, the duty of selling the goods, are more positive and less negative than they are in England. And this unnatural individualism, supported by many vigorous and manly virtues, is historically due to the old individualism in religion. In England it is rather the decline of the romance of the gentleman than the presence of the romance of the salesman. In America it is still the individual making good in trade, because it was originally the individual making good in goodness; that is, in salvation of the soul. Their religion was not republican enough; it was not common enough for a Commonwealth. And so at last religion surrendered to the trick of trade; learned from hucksters and hustlers how to “put it over”; counted converts like customers; and thought rather of selling the goods than of seeking the good.
This is the only real tragedy of America, and I have enough respect for the old Puritan to lament it. It is more tragic than comic to hear Puritans still denouncing Papists for pageantry and mummery, and then advertising their own chapels with theatricals and coloured lights. What the Puritans would not do for the glory of God or the beauty of woman, what they would not tolerate in priests or pardon in poets, they have done as a mere surrender to window-dressing and the wind-bags of publicity. So the commercial scramble has reacted on new problem. The problem of the great American democracy is in the conflict between the good and the bad principles I have indicated here; the great popular sense of worth and work, the unconscious heroism of the Average Man of Whitman, the old republican simplicity; and, on the other side, the tawdry and inadequate ideal of mere ambition and unrest.
Americans would be delightful if Americans would leave them alone. But there is an electric fan of hot air stirring them up endlessly to effort rather than effect. Nevertheless, they have this great advantage over us: that their older sanity was solidified into a creed; but I think that creed must become more rather than less Christian. It is no case for the Pharisee; heaven knows the English have often forgotten the cross on their flag. But I think that the crossless flag may yet become a symbol of something; by whose stars we are illumined, and by whose stripes we are healed.
~G.K. Chesterton: Sidelights on New London and Newer York And Other Essays, Part II, XIII. (1932)
