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AUGUST, 1926

BY A RETURNING AMERICAN

I

I HAVE just returned home after a winter in England. It is not a novel experience. When I first ‘came home from Europe’ I was four years old, and since then I have crossed the water many times. As I grew older and could compare the adult and the younger civilizations on the two sides of the ocean, I became increasingly aware of the contrast between them, a contrast which has grown steadily more striking as the years have passed. But never before have I been so startled on reaching my native shore as I was a fortnight ago. I asked myself over and over whether America had gone crazy, and where this wild dance, this bacchanalian orgy into which I was plunged by my return, was to end. Some of the impressions I received that seem to me most significant are informally jotted down in this paper.

The first thing that struck me was the infernal noise. People in this country seem to have come to enjoy noise for its own sake, as Negroes beat tomtoms in the African jungle. I spent most of the winter in London, a city half again as populous as New York. My hotel was in the heart of Mayfair, a few hundred feet from Piccadilly in one direction and but three minutes’ walk from Regent Street in the other — two of the busiest thoroughfares in London; yet day and night it was as quiet as my country place here in America. With a third-floor front room I could sleep with my window open and not hear a sound all night. The seven nights which I spent after my return at my usual excellent hotel in New York were as restful as if I had been trying to sleep in a boiler factory. Although on the twelfth floor, I could get no sleep unless I closed the window. Fire engines tore by all night with a gigantic shrieking, like damned souls. The surface cars made an unholy racket and seemed always to apply their brakes a hundred feet from the corner on which the hotel is situated and to slide the rest of the way with a grinding that defied endurance. Motorcar horns honked and honked and honked without intermission every hour of the night. When I took the train, after a week, to come to my country place, I had a seat in what happened to be the Pullman nearest the engine. For the first hour of the trip the engineer forced ear-piercing shrieks from the whistle at about threeminute intervals without a let-up. It was not a question of grade crossings, and what his purpose, other than pure love of noise, could have been is inexplicable. My companion and I gave up all attempts to converse and resigned ourselves to being tortured by what appeared to be a mad locomotive driver. There is absolutely no need for this nerve-racking bedlam of noises unless people really like it. The traffic in such London streets as Piccadilly, the Strand, and others is as heavy as on any street in New York. It is a continuous stream of motor cars and motor buses, yet it moves as swiftly and as silently as a river. One rarely hears a horn blown. The people prefer quiet, realize its value for the human system, and in some way have enough control over the organs of government to secure what they want. It is now against the law even to whistle for a taxi, and no one does whistle. London is at once the biggest city in the world and the most quiet and restful. This love of noise strikes one on coming home as being among the most symptomatic features of American life to-day. Children love noise, savages do, and some types of the insane.

II

Another contrast that was most forcibly impressed upon me was the respect for law and order in England as opposed to the utter breakdown of law and of protection afforded to the citizen by his government in America. Almost the last day before I left New York in January, I had occasion to go to my bank in Wall Street. In one block I saw three armored cars, with machine guns and armed guards, engaged in transporting valuables in the heart of the financial district of the biggest city in America. A few days after my return I stopped in to see my lawyer, who happens to be the attorney for a large public service corporation. As we left the door of his building I noticed two armored cars with the name of his corporation on them. I asked him why, in heaven’s name, his company had to have armored cars and machine guns and men with revolvers in their hands? His reply was, as though the matter were a mere commonplace, that they had to move considerable sums of money for pay rolls and so on, and that use of the armament I had noticed was the only safe way to do it. What have we come to when government can no longer afford protection to its citizens in the heart of our greatest city? In London, while I was there, a steamer arrived from South Africa with five millions of gold consigned to the Bank of England. At the dock it was placed in an open dray; a tarpaulin was thrown over it, and it was driven to the Bank with no guards of any sort. Respect for law and order, as shown in the recent strike of five million men, pervades all classes in England, and the law is always enforced. In London one feels and knows that one can trust a policeman utterly. At a dinner of a group of magazine and newspaper editors which I attended just before leaving here in January, the question of the police in two of our largest cities came up for discussion, and the statement was made, by one who had studied the situation thoroughly, that the most dangerous person to whom a young girl could apply for protection at night in one of those cities was a uniformed member of the police force. Pleasant situation, is n’t it? In London, again, every taxi driver is scrutinized by Scotland Yard, and only men with good characters and clean records are allowed to drive. It is perfectly safe to hail any taxi night or day and trust one’s self to the driver. In America?

On the other hand, in England, although the law is rigidly enforced and respected, one’s private life is remarkably free from interference. One can dress as one pleases, marry whom one pleases, pursue such hobbies as one pleases, read what one pleases, say what one pleases, and in general express one’s personality in one’s own way of living. In America I am more and more impressed with the growing restraint placed on individualism in private life. It is not necessary to stress Prohibition. Restriction is becoming evident in every direction. Different groups have their own mores, but each forces all its members to become alike as two peas. It is not only in the small town that one does not dare strike out for one’s self. There is no more type-compelling community to-day than a prosperous New York suburb. The men all dress alike, think alike, talk alike, lead almost identical lives. The lawyer who is on the wait for clients, the broker playing his social life for customers, the merchant who needs credit or tips from his banker, feel that they must wear the clothes, have the manners, and think the thoughts that are supposed to conform to the generic concept of a prosperous, conservative business man. Failing to resemble this auspicious image, they may be considered queer, if not ‘Red,’ and may lose business. A friend of mine to whom I spoke, on my return, of this soul-deadening monotony of American life agreed with me in the abstract. ‘But,’ I said, ‘are you not doing as much to force it on everyone as anybody else? If a bond broker came into your office to sell you bonds, and was not dressed just as a bond broker is supposed to dress; if he did n’t have just the ideas on economic questions you think he ought to have, and just the usual suave bond-broker manner, would he be likely to sell you bonds?’ My friend laughed, but confessed that the young man would probably not effect any sales. An editor of a wellknown paper, who is extremely wellinformed on the conditions underlying contemporary American life, told me he could name a half-dozen financiers who, by the ramification of their financial influence, could introduce any social custom into all the country clubs and club cars on suburban trains around New York in a month if they gave it out that such and such was what a successful business man should do. This may be exaggerated on the literal side, but it expresses a profound truth about American life to-day, and points to one of those conditions that most strike a home-comer.

He realizes that this growing restraint of personal opinion and way of life is not wholly due to the fear of losing money. Organized bodies and even the law of the land are taking a hand in the game. As an historian I have watched, in the last year or two, legislatures passing laws as to what shall and shall not appear in histories. On my return I found that more laws had been passed against the teaching of evolution, an issue that I thought would die a natural death when I left here some months ago. In this morning’s paper I read that a powerful organization has been formed, one of whose purposes is to drive from the pulpit of every evangelical church any preacher who believes in evolution. Such matters cannot be taken lightly, though we seem to pay no more attention to them than we do to the need of the citizen to protect himself with machine guns. We have seen in the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment what an aggressive, organized minority, backed by ample money and using terrorizing methods on candidates for political office, can accomplish. But if Americans, wholly occupied in ‘getting and spending,’ have lost all sense of serious issues, they seem also to have lost all sense of humor, for the Lady Cathcart case, viewed through a perspective of three thousand miles, was inconceivably grotesque for any mature and civilized nation.

III

Again, what struck me was that the pace has become so terrific in this country that money must be had at any price. And it is fantastic how money is being made. One friend of mine told me casually that he had made $70,000 outside his regular income while I had been gone. Another has made $100,000 in the last year. Neither of these is a wealthy man or a speculator. They consider themselves conservative. A Polish farmer near me in the country has made $19,000 in small real-estate deals in the past year and has recently refused $80,000 for the farm which he bought by aid of a mortgage two years ago for $18,000. In another part of the country I chance to know an enterprising boy who is, I am informed, making $400 a week helping bootleggers. Another neighbor, a New York business man, has made half a million in some stock. These are merely a few cases that have come to my personal notice in the fortnight since my return.

On every side I am struck with the orgy of expenditure. It is not only among the rich in the city. In this quiet country village it is just as true. There is not a farmer or mechanic who does not drive a much more expensive car than I do. At the post office last night I watched an old man drive up to the curb. He had to quit his small blacksmith business a few years ago and applied to me for the job of janitor in a building I am interested in. We were sorry not to give him the job, for he needed the money. So far as I know he has no occupation now but occasional carpentering, but he was driving a new Studebaker closed car. Cars, radio sets, vacuum cleaners, motor lawn-cutters, — any sort of machine that takes their fancy, costing from a hundred or two hundred dollars to two or three thousand,— are to be found in the homes or garages of these village farmers, mechanics, or small tradesmen. One wonders where they get the money and how long such a condition can last.

England is still simple. In the hotel in London where I stayed, one of the best of the purely English type, with a royal suite occasionally used by royalty (the late King of Belgium used to stay there), there is no running water in the bedrooms and the only heat is still the open coal fire. Yet there were quiet and peace and genuine comfort that I am unable to obtain at double the price at the hotel where I stay in New York. When one comes in late in the afternoon, tired from a stroll or a day’s work, it is after all more restful to sit in front of an open fire than to gaze at a radiator. On a table at my side was a whiskey and soda for further solace. When the evening paper was due, instead of my having to shoot myself down twelve stories to buy one at the news stand in a noisy lobby or tip a bell boy fifteen cents for getting a three-cent paper, it was automatically brought to my room by the page with a pleasant greeting and no expectation of a tip other than his modest one at the week’s end. Instead of my having to waste fifteen minutes and ascend a bootblack stand in public whenever my shoes needed shining, they were attended to at night with no waste of time or energy on my part. Small matters, it may be, but all tending to reduce the wear and tear of life.

Yet, as far as simplicity is concerned, it was the children who struck me most. I am fond of them, usually observant of them, and incidentally have young English cousins of my own, though my family has been in America for three hundred years. In England the children are still children. They play with simple toys, they sail toy boats in the Round Pond in Kensington, they tramp the moors with their fathers, they go in for the simpler sports which have not been professionalized. They may have bicycles, but they do not dream of automobiles and the more expensive machines of all sorts. I have been talking in this country with a man who has $5000 a year. He was objecting because his son insisted on joining a golf club and, after he had done so, insisted further on having the family car to go to it, a mile away. When his father told him the walk would do him good, he stared, open-eyed, and answered that none of the boys walked and that he would ’look queer.’ In this seaside village the country boys no longer care for swimming, or, indeed, for anything except cars and radios and all that costs money. And they get them. I have seen some of the summer children of thirteen and fourteen driving high-powered cars — against the law, of course, but no one any longer pays attention to law. I have also seen other things. Last summer I found myself trailing a handsome car along a road which led to the woods. The curtain was up at the back and I could see through. On the front seat were a boy and girl with their arms around each other’s necks. They were about fifteen years old. On the back seat was another youthful couple, about fourteen years old, similarly occupied but ‘more so.’ All were clothed only in one-piece bathing suits. The party subsequently disappeared into the woods. One wonders what American parents, who can scarcely be acquitted of all knowledge of their children, think of such occurrences, or whether they have reached a paralysis of thinking. Again, after watching the simply dressed English children I am staggered at the amount and costliness of the American child’s wardrobe. One of my small friends, to make my comment specific, has a $350 shawl, though her parents are not very well off.

Indeed, — and this is one of the most startling things that greet the returning traveler, — price seems no longer to be considered in America. My companion and I were more luxuriously housed and fed in one of the best hotels in Paris for eight dollars a day than we were in New York at twenty-eight dollars, a difference of over seven thousand dollars a year. In England, in spite of high costs and terrific taxation, a family can still live comfortably on what I am told would be very hard sledding for a young couple here just starting out. It is not difficult to see that a large part of the high cost of living in America is due to the orgy of spending for all sorts of luxuries and machinery of life, and to the highest tariff we have ever had. With all America scrambling to own motor cars, radio sets, clothes, and everything that takes its fancy, regardless of price, the prices naturally go up. Moreover, the enormous demand for such things must take a vast amount of labor away from the more genuinely productive trades. Mr. Coolidge may preach economy, but I notice he has never stood for any reduction in the tariff. When I landed at the dock the lowest duty I paid on any article was 60 per cent and from that the duties ran to 80 per cent. It is needless to tell me that a duty of 60 per cent on clothes does not increase the cost of living when I have to hand over thirtysix dollars on a suit that cost me in London sixty dollars. One asks one’s self how much such increase in the cost, of what he buys benefits the American workingman and how much it may be for the sole benefit of a small group of manufacturers.

At any rate one gasps, when one comes home, at the fantastic increase in both the scale and the cost of living, and when one turns from one’s personal plight to consider the effect on society generally one wonders where the situation will end, and how much real happiness the new scale of living is bringing to people. I asked a friend of mine whether the marriages of the group of her young friends in a community where I used to live had turned out happily. She thought for the most part they had not. When I asked her what she thought the cause of this misfortune might be, she said that five or six thousand dollars went nowhere now, even if the wife did all her own work. For a young man to earn that he had to work himself to death in the competitive struggle, and in the evenings both were so tired, with worry quite as much as work, that they had nothing of their best to give each other. They either passed a dull evening or went out for excitement. After a very few years of that sort of thing the situation became rather hopeless unless the man happened to make money fast . Americans, now highly industrialized and living the most extravagantly luxurious life of any people, still cling to the frontier ideal that any young man should be able to support any girl, and that a dowry is ‘un-American.’ That was all right when all he needed was an axe, a pair of strong arms, and neighbors to come for the ‘house-raising.’ But now a father who deliberately accustoms his daughter to foolish luxury expects her to be happy when she leaves a home where the scale of expenditure has been forty thousand dollars a year to scrabble along, without even a cook, on five thousand dollars a year for her family. And it is not every young man of education and cultivated tastes who can offer a girl even that much. The result is no marriage, late marriage, or a soulracking struggle for mere living in such a way as to enable the young couple to keep in some sort of social contact with their former friends.

IV

Another thing that struck me is that the American has no sense any more of simple enjoyment. Conversation is a lost art. People no longer talk for the interchange of ideas. Indeed, ideas seem to be taboo. Any suggestion that everything is not for the best in this best of all possible worlds is considered dangerously radical. People are not expected even to pretend to exchange thoughts any more. I have in mind three American hotels where I have stayed recently, all houses which I have frequented because of their former quiet and because if I happened to give a dinner to friends there was in each case a quiet room to which we could adjourn afterward to talk. Each of these hotels has installed a radio in these rooms this winter, and conversation has become simply impossible in them. One cannot talk when an agricultural specialist or a Y. M. C. A. man is bawling in one’s ear out of a loud speaker.

In England one feels everywhere a real love of beauty in the countryside. The simplest cottage of a workman has its flower garden and there the man works after hours with his family about him. The hedgerows, the clumps of trees here and there in the fields, all tell of an appreciation of nature and natural beauty on the part of not only the great landed proprietors but the small farmers as well. Here where I live the entire countryside has been spoiled in the past three years because farmers have ploughed down all the hedgerows and have planted potatoes, not only to the very outside inch of their own lands, but even well into the public highways. For miles the roads have become mere narrow strips of dirt between the dirt of the fields, and indistinguishable from them. In spite of many complaints, every town official interviewed has ‘passed the buck’ to another, and now it seems settled to the satisfaction of all but a few ‘kickers’ that no one has any right to interfere with farmers who take as much of the public roads into their own fields as they wish. Between this and the wholesale careless burning over of tract after tract of woodland, the countryside which was beautiful ten years ago has been completely ruined. And nobody seems to care. Anyone who insists on the right of the public when the farmers appropriate the roads or who suggests that the beauty of the country has a value at all comparable to a few more bushels of potatoes is a nuisance and a hopeless crank. Fresh from the well-kept beauty of the English country, I was staggered at the devastation which has been wrought in my neighborhood even since I left it last autumn. One of the prettiest wood roads is now a wilderness of charred forest, of orange-colored gasoline stations, of real-estate signs and ‘ hot dog ’ places. Another is lined on both sides for at least a mile and a half with dump heaps of tin cans and all sorts of refuse.

Still another thing that struck me was our commercialization of our own sentimentality. We Americans are a mawkishly sentimental people. What people who were not would inaugurate a ‘Mother’s Day’? But, having inaugurated it, how promptly and completely we have commercialized it! Everywhere as I went about New York in those first few days home, in candy shops, card shops, and all sorts, were signs not to forget Mother and to send her whatever the advertiser had for sale.

When I was sputtering about some of these impressions to an acquaintance, he objected: ‘Grant that much of what you say is true; nevertheless we are a happier people and more intelligent than the English.’ I doubt it. I find lots of excitement here, but very few genuinely happy and contented people. We are looking for happiness in things and in what we can buy, and I doubt if it is permanently to be found there. We have motors, bathrooms, telephones, and all other mechanical accessories to an extent undreamed of in Europe, yet I do not find the people who enjoy them any happier. I talked with a number of English wage earners of different sorts and they told me that in spite of high wages in America, where one could earn in a day nearly as much as in a week in England, they would not care to come over, and many of those who had done so had gone back after a while because they found that the wages all went in living expenses, and that in the rush and excitement they did not find so much happiness as they did in their life at home. Having crossed on the same steamer six times in two years, I have come to know some of the stewards rather well. One of them was talking of this on the trip home. He said he and his wife had a small cottage a little out of Southampton on the edge of the New Forest. He described it to me, with its flower gardens and the things he loved, and then said, ‘What could I get in America like that even if I were earning a lot more pay in New York?' As for intelligence, I am not so sure that the average American is more intelligent. He is quicker to use new machinery and has wider superficial knowledge of a practical sort, but I doubt if he takes a really more intelligent and rational view of life. I asked my dining steward what he did when he had time off in New York. His answer was that he and his friends spent most of their time in the Natural History Museum, and he told me with much evident interest of the new acquisitions there. Would an American boy of twenty-five, of the same class, spend his time off in London at the South Kensington Museum? He would scoff at the idea. Is it a sign of inferior intelligence that between four and five million men can be on strike with practically no cases of violence? On the basis of comparative population that would mean thirteen million men on strike at once in the United States. In such a national upheaval as that would the strikers and ‘struck at’ here have shown any more intelligence?

V

These are but random impressions set down at haphazard. There are doubtless other sides to the picture and I am not attempting to indict my own country. I am by no means an Anglophile or an unpatriotic American, but as I contemplate what seems to me a restlessness of life almost bordering on insanity, the growing love of mere noise and excitement, the unprecedented making of money, the extravagance of all classes, the attempts to suppress thought by law, the complete breakdown of law enforcement by our governments, national, state, and municipal, the rapidly growing contempt for law, and the substitution of unlimited spending for the simple human pleasures, I cannot help wondering whither we are bound if another decade sees any such rapid change as has the last. And I am wondering, as a personal but practical question, just how and where a man of moderate means who prefers simple living, simple pleasures, and the things of the mind to rapid moneymaking is going to be able to live any longer in his native country, where he would much rather live than exile himself. He can get as much enjoyment out of a Chevrolet as out of a PierceArrow. He much prefers a good inn to a hotel with the usual marble columns and costly and uncomfortable furniture in its lobby. He wants to lead a simple and sane life. He wants companionship of people who are neither too tired nor too excited at night to exchange ideas rather than personalities. He wants to be legally and socially free to express his own ideas. He wants to be able to think and work and write in quiet. Incidentally he wants a cook. He does not belong to the international idle rich, nor even to the idle new poor. He is a hard worker and a good American, but as he looks about him in his own country he wonders whether everyone has gone mad in the rush for money and extravagant luxuries, and whether such a life as he wants is any longer possible in it, as it easily is still in England. How long can American nerves and minds and the American sold withstand the pressure and pace of America’s present insane and noisy life, and the increasing restrictions on independent thinking and individual expression? There are ample signs that a devastating financial and commercial panic is not many years distant. Will the newer rich who may arise after it lead us a livelier dance yet, or will the history of the orgies of extravagance following the Revolution and the Civil War be repeated and a period of returning sanity ensue after the financial bloodletting?