Genius Loci: The Civilization of These United States

I

LOCALISM alone can produce, in the case of America, a thoroughly authentic type of man; this type alone can be the germ cell of an authentic American nation. Again, localism alone can lead to culture; it must start as a singular and single, and therefore small, thing. It will grow and spread as time goes on. The only really cultural atmosphere one finds to-day in America is that of Virginia. The cultured men who were born in its field of force are responsible for most that is of cultural value in America. But how different Virginia is from all other states! Its culture is a particular one; it is not only a matter of age, but of kind as well.

Let us now survey, in the form of a short sketch, whatever localisms and provincialisms and regionalisms already stand out within the United States. Here I am, of course, restricted to the narrow range of my personal experiences, but since in this connection it is a question more of type than of facts, I think that the following will suffice.

My lecture tour brought me to practically all parts of the United States. Everywhere it was not only my chief but my only concern to get into touch with the genius loci of the place I visited; for all the success of my lecturing — I mean all the success I care for: that is, my succeeding in giving vital impulses — depended on that contact. When I started on my tour, I naturally expected to come across that uniformity everybody talks of. But to my surprise I found that, in spite of the short time that has elapsed since the foundation of most towns, and in spite of the mixed and nomadic character of a considerable percentage of their inhabitants, each of them has a distinctly individual atmosphere; the uniformity is all of the surface.

First of all, America seems to be subdivided even now into large provinces of a comparatively unified character, provinces out of which there would undoubtedly have grown, in earlier days and under different conditions, separate cultures. There are New England, the East, the North, the Middle West, the South bordering the Middle West, the South in the real geographical sense, the Far West. But within these provinces almost every town has a spirit of its own, so that while traveling I constantly had in mind the dawn of European civilization, when the Teutonic nomads just began to settle down around centres such as Cologne, Worms, Nürnberg, Paris, Carcassonne.

Take, for instance, Dallas, Texas. This part of America may be called the youngest part, because it began to thrive on this side, so to speak, of the discovery of the value of oil. It began to thrive after the crazes for skyscrapers, apartment houses, more speed, and so forth, had blown over — at any rate, as the storms they had originally been. On the other hand, there was still lingering in the air the romance of the cowboy and the prairie, and close by lay the ancient culture of Mexico. This coöperation of different causes and traditions might easily have created a mixtum compositum of the most interesting kind. As a matter of fact, there is even to-day, at Dallas, a perfectly delightful genius loci. On the material plane, the interests of oil, of course, predominate. But private life has already developed a charm quite in harmony with the lovely country. One notices in the souls of the residents something of the wide sweep of the prairie, the beginnings of an innate taste concerning things visible, such as one meets with, as a matter of course, in every Italian; and a vital exuberance attributable in equal parts, I should say, to the generosity of the Southern sun and to the prospects of prosperity due to the coöperation of man and the earth. I should greatly wonder if, after a few centuries, Texas did not develop a very delightful original culture — all the more so as this state includes the wonders of the desert, wooded hill lands, and the prairie, and all this under the spell of Mexico’s ancient cultural spirit.

II

Now, as opposed to Texas, let us just cast a glance at Minnesota. It seems a providential thing that this state has been colonized to such a large extent by Swedes, for the landscape is essentially Swedish. Thus the Swede will take root easiest in this soil. The atmosphere of Minneapolis is thoroughly authentic. It is Swedish at bottom, and yet fundamentally American. This can lead to a very promising development. One should not forget, that Sweden and Finland are in many respects the most modern countries in Europe in the American sense, and yet essentially cultured.

And now let us overleap hundreds of miles and give our attention, without transition, to Missouri. This state represents a borderland between the Middle West and the South. But this general description misses the central point. The Missourian is foremost a Missourian—which does not only mean, as the popular satirist will have it, that he wants to see a thing before he believes in it, that he is suspicious and close-fisted to a certain extent. He is essentially rooted in the Missourian soil; he is the one white American I have met of peasantlike qualities.

But Missouri is not only one of the most prosperous, but also one of the most beautiful, states of the Union; in the fall, its scenery must be of an entrancing charm. Accordingly the psychic atmosphere of Missourian cities is even to-day one of harmony, which makes one think of France as opposed to Germany. To its peculiar gayety St. Louis owes its singular attractive power.

New England’s great and very original charm is, alas, that of a dying culture. There is little likelihood that it will survive even for a century; all the less so as it represents an artificial civilization from the point of view of the earth. It was almost purely spiritborn; only a certain ethereal lyricism seems to harmonize with the peculiar hazy beauty of the land. In centuries to come, America will probably see New England’s main, because most lasting, achievement in the fact that its sons are chiefly responsible for the colonization of the South and the Middle West. The lines of development American historians are in the habit of drawing between New England’s past cultural achievements and the present and future state of America are, in my opinion, all of them untrue to fact. New England’s culture was an exclusive thing in itself, beautiful but essentially sterile, and even to-day what is vital in America derives little more from Boston than it does from Athens; what seems to be of New England origin is really of generally Puritan origin. I should not wonder if New England ended as an essentially Irish country—less because of the growing percentage of residents of Irish extraction than because of a preestablished harmony between the Irish temperament and the New England landscape.

III

Now let us fly right across the continent to the Far West. California is so young that it should be impossible, one would think, to foretell anything of its future. Surely its present chief characteristics— for instance, that it has the largest output in the world, not only of oranges and tomatoes, but also of world saviors — cannot be considered lasting. At present the population to an extraordinary degree shows signs of a hysterical temperament; and this can only mean, since the climate in itself is excellent, that the present inhabitants are to a considerable extent not yet adapted to their surroundings. This state of transition could probably have been avoided only if the land had been colonized by members or descendants of the Southern races of Europe. But it is out of the question that under this bright, exhilarating sky, in this unique electric atmosphere, there should not develop, sooner or later, a corresponding type of man.

And this means a type of man very different from the native of any other part of the United States. I wonder whether it will ever be a cultural type; perhaps no culture would ever have developed in the radiant atmosphere of the Greek isles and seas if the Classic Age had been an age of conquered nature making life easy for all, and of democracy as well. These conditions would rather have made for a type akin to the Hawaiian. But very few peoples have ever developed real culture, and many have been great without it.

What I could sense in this psychic atmosphere of California is the following. It is inhabited by a primitive sort of man; there is more of the frontier type alive in him than in any other American. But, on the other hand, he has an innate sense of beauty; beauty means a great deal to him. And there is something of champagne in his blood which may, some day, mature into a vintage entirely different from anything else that grows in the United States, and will certainly act most beneficently as a counterpart and counterpoint to the bourgeois quality of Eastern, Northern, and Middle Western life.

San Francisco is, of course, a thing in itself. Its atmosphere represents a delightful blend of the Far West and the Far East; it is the most attractive international seaport I know, and in centuries to come, when America shall have developed its own culture, it may play a part corresponding to that of Alexandria in Roman days — the Egyptian quality of Greek Alexandria being represented in San Francisco by the Chinese and Japanese, which foreign element forms an integral part of the atmosphere around the Golden Gate. It has been a city of ease, if not of luxury, from the outset. The grim Puritan has never played a prominent part in it. This was due, in the beginning, to the dominant rôle played by the representatives of those races to whom life is first and foremost a joyful thing — the Latin peoples. The different races soon began to blend, and the result is a general atmosphere of ease, of light-heartedness, of frivolous levity, which is the exact opposite of the atmosphere of Boston, all the more interesting since San Francisco too is essentially American.

IV

This, then, leads me to a short description of those towns the genius loci of which is less American, but which for that very reason act like leaven or spices within the whole of the American atmosphere — be it only in a way akin to the terrors of tabasco, the fire of which is surely banished from Hell because of its excessive heat.

Since we are still lingering in the Far West, let us begin with Los Angeles. This city, as it presents itself to-day, — it was quite different when I visited it in 1912, — has the most unreal atmosphere I ever inhaled in my life. It is surely for the purpose of redemption that Hollywood was established just there; according to the mathematical law that the multiplication of two negative quantities results in a positive one, the frankly avowed will-to-beunreal of the film city alone can give a reality to what is essentially phantasmagoric. Los Angeles is the most weirdly unreal city I know, because its psychic atmosphere is chiefly constituted of the emanations of the most unreal, the most ghostlike, type in the world — the retired American. A modern American who retires cannot retire and live in a kind of Riviera, if he is at all sincere. There is as yet no leisured class on this continent; leisure is not yet recognized as a possible life form. Above all, those cultured interests which are found among representatives of any race, and which make, provided they form an integral and essential part of the atmosphere, a place of rest both meaningful and delightful anywhere, are lacking completely with the class forming the prevalent part of those who retire to Los Angeles. They usually belong to the Babbitt type. They have decided to have a good time as retired gentlemen, and they think they are having it — but in reality they are most of them bored to death, because they have no idea what to do with their leisure.

But perhaps this extravagantly comic element is very necessary and wholesome as part of the general texture of American life. American life is on the whole too serious, in the sense that most Americans take themselves too much in dead earnest. It would do them good if they were to make up their minds as a nat ion to think of Los Angeles as a place to be laughed at, as the Greeks did in the case of Abdera. This would perhaps also help them to develop a real sense of humor. For in this, whatever they may think themselves, the Americans are singularly lacking.

One may, of course, use the word in many ways, but if ‘humor’ is to mean at all what it has always meant in the worlds of culture, then what Americans call a sense of humor is only a love of cracking jokes and enjoying jokes — and these jokes more often than not lack what the French call pointe. He only has humor in the real sense who knows how to give expression to a profound and even tragic opposition from the point of view of a benevolent and serene mind. His is the quality of divine laughter of the man inwardly superior to those things ordinary people take with such fearsome seriousness. Accordingly, there can be no high quality of humor unless intellectual understanding acts as the keynote. This is why ancient Chinese humor must be appraised as the highest mankind has as yet produced. This is why real humor is not merely a sense of proportion as such, as the English would have it — it is a sense of proportion ruled from within by a keen appreciation of spiritual and intellectual values.

Now there is not the faintest trace of this kind of understanding to be found in what Americans call humor. In their case it usually means nothing better than a device for not noticing the real conflicts of life, as the criminal about to be hanged often uses the last moments of his life to play the part of the man who does not care; or else it means an outlet for repressions or for a feeling of inferiority. Here let me quote from The American Mind in Action, by Harvey O’Higgins and Edward H. Reede: —

American humor is what science calls a ‘folkway.’ It is an outlet for repressed emotions in disguise. At its crudest it relieves a suppressed hatred — as, for instance, in the practical joke, which does its victim an injury but compels him to join in the laugh at his own discomfiture if he wishes to be considered ‘a good sport.’ The joke disguises your vengeful purpose, but that purpose is the unconscious motive of your joke, and the victim shows that he recognizes your hidden motive when he responds to it with the anger and animosity which he suppresses. The American cartoon is this sort of cruel humor. In drama and the moving picture it takes the form of slap-stick comedy. The cruelty of the popular moving-picture humor is almost savage. And in the dressing tent at the circus you will hoar the battered clown complain, ‘If I was to fall down and break my neck, these rubes would laugh themselves to death.’ They seem almost to hate him, and their laughter at his mishaps sounds cruel, because in that laughter they are draining off suppressed hatreds which the civilized conventions of morality have reservoired. The greater the repressions, the louder the laughter. Humor is a conspicuous quality of American life because in that life repressions are so general. Mark Twain tapped a well of hatred and revolt in the subconscious minds of his generation, and it paid him like an oil gusher. . . .

His sense of inferiority made him conceal his satire in buffoonery — that is to say, when he wished to satirize his reader, he satirized himself, and the reader laughed at his own absurdities put forward as Mark Twain’s. It is this sense of inferiority which makes his humor seem ‘kindly.’ The laugher is playing a sort of practical joke on himself and enjoying his own discomfiture. By laughing at his shortcomings, he feels superior to them and escapes his own condemnation of them. Here is the quality in American humor which Rudyard Kipling struck at, in his lines about the American’s ‘cynic devil in his blood . . . that gilds the slough of his despond but dims the goal of his desire.’ The reformer attacks the slough, to drain it instead of laughing at it; and the typical American always complains of his reformers that ‘they have no sense of humor.’ If they had, of course, it is not likely that they would be reformers.

V

And now to New Orleans. Nowhere did the absolute superiority of real culture strike me so forcibly as there. The percentage of Frenchmen who live in that city to-day is infinitesimal. Yet it is imbued with the tradition of the eighteenth century; it still owes all its charm and all its worth to the leaven of Old France. New Orleans is the one place in America where cooking is considered an art — and I thoroughly agree with Mr. Langdon Mitchell when he says that bad cooking and the manner in which people put up with it mean a gigantic block in the way leading to a possible American culture. Personally I consider an original sense for — or else a training toward appreciation of— the value of art ful cooking much more important culturally than any ‘education’ in the usual sense. For, since hunger and thirst are the most elementary impulses of animal man, an association of these with æsthetic values means more for spiritualization in general than any intellectual and moral training. Surely there can be a high culture in terms of a simple life, but this is the most difficult kind of culture to attain; the case is analogous to that of the simplicity of classic art.

The example provided by drink is perhaps more illuminating even than that provided by food. It is, of course, possible to be a cultured person and yet a water drinker; on the basis of abstinence, even a very high culture can be developed. But then all that sense of quality and discrimination which the connoisseur applies to vintages must find its application in the distinction between different kinds of water. This is one of the wonders one has to admire in the greatest representative of Islamic culture: this people discriminates between water and wells as Europeans do between vintages. But whoever just drinks ice water, and thinks himself superior for that to the wine drinker, errs most lamentably. He stands, as far as soul development goes, far, far below any man of the Falstaff type, provided the latter be primarily a lover of quality and not of quantity. I repeat: the interest for food and drink is the most elementary of impulses; for this reason a culture of these means more for the culture of the whole of human nature than any training of the intellect. The basis of the greatness of Greek, Chinese, and French culture — I mention only these, but the case was the same with all real cultures and will be so as long as mankind dwells on earth — was the sense for the quality of food and drink these nations possessed or possess.

I must seize this opportunity to make quite clear to what a horrifying extent public opinion in America appears misguided in these fundamental respects. Cleanliness and purity seem to the American the alpha and omega of quality. Surely food and drink should be wholesome. But this has nothing to do, in principle, with the extermination of microbes. The symbiosis, and not the conflict, between microbes and man is the primary phenomenon. Most of these tiny little creatures are not only harmless, but necessary for a sound metabolism; they become the causes of disease only when irritated. Further, no organism catches a determinate disease unless it is predisposed to it.

Now a great deal of what makes for good taste is due to the collaboration of microbes; only think of the various processes of fermentation. What, then, can be expected as a general result if food is sterilized? Probably loss of nutritive value, — all animals live on raw food, — but most certainly loss of taste. In California they are now growing dates on trees which descend from those acknowledged as the best of African, Arabian, Syrian, Mesopotamian growth. But those American dates one can buy in the shops are almost devoid of taste; that is, they have been so well sterilized that the microbes which make for the taste have been exterminated before they could perform their duty, or else their work has been destroyed by chemical process; the effect is much the same as that of the cleansing of precious old vessels covered with patina. Until Americans realize that this kind of cult of cleanliness is not a sign of culture, but of utter barbarism, they cannot expect that any Italian, any Frenchman, any Spaniard, or any cultured Chinese, who washes as rarely as he possibly can, will consider them his equals on the plane of true civilization. And he will be right before Eternity, God, and Man.

But let us revert to New Orleans. It is the one place in America with a tradition of good cooking; and this is being kept up by the French element, whose beneficial influence does not stop here. Owing to that tradition, even Americanism acquires a halo of beauty in New Orleans. I spent a night walking through those docks and market places where vegetables and fruits are being loaded in and out and sold by wholesale and retail in overwhelming, truly American quantities. But the exquisite sense of beauty of the French has conquered and now rules even this extravagant accumulation of material. The millions of radishes, beans, bananas, oranges, and so forth, look, in their arrangement, like so many artistic nosegays; a walk through the market halls of New Orleans at night is probably the most remarkable sight of culture-born beauty one can find in the United States. Now the French are the most tenacious of all races. This beautifying of American market places seems to prove that the French sense of quality, challenged by American quantity production, is more than ever determined to live.

Is it not wonderful that America should contain a great city of such innate culture? It will be purely American before long, though, of course, of a peculiarly Southern, even tropical, variety. But the French sense of quality will continue to act, not only as a leaven, but as the determinant formative influence. A time may come — and I do hope it will come — when New Orleans will wield more attractive power in the eyes of the Americans than New York. If this should ever be the case, they would prefer the former city in the same sense in which every cultured German thinks more of Munich — not to mention Vienna — than of Berlin.

VI

And now we are ready to face Chicago, that most uncanny city in the world. If ever there was a ‘thing in itself,’ Chicago is one. It is not American — it is just Chicago. But, on the other hand, if it goes on spreading as it has with as much intelligently directed energy, it may some day swallow up the whole of the United States. The atmosphere of the city is not pleasing. What I wrote in 1912, under the impression of what I experienced during only two days spent in that city without talking to a single soul, is true — even more true to-day than it was then. And here the genius loci is unquestionably due to man, and not to the surroundings, which are as beautiful as they can possibly be. Lake Shore Drive could compete, for beauty, with the Chiaja of Naples.

As far as I can make out, the atmosphere of Chicago is chiefly made up of the following elements. First, the parasitic growth of a ‘thing in itself’ almost independent of all American tradition which does not belong 1o the sphere of technical expansion. This again is due —we have herewith come to the second element — to the crowding together of the population, alien in its majority; which is — thirdly — of German extraction in the case of all its most efficient members. This results in a curious convergence of Chicago with modern Berlin. The typical modern Berlinese are, as a matter of fact, more akin to German Americans than to the Germans of traditional culture.

There is in Chicago no trace of Anglo-Saxonism; in this respect there is no likeness whatsoever between this city and New York. The quality of efficiency is German in spirit; so is a certain impression of unreality that its results produce. It resembles a city of the year 3000 A.D. as anticipated by motion pictures made in Germany. Unreality of spirit is, as I have shown in Europe, one of the foremost characteristics of the German, while the exact opposite is true of the Anglo-Saxon. Here lies the raison d’être of that phantomlike quality one cannot help being conscious of in the atmosphere of Chicago; there is something phantomlike even in the mass slaughter of the stockyards. One feels that, if Hell does exist, such mechanized operating with the mystery of death would be an impossibility there and would surely be judged as an abomination. In accordance with this, there is something unreal about the Chicagoan type of man; he too would appear more natural in a motion picture than as a being of flesh and blood.

On the other hand, the phantasmagorical quality of Chicagoan crime agrees well with the general atmosphere of a film city. I remember a dinner party where a gentleman suddenly got up and asked to be excused for a few hours. We asked him what was the matter. He replied; ‘A few days ago a gang of gunmen came at ten o’clock in the morning into my office in the city [he was a prominent banker] and took away all they could find. It was, of course, no use applying to the police. But to-day I got a message to the effect that if I would come to a certain spot this evening at ten o’clock we might come to a gentlemanly agreement.’

I think the criminal life of Chicago, which is more adventurous than anything one finds in books of adventure, is due much more to the general atmosphere of unreality than to the number of foreigners who live there. Surely in a way Chicago resembles pre-Mussolinian Naples and Palermo, but there are many Italians in other cities as well, yet in them the fact leads to nothing like what it does in Chicago.

If one wants at all to find general reasons, one should rather look for them in the fact that man, being alive after all, and a human being at that, — not an ant or a bee, — must have some safety valve when his life becomes mechanized beyond a certain limit; for this reason I expect rather an increase than a decrease of crime in the United States as ‘civilization’ progresses.

The reading of detective stories may do as a safety valve in Germany. Here the tradition of an adventurous past acts rather as a substituted than as a real cause. There was little adventure in Chicago in the olden days, and, the overwhelming majority of its present inhabitants being of foreign origin, it has no adventure tradition whatever in its subconscious. But, however this may be, the apparent mixture of such incongruous elements as Berlin and Naples is well in accordance with the general atmosphere of unreality characteristic of Chicago. Whatever is downright real there is typically unpleasant. Personally, I had pleasant experiences only with those I got to know better, and I must admit that the Americans of other parts of the Union I met, who all seemed to dislike Chicago, are right as far as the general atmosphere goes. It is the one place in the United States where one is actually aware of the presence of ungenerosity, ill will, and malice.

All this is so. Yet Chicago is an amazing thing. And being Berlinese, which means that it is more thorough and more apt to become immeasurable without exploding in its enterprises than any other city, it has undoubtedly a very great future. I hope Chicago will not absorb the whole of America — a thing which is quite within the range of the possible; this would inevitably lead, centuries hence, to a revolution. But if it remains what it is, an immensely powerful thing in itself, which incidentally accomplishes a good deal of work of national importance, its contact with the rest of the Union as it grows will of necessity lead to fruitful tensions and polarizations. All the more so as Chicago happens to be — again a weird, unreal thing — the most important city and the industrial capital of, precisely, the Middle West.

VII

And now to New York! Every intelligent American will tell every intelligent European he meets that New York is not America. It is, indeed, no longer representative, as it undoubtedly was as long as technical development was the one thing the Americans thought of and before the real native, the hundred-per-center, had come to conscious life. Yet New York belongs to America, as a part of the planet, as necessarily as any other city. It is America’s clearing house. Surely, it harbors more foreigners than natives. Surely, there is no unified atmosphere at all. Surely, life is feverish there; this typical quality of every business centre of the Wall Street type is enhanced by the truly horrible climate of New York. The climate is not in the least stimulating; it is just unsteady, oscillating between one extreme and the other; it is electric and damp, relaxing and bracing, at the same time.

I do not wonder that no woman’s complexion stands this climate for any length of time; whoever sneers at the fact, shocking in itself, that individually pretty girls are in the habit of painting themselves as though they had centuries to conceal ought to remember, in the case of New York, that the climate provides an excuse for it, and that this city still sets the fashion for America.

But, whatever New York’s drawbacks may be, it means to America exactly what St. Petersburg used to mean to Russia, and Vienna to the Near East: it is America’s window opening on Europe. Here American and European influences meet. Here one of the great brains of mankind is developing. And accordingly the best minds of America crowd together in New York and will continue to do so for a long time to come. The relationship of New York to America is very curious; it is not at all comparable to that of Paris to France. Nothing of national importance has happened there; New York rather stands for the continuance of that notnational American life all pure business men and all recent immigrants naturally like best. But just because the real America is narrowing down, and will inevitably do so to an everincreasing degree, the existence of a powerful New York with its world-wide interests is even more of a necessity for America than any metropolis ever was for any other country. But for a powerful New York, George Babbitt and what he stands for might easily become predominant, which, considering the tremendous power America wields to-day, would be a disastrous thing.

VIII

To conclude the survey of America’s manifoldness and diversity, let me add a few words about Washington. To my surprise, this city also struck me as unreal. I soon found out the reason: a political centre in an essentially unpolitical country must needs give an impression of unreality. Besides, it is to a very great, extent peopled and, in any case socially, dominated by foreigners, the members of the diplomatic corps. This latter fact makes for an apparent survival of the colonial days, when great gentlemen continued the typical eighteenthcentury life in a new world. If a man like Mr. Coolidge happens to reside at the White House, this only qualifies the general sense of the paradox incarnated in Thomas Jefferson. This man, who, as far as my knowledge goes, invented most of the aphorisms concerning equality, was personally an eighteenth-century grand seigneur, if there ever was one. He advocated, as a statesman, the equal rights of all. But this did not prevent him from building tunnels for the invisible passage of his slaves, a thing which would have delighted a Trimalchio or even a Nero.

Yes, Washington is also unreal in its way; it is a political centre in an essentially unpolitical country, and, at the same time, a colonial town in a land which is no longer a colony. To complete the picture, Washington is peopled to a considerable extent by retired well-to-do Americans. These belong to a quite different class from those men and women who retire to Los Angeles; they have an inner right to lead a life of leisure. But for that very reason they do not really belong to present-day America. If Washington were a powerful capital, which it is not, one might be induced to say that America lives under foreign rule. As things are, Washington means one more bright spot making for variety in the uniform picture of industrialized America. Washington likewise makes for salutary tension and polarization. But there can be less a question here of a rooted genius loci than in the case of Chicago. When I was driving through the lovely city at the time of the cherry blossoms I sometimes had to think of the hanging gardens of Queen Semiramis.

Yes, America is at bottom a new land of budding localisms, very much as Europe was at the end of the migration of the peoples. I could only give sketches of a very few of these localisms, but they will suffice, I think, to draw the attention of my readers to this very essential aspect of the American scene, which now each of them may follow up according to his own knowledge.