The Nineteenth-Century American

by HENRY STEELE COMMAGER

1

NOTHING in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American in the nineteenth century knew it. Nowhere else on the globe had nature been at once so rich and so generous, and her riches were available to all who had the enterprise to take them and the good fortune to be white. As nature and experience justified optimism, the American was incurably optimistic. Collectively, he had never known defeat, or grinding poverty, or oppression, and he thought these misfortunes peculiar to the Old World. Progress was not, to him, a philosophical idea, but a commonplace of experience: he saw it daily, in the transformation of wilderness into farm land, in the growth of villages into cities, in the steady rise of community and nation to wealth and power.

To the disgust of Europeans, who lived so much in the past, he lived in the future, cared little for what the day might bring but much for the dreams and ambitions and profits of the morrow. He planned ambitiously, and was used to seeing even his most visionary plans surpassed; he came at last to believe that nothing was beyond his power, and to be impatient with any success that was less than triumph. He had little sense of the past, or concern for it, was not historically minded, and relegated interest in genealogy to spinsters, who could have no legitimate interest in the future.

The American saw the present with the eye of the future: saw not the straggling, dusty town but the shining city; not the shabby shop but the throbbing factory; not the rutted roads but gleaming rails. In every barefoot boy he saw a future President or millionaire; and as the future belonged to his children, he lived in them, worked for them, and pampered them.

With optimism went a sense of power and of vast reserves of energy. The American had spacious ideas, his imagination roamed a continent, and he was impatient with petty transactions, hesitations, and timidities. To curve out a farm of a square mile or a ranch of a hundred square miles, to educate millions of children, to feed the Western world with his wheat and his corn, did not appear to him remarkable. His very folklore was on a large scale — the Paul Bunyans and Mike Finks — and it was suggestive that the empire builders so closely approximated the folklore type that it was easy to confuse real and legendary characters: Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and Sam Houston belonged to mythology as well as to history.

His culture, too, was material: he took comfort for granted, and regarded either with condescension or with contempt people who failed to come up to his standards. Those standards were exalted. Nowhere were the workingman’s or the farmer’s tables more lavishly provisioned, nowhere did the average man and woman dress better, nowhere could women and children be more readily excused from hard labor.

The American had always met hardship with fortitude, partly because he was made of tough stuff, partly because he was so sure that fortitude, together with industry, shrewdness, and a little luck, was bound to be rewarded in the end. He preached the gospel of hard work and regarded shiftlessness as a vice more pernicious than immorality. He liked solid evidence of wealth but distrusted ostentation, and women whose position and wealth anywhere else would have justified servants, heroically did their own housework. He was accustomed to prosperity, resented anything that interfered with it, and regarded any prolonged lapse from it. as an outrage against nature. The worst misfortune that could befall a political party was a depression, and the worst thing that could be said against a law was that it was harmful to business. Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation, and the expropriation of natural resources, and bore patiently with the worst manifestations of industrialism.

All this tended to give a quantitative cast to his thinking and inclined him to place a quantitative valuation upon almost everything. When he asked what a man was worth, he meant material worth, and he was impatient of any yardstick that did not contain the normal thirty-six inches, or any scale that did not record pounds. His solution for most problems was therefore a quantitative one and education, democracy, and war all yielded to the sovereign remedy of numbers.

Foreigners who thought this vulgar had no conception of its origin or its connection with the realities of American life. To describe America, indeed, required a new vocabulary and a new grammar, and almost a new arithmetic. Hence the American passion for population statistics, skyscrapers, railroad mileage, production records, school and college enrollment figures; hence the pleasure in sheer size — in the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River, Niagara Falls, Texas; hence the toleration of trusts, combines, and giant corporations; hence, perhaps, the cheerful acquiescence in majority decisions.

This quantitative cast of American thought was an indication of an intense practicality which extended to most, though by no means to all, matters. Often romantic about business, or land values, or railroads, the American was practical about politics, religion, culture, and science. He was endlessly ingenious and resourceful, always ready to improvise new tools or techniques to meet new conditions. He borrowed readily from Indian or immigrant, and naturalized what he borrowed; he improvised jauntily, had little respect for custom, and was willing to try anything. His reaction to most situations was a practical one, and he was happiest when he could find a mechanical solution to problems: the cotton gin, the steamboat, the harvester, the sixshooter, the sewing machine, vulcanized rubber, the telegraph and telephone, barbed-wire fencing, the typewriter, and a thousand other inventions anticipated the day when the American was to be notorious for his passion for gadgets. He was the first to concede technology a place in higher education, and West Point Academy trained engineers as well as soldiers. That the British were the greatest maritime people in the world no one would deny; yet it was Nathaniel Bowditch whose Practical Navigator became the seaman’s bible, and Matthew Maury who explored the physical geography of the sea. The Prussians and the French were the acknowledged masters of the military art, but balloons, wire entanglements, trench warfare, the armored ship, and undersea projectiles were first used effectively in the American Civil War.

2

THEORIES and speculations disturbed the American, and he avoided abstruse philosophies of government or conduct as healthy men avoid medicines. Benjamin Franklin was his philosopher, not Jonathan Edwards, and when he took Emerson to heart it was for his emphasis on self-reliance rather than for his idealism. No philosophy that got much beyond common sense commanded his interest, and he ruthlessly transformed even the most abstract metaphysics into practical ethics. Transcendentalism, in Germany and England, led to an abdication from public affairs, but in America to an incessant concern with affairs public and private.

Even when he rejected the religious implications of Utilitarianism, the American was incurably utilitarian, and it was entirely appropriate that the one philosophy which might be called original with him was that of instrumentalism. If he failed to explore those higher reaches of philosophical thought which German and English philosophers had penetrated, it was rather because he saw no necessity for such exploration than because he was incapable of undertaking it; he felt instinctively that philosophy was the resort of the unhappy and the bewildered, and he knew that he was neither.

His religion, too, notwithstanding its Calvinistic antecedents, was practical. He was religious rather than devout, and with him the term pious came to be one of disparagement, just as later the term Puritan came into disrepute. Saintliness was not the most conspicuous quality in his greatest religious leaders, and to the doctrine of salvation by grace he stubbornly opposed an instinctive faith in salvation by works. Sundays he was troubled by a suspicion of sin, his womenfolk more often, but he had no racking sense of evil, and his philosophy persisted in ignoring the one problem which had challenged philosophers from the beginning of time. Denominations multiplied, but rather as organizations than as dogmas, and the average American was no more capable of distinguishing between Methodist and Presbyterian theologies than between Republican and Democratic principles. The most significant aspects of his two most original religions — Mormonism and Christian Science — were the practical ones.

In politics, too, he profoundly distrusted the abstract and the doctrinaire. To the charge that he had no political philosophy he was cheerfully indifferent, for he regarded his freedom from the exactions of political theory as good fortune rather than misfortune. No party whose appeal was primarily intellectual could command his support, and his inability to differentiate philosophically between his two major parties abated his party loyalties not a whit. Because his parties were organizations to which he could attach, from time to time, miscellaneous principles, rather than principles around which he had to build organizations, he was able to avoid the multiparty system which had bedeviled Old World nations and make two parties serve all his needs.

Yet, notwithstanding his youthfulness and his incurable amateurishness, the American was politically mature. That maturity was not conceded abroad, where government was associated with dynasties and ruling classes, but that the average American had longer and larger experience in government than the average Englishman, Frenchman, or German was simply an historical fact. He early displayed a natural talent for politics. His political instruments were as ingenious as his mechanical contrivances. The federal system, the constitutional convention, and judicial review were the products of sophistication and art, and he brought the political party to its highest development. With his politics, as with his agriculture, the amateur spirit produced results that might well excite the envy of professionals: none of his Presidents had fallen below mediocrity, none of his statesmen had been wicked or dangerous, and the general level of his political leadership was — if judged by its achievements — appreciably higher than that of most other countries.

3

THE nineteenth-century American’s attitude towards culture was at once suspicious and indulgent. Where it interfered with more important activities, he distrusted it; where it was the recreation of his leisure hours or of his womenfolk, he tolerated it. For the most part he required that his culture serve some useful purpose. He wanted poetry that he could recite, music that he could sing, paintings that told a story. Stephen Foster was his most beloved composer and Currier and Ives his favorite artists. Art was something that had happened in the past, and when ho could afford it, he bought the paintings of artists long dead, listened to lectures on French cathedrals, and built museums to look like mausoleums. Education was his religion, and to it he paid the tribute both of his money and of his affection; yet as he expected his religion to be practical and pay dividends, he expected education to prepare for life — by which he meant jobs and professions.

His attitude towards higher education was something of a paradox. Nowhere else in the Western world did colleges multiply and flourish as in America, nor was any other people so avid of college degrees. Yet nowhere else were intellectuals held in such contempt or relegated to so inferior a position, and in America alone the professor — invariably long-haired and absent-minded — was an object of humor.

The moral superiority of his country was as axiomatic to the American as its political, economic, and social superiority. The assumption of superiority was accompanied by a sense of destiny and of mission. Jefferson called his country the world’s best hope, and Lincoln the last best hope of earth, and those who did not read Presidential messages could recite: —

Or, better yet: —

Successive generations were equally eager to spread the American idea over the globe and exasperated that foreign ideas should ever intrude themselves into America. The legal term alien carried, almost invariably, its connotations of repugnancy.

Every white American felt that he had a personal stake in the future of his country, and that its realization would be personally profitable. Industry brought tangible rewards, and the American was industrious; thrift was a slow and prosaic way to success compared with speculation in land or business, and the American, while he did not cease to exalt thrift, was by nature a speculator. As every village might become a Chicago, every mine a Comstock or a Mesabi, lack of faith was a species of treason; braggardism became a virtue, and criticism a vice as intolerable as any forbidden by the Ten Commandments.

The temptation to experiment was deeply ingrained in the American character and fortified by American experience. America itself had been the greatest of experiments, one renewed by each generation of pioneers, and where every community was a gamble and an opportunity, the American was a gambler and an opportunist. He had few local attachments, pulled up stakes without compunction, and settled easily into new communities; where few regions or professions were overcrowded and every newcomer added to the wealth and the drawing power, he was sure of a welcome.

He was always ready to do old things in new ways, or for that matter, to do things which had not been done before. Except in law, tradition and precedent discouraged him, and the novel was a challenge. Pioneering had put a premium upon ingenuity and handiness, and where each man turned readily to farming, building, and trading, it seemed natural that he should turn with equal readiness to preaching, lawing, or doctoring, or combine these with other trades and professions.

The distrust of the expert, rationalized into a democratic axiom during the Jacksonian era, was deeply ingrained in the American character and persisted long after its original justification had passed. With opportunism went inventiveness, which was similarly invited by circumstances. Americans, who recorded at the Patent Office in Washington more inventions than were recorded in all the Old World nations together, likewise found more new roads to Heaven than had ever before been imagined, while their schools multiplied the seven liberal arts tenfold. Denominationalism and the inflated curriculum were not so much monuments to theological or secular learning as to the passion for experiment and inventiveness, and to an amiable tolerance.

Opportunity opened the way to talent or to luck, and the nineteenth-century American had no use for caste or class. He was democratic and equalitarian, but his democracy was social and political rather than economic, and as he himself anticipated economic success next year or the year after, he had little envy of those who achieved it this year. He regarded with easy tolerance the looting of the public domain or the evasion of taxes or the corruption of legislatures, so long as these things brought visible profits, and he resented government interference with private enterprise far more than private interference with public enterprise. It was equally typical that Horatio Alger’s heroes should invariably start poor and invariably end rich.

4

THE sense of equality permeated the American’s life and thought, his conduct, his work, and his play, his language and literature, his religion and his politics, and conditioned all the relationships of his life. Except on the Fourth of July he said little about it, for he took it for granted, like his right to say what he pleased or to worship as he pleased; nothing was more characteristic or more exasperating to foreigners than the palpable sincerity with which even Southerners confessed their faith in equality while rejecting its practice. It was imposed by circumstances, rather than by logic: where so few started with anything but their strength and their character, and where success was so easy, artificial advantages counted for little. Where all men were equal in the sight of God, it was difficult not to admit equality in the eyes of man, and where all men were equal at the ballot box, it was impolitic to encourage privilege.

Yet equality was not primarily political, and those who celebrated it as such missed its significance. In America it antedated universal suffrage; in time other countries attained a comparable political equality without any perceptible effect on existing class distinctions or class consciousness. It was social, it was cultural, it was psychological; it was, even with the extremes of wealth and poverty and the adulation of material success, economic. It was chiefly the absence of class distinctions rather than the triumph over them. Wherever men and women met in typical gatherings — camp meetings, militia drill, Grange picnics, political conventions, Chautauqua assemblies, church sociables — they met on a basis of equality.

The sense of equality introduced into social relationships an ease and sincerity not to be found elsewhere. Love had always found a way to penetrate the barriers of class; in America it could direct its guiles and shafts against more formidable barriers. Talent had always been able to break through class distinctions; in America it could conserve its energy for the tasks before it. Accent and pronunciation were refused their ancient prerogatives, family and even wealth their customary advantages, and as these artificial insignia of authority were at a discount, the importance of power was exaggerated. The unwillingness of the rich to retire and enjoy their wealth — the absence of a leisure class — was a logical result.

Where the poor felt no burden of inequality, they were relieved from the aggressive assertion of rights and prerogatives, and displayed no such self-conscious pretensions as in the Old World; where wealth could not in itself command acknowledgment of social superiority, it was relieved, in turn, from the compulsions of ostentatious display. No outward signs of rank were tolerated. The poor did not flourish a forelock, nor did those who performed ordinary services accept gratuities; the rich lived much as their neighbors, and had not yet learned to flaunt butlers, thumb a Social Register, or order their meals in French. Alt this was to change for the worse.

Even in politics there was more equality than democracy. Nothing was more fatal to political success than the appearance of superiority. William Henry Harrison was as rich as Martin Van Buren, but when it was established that Harrison drank hard cider from a jug and Van Buren sipped foreign wines from golden goblets, the triumph of Harrison was inevitable. Although present wealth was tolerated, it behooved every ambitious politician to have himself born in a log cabin or a sod house, and if he could manage to work his way through college, so much t he better. The hard work of political organization was left to those whose ostentatious mediocrity could not be gainsaid.

No military caste dominated the almost nonexistent army, and except in time of war, no social advantage attached to the uniform. The Society of the Cincinnati, which was limited to officers and their descendants, was impotent; the Grand Army of the Republic, which embraced privates, was a powerful organization. The principle that the civil was superior to the military was not so much an expression of fear of military usurpat ion as of suspicion of the contagion of military standards. Lee, whose credentials to such aristocracy as existed no one could challenge, not only held himself rigidly subordinate to President Davis but, after the war, marched ostentatiously out of step with soldiers on parade.

As the English influence waned, the terms Gentleman and Esquire evaporated; the term Lady had never achieved its Old World meaning, and it was suggestive that the one calculated Portrait of a Lady was drawn by an expatriate author, and that the most successful of society painters was another expatriate. Yet Americans had a passion for titles: honorary Colonels littered the landscape even outside Kentucky, and family pride recalled no privates in Union or Confederate armies. In country towns every druggist was called doctor, and every teacher professor, and American law early dispensed with the lowly solicitor and dignified every magistrate by calling him judge. Perhaps the most interesting things about these titles were their availability and their uselessness: they were an expression of carelessness, good nature, and humor, rather than of respect for position or yearning for status.

The American was good-natured, generous, hospitable, and sociable, and he reversed the whole history of language to make the term stranger one of welcome. There were pioneers who could not stand the sight of a neighbor’s smoke, but for the most part the American was gregarious, and he became increasingly so with the passing years. He had as yet formulated few of those rules and developed few of those habits designed to transform a crowd into a society, and perhaps for this reason he embraced with peculiar enthusiasm those fraternal organizations that gave him an artificial sense of security and companionship.

His generosity and hospitality were careless rather than calculated, flowed from a consciousness of abundance and a pleasure in society rather than from any adherence to moral or social precepts. The tithe had never been popular in America, but voluntary contributions to religion were customary, and nowhere was private philanthropy more extravagant. Indeed, to the abhorrence of all Old World observers, extravagance and carelessness flourished from generation to generation, and both were explained by the same good fortune, for in a country so richly endowed there was no need for parsimony, and in a country so open and free from tradition, circumspection and caution were profitless.

Carelessness was perhaps the most pervasive and persistent quality in the nineteenth-century American. He was careless about himself, his speech, his dress, his food, even his manners: those who did not know him thought him slovenly and rude. His attitude towards the English language pained the traditionalists, but he brought to language and grammar something of the same vitality and ingenuity that he brought to his work or his religion, and they served his needs and reflected his character. He was careless about rank and class, about tradition and precedent, about the rights and prerogatives of others and about his own rights and prerogatives. He tolerated in others minor infractions of law or custom, and expected to be similarly indulged in his own transgressions: hence that vast patience with noise, litter, the invasion of privacy, and sharp practices. He was careless about his work and his trade, and as he preferred to have machines work for him, regarded with equanimity the decline of inherited traditions of craftsmanship: while the products of his machines could compete anywhere in the world market, the products of his handicraft could not.

5

His attitude towards authority, rules, and regulations was the despair of bureaucrats and disciplinarians. Nowhere did he differ more sharply from his English cousins than in this attitude towards rules, for where the Englishman regarded the observance of a rule as a positive pleasure, to the American a rule was at once an affront and a challenge. His schools were almost without discipline, yet they were not, on the whole, disorderly, and the young girls and spinsters who taught them were rarely embarrassed. Absence of discipline in the schools reflected an absence of discipline in the home: parents were notoriously indulgent of their children, and children notoriously disrespectful to parents, yet family life was on the whole happy and most children grew up to be good parents and good citizens.

The laxity of discipline in his armies was a scandal tolerated only because they somehow fought well and won battles. It seemed entirely natural that during the Civil War privates should elect their officers, or that the greatest of the generals should so often see his plans miscarry because he hesitated to give firm orders to his subordinates or to insist upon obedience. If Lincoln did not pardon quite as many sleeping sentinels as folklore relates, it was characteristic that folklore should celebrate as a virtue a gesture so disruptive to all discipline.

Almost the only rules which the American took seriously were those which regulated his games. His sense of sportsmanship was keen, and though he was tolerant enough of a little cheating in politics or business, he would not tolerate it in sport. The distinction was a nice one and, on the whole, creditable to the American character, for it suggested a scale of values in which material profits were not the most important. Sport was still confined pretty much to organized games and was predominantly amateur. The American hunted and fished chiefly for food, and had not yet arrived at that stage of sophistication which regarded mountain climbing as a diversion or held it dishonorable to fish for trout with bait.

The American’s attitude towards law was a curiosity. It was the universal observation that few people were more lawless than the American, and statistics seemed to confirm this. Quite aside from crime that was recorded in statistics, minor infractions of law were universal. Yet if the American displayed a cavalier disrespect for laws, he venerated Law. It was his pride that every American was equal before the Law, that no one — not even the highest official — was immune from the operation of the Law. Here, alone, the Constitution was supreme law; here, alone, the judiciary could nullify acts of all legislative bodies. Certainly nowhere else in the world was law more assiduously studied, nowhere else did lawyers play so important a role in politics or in daily affairs.

The American lawyer was a leading citizen at a time when his English colleague was but a minor clerk, and throughout the century lawyers dominated the legislature of every farming state. Whatever the ordinary standards of politics, judicial standards were invariably high, even where judges were elective, and while the American indulged recklessly in the most scurrilous criticism of his President or his Congress, he would scarcely tolerate criticism of his Supreme Court. The paradox was more apparent than real. The American was at once intelligent and conservative, independent and reliable. Rules represented tradition, and discipline authority; he knew that his country had become great by flouting both, and that in a land where everything was yet to be done and where the future was in his hands, he could continue to flout both with impunity. At the same time he thought his government and his Constitution the best in the world, credited them with a large measure of the success of his New World experiment, and would not tolerate any attack upon their integrity.

His lawlessness was always within the framework of some larger law; his disorder was never chaotic, but almost orderly. Certainly to those who accepted the legend of American lawlessness it was puzzling that America had never known revolution; that in a society allegedly anarchical, government was stable, elections orderly, and property safe; and that a democracy should be able to boast the oldest written constitution in the world.

His disrespectful attitude towards authority, combined with his complacent confidence in the superiority of his institutions, made the American lenient towards dissent and nonconformity. Individualism, too, required nonconformity and paid dividends: the American was always taking a short cut to freedom, a short cut to fortune, a short cut to learning, and a short cut to Heaven.

A society which had not had time to nourish its own traditions invited nonconformity. Indeed, had the American wished to be a traditionalist, he would have found it difficult to determine what tradition he should honor, and after the middle of the century a Supreme Court Justice observed that Western judges commonly pronounced good law because they were so ignorant of the precedents.

Nature, too, conspired with history to justify heterodoxy, for where heretics could indulge their heresies in the wilderness, it was easy to tolerate them: certainly the Mormons had less trouble in Utah than in Illinois. While America was still rural, every village boasted its eccentric, but as the country became more thickly settled and its economy more tightly knit, eccentricity declined and conformity became a virtue. By the close of the century even the West had caught the infection of orthodoxy: Oklahoma became impatient with Jesse James and Dakota with Calamity Jane. Only in the South, where the tradition of individualism was strongest and where an inferior class indulged its masters, were idiosyncrasies encouraged. The triumph of standardization over individualism was a memorial to the passing of the old America.

The American was not lacking in a sense of discipline, but it was a discipline imposed by circumstances rather than by the state. It was imposed, to be sure, by school and church, but more rigorously by a way of life close to nature and subject to nature’s iron laws, by the endless chores required of every boy and girl, by the care of animals required on every farm and in most village homes, by the responsibility of large families, by the lack of servants in the North and the care of Negroes in the South, by the inescapable obligations of membership in selfgoverning and self-regulating communities. That dissipation of social responsibility which came with urbanization, and of economic responsibility which came with the corporation, was still in the future.

For all his individualism, the American was much given to coöperative undertakings and to joining. Nowhere else did men associate so readily for common purposes, nowhere else were private associations so numerous or so efficacious. In the Old World the establishment of a church, a college, a hospital, a mission, waited on the pleasure of the crown or the state; in America they waited on the interest of the individual, and it was not customary to look to the state for permission, guidance, or aid.

As the American had created his church and his state, he took for granted his capacity to create all lesser institutions and associations. A thousand organizations sprang up — organizations to do good, to prosper business, to influence politics, to recollect the past, to mold the future, to conquer culture. In time everyone organized: boys and girls in schools, businessmen and scholars, friends and neighbors, old settlers and newcomers, vegetarians and teetotalers, those who survived a blizzard and those who grew roses and those who collected stamps. It was an effort to give an appearance of stability to an unstable society, to create order out of disorder, to substitute new loyalties for those which had been dissipated and new conventions for those which had been lost, to enlarge horizons and inflate opportunities. It was an expression of faith in the efficacy of common enterprise, in the ability of men to make their own institutions, in the power of fraternity and democracy.

6

IN ONE realm the nineteenth-century American was a conformist, and that was the realm of morals, especially of sex morals. Although he did not always observe them, he accepted without question the moral standards of the Puritans, and if a later generation was to find him repressed and inhibited, there is little evidence that he was conscious of his sufferings. It was the testimony of foreign observers that nowhere were morals more pure or female virtue more deeply respected, and the statistics of illegitimacy confirmed this impression. The virtue of women, indeed, was safe anywhere, and chastity taken for granted before and fidelity after marriage. That violations of the moral code were common could not be denied by anyone familiar with the history of miscegenation in the South or of prostitution in the larger cities, yet violations were surreptitious, not flagrant, and it was considered neither sophisticated nor aristocratic to keep a mistress.

In a rural society men and women married early, reared large families, and lived as equals in the home and in society. The social position of women was an elevated one; nowhere were they more honored and protected, nowhere more encouraged in their intellectual development, nowhere given wider scope for the employment of their talents and virtues. In all matters of church and school, women took the lead, and the experience of every boy with women teachers throughout his school days doubtless did much to confirm that attitude of respect with which he was taught to regard the opposite sex. Women controlled not only education and religion, but largely dictated the standards of literature and art, and clothed culture so ostentatiously in feminine garb that the term itself came to have connotations of effeminacy.

Conformity and conventionalism in matters of morals sometimes assumed aggressive form, and the willingness to resign control of the whole field of culture to women combined with the traditions of Puritanism to encourage intolerance and justify censorship. Language was emasculated, literature expurgated, art censored. Piano legs were draped with pantalets, words like belly and breast dropped from polite conversation, the discussion of sex was confined to men and of obstetrics to women, while Shakespeare and Fielding joined French writers in disrepute.

Early in the century a furor was raised when Hiram Powers exhibited his undraped Greek Slave, and at the end of the century Thomas Eakins, the greatest of American painters, was driven from the Pennsylvania Academy when he used male models in mixed classes. Dancing, plays, and mixed bathing came under the ban. Censorship of art and literature slid easily into censorship of morals, especially those having to do with love and drinking; modesty degenerated into Comstockery, and the temperance movement into prohibition.

The romantic view of sex was by no means out of character, for in many matters the American was romantic and sentimental. His sentiment was spontaneous rather than introspective, an expression of the enthusiasm of his nature and the richness of his imagination rather than of bathos: it was closer to that of the Frenchman than to that of the German. He was sentimental about nature in her grander aspects, and liked rolling rhetoric in his orators. He thought the whole history of his country romantic and heroic, and every Fourth of July and Memorial Day he indulged in orgies of sentiment.

Fie felt no need for the picturesque anachronisms which provided the Old World with its romance — feudal castles and knights in armor and royal courts — and he applauded when his greatest humorist, himself the most sentimental of men, found them all faintly ridiculous. Humor was not only a positive but a notorious national trait; as pervasive as optimism and carelessness, and closely allied with both, it cropped up in the most unexpected places and left few things untouched. It was entirely fitting that Lincoln, the most beloved of the American’s national heroes, should be cherished especially for his humor. There were as many varieties of humor as there were regions: Yankees, darkies, and cowboys all had their special dialects, but all spoke a common language.

From Franklin to Mark Twain, American humor tended to exaggeration and extravagance; not until the next century was it to sour into sophistication and wit. It was fundamentally outrageous, and in this reflected the attitude towards authority and precedent. It celebrated the ludicrous and the grotesque with unruffled gravity: Franklin’s story of the cod leaping Niagara Falls, Mark Twain’s discovery of the Petrified Man, and Bill Nye’s gratification that the Navy was safe behind the brick walls of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, all had the authenticity of the American game of poker. It bore the impress of the frontier long after the frontier had passed. It was leisurely and conversational; the tall story was usually a long story and was designed to be heard rather than read.

American humor was shrewd, racy, robust, and masculine, often vulgar but rarely gross, and interested in sex only casually. It was generous and good-natured, and malicious only when directed against vanity and pretense. It cultivated understatement not, as with the British, as a sign of sophistication, but as an inverse exaggeration: Lincoln’s dynamited cur whose usefulness, as a dog, was about over, and Mark Twain’s frog that had “no p’ints that’s better’n any other frog,” were as native as Paul Bunyan or Mike Fink. It was democratic and leveling, took the side of the underdog, ridiculed the great and the proud, and the politician was its natural butt. If America developed no Daumier or Hogarth, her cartoonists were, on the whole, the best in the world, and they addressed their talent chiefly to politics.

American humor recounted few comedies of manners, for these appeared where class distinctions were sharp and social climbing a passion, but many comedies of circumstance: where almost every man had, at one time or another, aimed too high, adventured too boldly, boasted too loudly, it was consoling to see him get his come-uppance. Nature played the part in American humor that social distinctions did in British: it was forever putting men in their place. Thus Mark Twain could find in the currents and snags of the Mississippi a proper foil for the vanity of man, but confessed of The Bostonians, which appeared cheek by jowl with his own story, that he would “rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read that.” The twentieth century seems to have concluded that Henry James was a greater writer than Mark Twain, but the nineteenth entertained no such hothouse notion.