American People and Philosophy, 1910
From Home Life in America by Katherine Graves Busbey, 1910.
Location: United States of America
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Home Life in America by Katherine Graves Busbey, 1910.
The average foreigner is willing to proclaim his good-will toward America, but in his ordinary conversation he forgets his philosophy, and remembers disparaging anecdotes about our manners. He dilates upon the possibilities of fortune-making in America, but he never forgets that it was an American millionaire who refused to wear his enormous diamond studs at a dinner because, “What’d be the use; the napkin covers ’em up any way.”
If pressed for departing sentiment, he toasts the spirit of liberty in America—”In Italy they are hoping for liberty. In France they are studying about it in their histories. In Germany they are utterly oblivious of it. In England they think they have it. And here in America you have it and you know it,” he says; but he holds as stock episode of his visit the fact that the man whom he had never seen before, riding opposite to him in a railway coach, leaned forward to slap his knee as he exclaimed heartily, “Going through? I’m on the way out to my old home to my father’s funeral. What did you pay for those boots? cracker-jacks, aren’t they?”
The general feeling fifty years ago as summed up in the remark of one of Martin Chuzzlewit’s contemporaries, “everything degenerates in America. The lion becomes a puma, the eagle a fish-hawk, and man a “Yankee,” apparently has veered to an awe of the physical Uncle Sam, but a shudder for his crude force, and in a very recent work an English novelist, after a rapid transit study of the United States, brings one of her characters to Washington, and with him as her mouth-piece, seriously avows, “His English soul was disturbed arid affronted by a wholly new realization of the strength of America; by the giant forces of the new nation, as they are to be felt pulsing in the Federal City. He was up in arms for the Old World, wondering sorely and secretly what the new might do for her in the times to come, and foreseeing an ever-increasing deluge of unlovely things—ideals, principles, manners—flowing from this Western civilization, under which his own gods were already half buried, and would soon be hidden beyond recovery.”
I do not think this extreme perturbation affects England as a whole, but I have known English women whose husbands were accredited to the United States as members of the diplomatic corps to sigh with relief when a transfer made it possible to remove their children from the baneful influence of “unmannerly street-playing American children,” as they might over the removal of their infants from the enervation of India.
There are, of course, many good Americans who are as immune to any feeling of deference or awe as, to quote a celebrated Italian visitor, “an egg in the days of its first innocency.” For instance, one would think that almost any flippant lawyer would lose his nerve when he faces the Supreme Court. The air is full of dignity and the bar of the court, behind which sit the black-robed and venerable jurists, is about as inviting as the tomb to the young lawyers who appear in their first cases. Not so with a young lawyer who appeared a few days ago. The court has a rule which fixes two hours for oral argument, and is reluctant to grant more time. The novice asked for additional time for his speech.
“How much time does the learned counsel want?” asked the Chief Justice.
"Just as much time as you folks will give us,” answered the lawyer, leaning forward in a confidential way. Everybody laughed except the black-robed justices.
And many of us in our naive innocence would, indeed, seem to regard culture as obtainable through a sort of innoculation. I met a charmingly fresh young woman from the West whose aunt was introducing her to Washington society, and who had ridden too many years over her father's ranch to be anything but as frank as a prairie landscape. “Oh yes,” she beamed, “auntie has brought us on here, and, if the polish takes, she may let us go over to London after she's broken us in here.”
As an actual fact, however, our material development is insignificant in interest compared with our sociological evolution. We are a suddenly developed people, and have packed into the American all the good and all the bad of the best and the worst from all over the world, and we have been too busy developing our resources to cultivate our sensibilities.
We are a young people among the nations of the earth. We have been set in the midst of a virgin continent. Our first task naturally has been the purely material one of conquering the wilderness and producing wealth out of our resources. The natural result of our long complete absorption in this task is to be seen in our characteristic national virtues and vices. We are a people of unsurpassed energies, of unparalleled ingenuity and skill in individual inventions and pursuits.
Therein is our characteristic strength. But just as naturally, we are more crudely, crassly materialistic in our ideas and ideals only—and this the visiting foreigner cannot be expected to see—while amenities and finer graces of life seem as yet to have eluded the majority of us underneath the surface in the making of national character, Republicanism has been a success. While we have not as yet produced a great art, we are actually getting a strong feeling for art and literature, and this in a country where the social elevation of uncultured persons of sudden wealth is an everyday occurrence; while our servants and children say abruptly “yes” or “no,” and the serving-man has not “thank you” in his vocabulary, our people do not hate one another as do the people in Europe.
It must be remembered that we are just around the corner from the time told of by the Honourable Joseph G. Cannon, Speaker of the House of Representatives, when certain elders of the church, calling upon his mother in her rude Middle West home, saw to their horror, a rag carpet in the parlour, and, after looking at each other and at her sadly for some time, one of them asked: “Do you expect to have this and heaven too?”
Just around the corner we are from a significant incident of our greatest American, Lincoln, whose unconventionality was the confident expression of his greatness. The British Minister accredited to Washington during the Civil War, a diplomat dignified and formal, dining alone with full courses and ceremony, was interrupted by the announcement of President Lincoln, who followed the servant into the dining-room and took his seat at the table. Of course the Minister was as astonished as if it had been the King in the countries where he had before served. Formally he urged the President to join him in the dinner, but Lincoln answered, “No, Lyons, I have had my dinner; if anything comes which is inviting, I’ll browse around;” but before the President departed, the ever-present, dangerously acute situation and fear of Great Britain's recognition of the Confederacy and the means of averting it were under discussion.
But we are around the corner from primitive simplicity, and the resolution to be mannerly if we cannot be great would not be out of order for most of us. It is quite useless to say that manners and conventions are a matter of comparative “shockables with each nation”; to say that the English are aghast at our chaperonless daughters, but that we shudder at the cigarette; in short, that foreign criticism of our manners is merely a matter of the Frenchman bewailing the lack of sidewalk cafes or the Englishman bemoaning the absence of tea shops; there is something deeper than that in our contempt or hurried disregard of the non-essentials of life.
Still recognizing the wonder that we have, in a new country with raw and unstable conditions, acquired the deep-seated impulse for practising the humanities, every American to-day should pause to consider wherein lies the explanation for the crudeness of public manners, observed by even our kindliest critics as an attribute of very much the larger proportion of American people.
In the first place, manners in the United States must come as an exponent of our civilization—distinctly as a polish superimposed on a sterling substance of character, not bred in the fibre and intermingled with the instinct of self-preservation or the “bread and butter” problem. For manners are not requisite for success in this Republic. The self-made man is the order of the day, and disregard for the non-essentials of life never kept a man in the United States from riding roughshod to the political front.
Society, since it has not the raison d'être of the court and political circles abroad, is regarded by the average American citizen as applying mainly to the capers cut by certain rich people in their summer diversions. Men in America do not seek the society of women, and therefore social intercourse is limited. This may be significant of the independence and strength of manhood here; it may be a sad commentary on the American woman's inability to cross the line of the domestic sphere into the field of camaraderie and mental interests with men; but the result is a certain lack of culture, a certain crudity of manner in both American men and women.
And further down the scale, of course, manners would seem to be shunned as a plague destined to destroy the I-am-as-good-as-you-are principle. A witty Englishman has said of the American that “his dream is to be his neighbour's president," and it is not untrue, but it merely takes the place of trying to establish a claim to bluer blood as rises the ambition in older countries. The American is usually a true republican in the sense that he thinks himself as good a man as any, but he also thinks any man as good as himself. Owing to the first of these mental states, he considers courtesy and suavity as denoting servility or inferiority on his part, and, because of the second, he doesn't want the other fellow to “give himself airs,” and between the horns of the dilemma is the problem of a national code of manners tossed, and it does not stick.
We say in lofty republicanism, “The sweep of the peasant's cap has been measured by the length of the nobleman's sword, and there is as much sincerity in the former as there is force in the latter,” but we do not realize that in completely shearing the foreigner landing in this country of his manners by our force of example we are complicating our problem of assimilating him into a desirable citizen. One has but to work among the foreign immigrants settled in any American city to realize this.
The metamorphosis of the soft-voiced, obsequious courtesy of the peasant to the independent insolence of a labourer in a country where social equality is preached, does not take a generation.
Perhaps the imperfection of finish is perfectly normal in a new Republic—and America is, of course, an experimental station in Republicanism—and perhaps the American would lose value as a national developer if divested of his rugged disregard of social amenities. Perhaps with the nation as with the individual of great mental dimensions, the early personality is somewhat ungainly. Perhaps, as is said of the provincialism of the middle-class French woman, she “has the defect of her greatness”; the sum total of the American's superficial faults and weakness, and his virtues and strength certainly leaves a substantial balance in his favour.
Busbey, Katherine Graves. Home Life in America. The Macmillan Company, 1910.
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