Your United States, Arnold Bennett [ebook reader browser .TXT] 📗

of the United States been conspicuous for their public spirit?...

It depends on what is meant by public spirit--that is, public spirit in its finer forms. I know what I do _not_ mean by public spirit. I was talking once to a member of an important and highly cultivated social community, and he startled me by remarking:

"The major vices do not exist in this community at all."

I was prepared to credit that such Commandments as the Second and Sixth were not broken in that community. But I really had doubts about some others, such as the Seventh and Tenth. However, he assured me that such transgressions were unknown.

"What do you _do_ here?" I asked.

He replied: "We live for social service--for each other."

The spirit characterizing that community would never be described by me as public spirit. I should fit it with a word which will occur at once to every reader.

On the other hand, I cannot admit as proof of public spirit the prevalent American habit of giving to the public that which is useless to oneself--no matter how immense the quantity given, and no matter how admirable the end in view. When you have got the money it is rather easy to sit down and write a check for five million dollars, and so bring a vast public institution into being. It is still easier to leave the same sum by testament. These feats are an affair of five minutes or so; they cost simply nothing in time or comfort or peace of mind. If they are illustrations of public spirit, it is a low and facile form of public spirit.

True public spirit is equally difficult for the millionaire and for the clerk. It is, in fact, very tedious work. It implies the quiet daily determination to get eatable chops and steaks by honest means, chiefly for oneself, but incidentally for everybody else. It necessitates trouble and inconvenience. I was in a suburban house one night, and it was the last night for registering names on an official list of voters before an election; it was also a rainy night. The master of the house awaited a carriage, which was to be sent up by a candidate, at the candidate's expense, to take him to the place of registration. Time grew short.

"Shall you walk there if the carriage doesn't come?" I asked, and gazed firmly at the prospective voter.

At that moment the carriage came. We drove forth together, and in a cabin warmed by a stove and full of the steam of mackintoshes I saw an interesting part of the American Constitution at work--four hatted gentlemen writing simultaneously the same particulars in four similar ledgers, while exhorting a fifth to keep the stove alight. An acquaintance came in who had trudged one mile through the rain. That acquaintance showed public spirit. In the ideal community a candidate for election will not send round carriages in order, at the last moment, to induce citizens to register; in the ideal community citizens will regard such an attention as in the nature of an insult.

I was told that millionaires and presidents of trusts were chiefly responsible for any backwardness of public spirit in the United States. I had heard and read the same thing about the United States in England. I was therefore curious to meet these alleged sinister creatures. And once, at a repast, I encountered quite a bunch of millionaire-presidents. I had them on my right hand and on my left. No two were in the least alike. In my simplicity I had expected a type--formidable, intimidating. One bubbled with jollity; obviously he "had not a care in the world." Another was grave. I talked with the latter, but not easily. He was taciturn. Or he may have been feeling his way. Or he may have been not quite himself. Even millionaire-presidents must be self-conscious. Just as a notorious author is too often rendered uneasy by the consciousness of his notoriety, so even a millionaire-president may sometimes have a difficulty in being quite natural. However, he did ultimately talk. It became clear to me that he was an extremely wise and sagacious man. The lines of his mouth were ruthlessly firm, yet he showed a general sympathy with all classes of society, and he met my radicalism quite half-way. On woman's suffrage he was very fair-minded. As to his own work, he said to me that when a New York paper asked him to go and be cross-examined by its editorial board he willingly went, because he had nothing to conceal. He convinced me of his uprightness and of his benevolence. He showed a nice regard for the claims of the Republic, and a proper appreciation of what true public spirit is.

Some time afterward I was talking to a very prominent New York editor, and the conversation turned to millionaires, whereupon for about half an hour the editor agreeably recounted circumstantial stories of the turpitude of celebrated millionaires--stories which he alleged to be authentic and undeniable in every detail. I had to gasp. "But surely--" I exclaimed, and mentioned the man who had so favorably impressed me.

"Well," said the editor, reluctantly, after a pause, "I admit he has _the new sense of right and wrong_ to a greater extent than any of his rivals."

I italicize the heart of the phrase, because it is italicized in my memory. No words that I heard in the United States more profoundly struck me. Yet the editor had used them quite ingenuously, unaware that he was saying anything singular!... Since when is the sense of right and wrong "new" in America?

Perhaps all that the editor meant was that public spirit in its higher forms was growing in the United States, and beginning to show itself spectacularly here and there in the immense drama of commercial and industrial policies. That public spirit is growing, I believe. It chanced that I found the basis of my belief more in Chicago than anywhere else.

* * * * *


I have hitherto said nothing of the "folk"--the great mass of the nation, who live chiefly by the exercise, in one way or another, of muscular power or adroitness, and who, if they possess drawing-rooms, do not sit in them. Like most writers, when I have used such phrases as "the American people" I have meant that small dominant minority which has the same social code as myself. Goethe asserted that the folk were the only real people. I do not agree with him, for I have never found one city more real than another city, nor one class of people more real than another class. Still, he was Goethe, and the folk, though mysterious, are very real; and, since they constitute perhaps five-sixths of the nation, it would be singular to ignore them. I had two brief glimpses of them, and the almost theatrical contrast of these two glimpses may throw further light upon the question just discussed.

I evaded Niagara and the Chicago Stock-yards, but I did not evade the "East Side" of New York. The East Side insisted on being seen, and I was not unwilling. In charge of a highly erudite newspaper man, and of an amiable Jewish detective, who, originally discovered by Colonel Roosevelt, had come out first among eighteen hundred competitors in a physical examination, my particular friend and I went forth one intemperate night to "do" the East Side in an automobile. We saw the garlanded and mirrored core of "Sharkey's" saloon, of which the most interesting phenomenon was a male pianist who would play the piano without stopping till 2.30 A.M. With about two thousand other persons, we had the privilege of shaking hands with Sharkey. We saw another saloon, frequented by murderers who resembled shop assistants. We saw a Hebraic theater, whose hospitable proprietor informed us how he had discovered a great play-writing genius, and how on the previous Saturday night he had turned away seven thousand patrons for lack of room! Certainly on our night the house was crammed; and the play seemed of realistic quality, and the actresses effulgently lovely. We saw a Polack dancing-hall, where the cook-girls were slatterns, but romantic slatterns. We saw Seward Park, which is the dormitory of the East Side in summer. We saw a van clattering off with prisoners to the night court. We saw illustrious burglars, "gunmen," and "dukes" of famous streets--for we had but to raise a beckoning finger, and they approached us, grinning, out of gloomy shadows. (And very ordinary they seemed in spite of slashed faces!)

We even saw Chinatown, and the wagonettes of tourists stationary in its streets. I had suspected that Chinatown was largely a show for tourists. When I asked how it existed, I was told that the two thousand Chinese of Chinatown lived on the ten thousand Chinese who came into it from all quarters on Sundays, and I understood. As a show it lacked convincingness--except the delicatessen-shop, whose sights and odors silenced criticism. It had the further disadvantage, by reason of its tawdry appeals of color and light, of making one feel like a tourist. Above a certain level of culture, no man who is a tourist has the intellectual honesty to admit to himself that he is a tourist. Such honesty is found only on the lower levels. The detective saved our pride from time to time by introducing us to sights which the despicable ordinary tourists cannot see. It was a proud moment for us when we assisted at a conspiratorial interview between our detective and the "captain of the precincts." And it was a proud moment when in an inconceivable retreat we were permitted to talk with an aged Chinese actor and view his collection of flowery hats. It was a still prouder (and also a subtly humiliating) moment when we were led through courtyards and beheld in their cloistral aloofness the American legitimate wives of wealthy China-men, sitting gorgeous, with the quiescence of odalisques, in gorgeous uncurtained interiors. I was glad when one of the ladies defied the detective by abruptly swishing down her blind.

But these affairs did not deeply stir my imagination. More engaging was the detective's own habit of stopping the automobile every hundred yards or so in order to point out the exact spot on which a murder, or several murders, had been committed. Murder was his chief interest. I noticed the same trait in many newspaper men, who would sit and tell excellent murder stories by the hour. But murder was so common on the East Side that it became for me curiously puerile--a sort of naughtiness whose punishment, to be effective, ought to wound, rather than flatter, the vanity of the child-minded murderers. More engaging still was the extraordinary frequency of banks--some with opulent illuminated signs--and of cinematograph shows. In the East End of London or of Paris banks are assuredly not a feature of the landscape--and for good reason. The cinematograph is possibly, on the whole, a civilizing agent; it might easily be the most powerful force on the East Side. I met the gentleman who "controlled" all the cinematographs, and was reputed to make a million dollars a year net therefrom. He did not appear to be a bit weighed down, either by the hugeness of his opportunity or by the awfulness of his responsibility.

The supreme sensation of the East Side is the sensation of its astounding populousness. The most populous street in the world--Rivington Street--is a sight not to be forgotten. Compared to this, an up-town thoroughfare of crowded middle-class flats is