Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry
by . Edited by . New York; Harcourt, Brace and Co. 1922. x+577 pp. $5.00.
MANY of the contributors to this book gathered each fortnight in the quaint Dutch basement room of the editor’s two-century-old house in Greenwiea Village, and each writes here as if he were setting forth in talk to the others his impressions, fears and hopes about that particular aspect of our national life which has most occupied his thought and energy. It was impossible for even thirty-three articles to cover all phases of our civilization. The editor apologizes for the omission of religion. The physiography and scenery of the country necessarily shaped its development, but there is no description of them, like that which opens Zimmern’s Greek Commonwealth. The reader also misses some material factors which contribute to the pleasantness of American life, and distinguish it from Europe — and it may well be that the mind and emotions of a civilization, as of a person, cannot be fully understood apart from its body.
A single writer often uses up his ideas in the first hundred pages, while this book is enriched with those of thirty-three men. To take a few at random: our small cities, instead of mechanically imitating New York, might learn from Bergen and Grenoble; the chief monuments of American scholarship have seldom, if ever, come from our universities — witness, Adams’s Mont SaintMichel. Thayer’s Cavour, and Beveridge’s Marshall; the pioneers necessarily hated a thinker because, when everyone else worked painfully hard to ward off starvation, he was non-productive and a dangerous example; American composers suffer for lack of orchestras to try out elaborate pieces.
The contributors, of whom the reviewer is one, have tried to be sincere above everything. Although high praise is given to poetry, science, and surgery, the enumeration in other fields of evils which have been too much overlooked has tended to crowd out deserved recognition of accomplishment and effort. Nothing that these writers say goes beyond William James’s outburst to his brother against the ‘strange thinness and femininity hovering over all America.’ Yet we must not allow ourselves to take refuge from our national shortcomings in dreams of some paradise across the seas. The conclusion to be drawn from this book is the conclusion of James: ‘Europe has been made what it is by men staying in their homes and fighting stubbornly generation after generation, for all the beauty, comfort and order that they have got — we must abide and do the same.’
ZECHARIAH CHAFEE JR.