by Elin L. Anderson
[Harvard University Press, $3.00]
ALTHOUGH I am no great one either for prize books or for statistics, I was taken with this book at once. For, mutatis mutandis, it could be my own New England town which Elin in Anderson has explored the heart of instead of Burlington, Vermont. My town is an experiment in internationalism, too, and I had to speak Canadian French and be good at diplomacy in order to survive as a schoolboy growing up there. Miss Anderson has gone into the heart of a community, and she has found a good many things to set down that are reassuring to a believer in American democracy. She has implied many others that are still more so.
Usually studies of ethnic groups leave the human beings as such pretty well out. But there are a lot of human beings here. I got so I could almost call them by name. This serious and absorbing essay in sociology is full of voices. Hundreds of people are talking all the time, just the way they do on the streets and in their houses, not speaking pieces — Irishmen and French Canadians, Italians and Jews. And the sum of what they say is that America is a place where people can labor to be different and yet live together; keep their religion, their culture, and their prejudices, and still work out some common ideal of understanding, a live-and-let-live philosophy which may well serve as an example to quarreling nations overseas.
Not that this book is a pæan. Far from it. It proves that the melting pot seems at the moment to be a myth — as it is, by the way, at any given moment; that antagonisms rankle; that the different breeds in a fair sample of an American city keep much to themselves in spite of chambers of commerce, unions, the amalgamation of different groups within the Roman Catholic Church, in spite of a common tongue, the Rotary Club and the Lions, Elks and Eagles, and such fauna, art, the theatre, music, the American Legion, the Alliance Française, public schools, a university, lectures, bridge clubs (contract can never kill out auction, thank goodness), in spite of marriage, charities, a common interest in the government, and even that leveler of all levelers — the movies!
The French Canadians of Burlington — who are often much older Americans than most of us Yankees, having been on our continent longer — keep to their trades and ideas just as they do in Brunswick, Maine. The people down by the water shy away from the academic lectures on the hill. Irishmen stand up like torches to rally the underprivileged just as Irishmen have always had the God-given right to do since they helped us to start — and finish — the Revolutionary War. The parochial school teams go into combat like Crusaders of the ninth century against the heretics who would defame their basket by tossing balls through it. And the Protestants fight like the hosts of Gustavus Adolphus. That’s as it should be. The Old Americans wonder what the world is coming to, as the Italian and French Old Americans will wonder what on earth America is coming to when the Tibetans and Balinese Americans swarm up the hill to take over their houses two hundred years hence.
Behind all this failure to coalesce is the American secret. That is why we are the interesting country we always have been, and why mass formations will never gather momentum enough to crush us all. The good worker and the lover of life will come to the top. A nation will go on in spite of narrowness in religion, in ideas on marriage, and in business. Adjustments to the changing world will be more easily made, as they have been made all through our history, and usually without bloodshed. And people from the four corners of the world will go on competing for life, liberty, and the pursuit of the happiness that makes me scorn to think the way my neighbor does on anything.
There is no easy or glib solution. No wholesale regimentation is possible in such a city as Burlington. We ought to thank goodness for that when we see what goes on overseas. Cultural and economic and religious differences will always exist as rightly as political parties. And the experiment in coöperative differences of opinion in the new world will come to a slow fruitage. It has done so in most of the Northern states. Maine’s ‘Old Americans’ are part Indian, part Huguenot French, part Scottish, Scotch-Irish, plain and hot Irish, part Moravian German, part Dutch, part English. And how good we feel being all these at once! It will be very strange if a few thousands of French Canadians cannot be taken into the family at this late day.
Miss Anderson makes one mistake: the chief reason why Vermont did not take that horrible road right the whole length of the Green Mountain range was that she thought too much of the Green Mountains.
ROBERT P. TRISTRAM COFFIN