The Amer caMan
HE is fighting for his life.,. His positionis Frecarious,, dramatic, extremely significant. He should be watched by everyone interested in the future of mankind, for the scaffolding of the world of the future is reared against the sky of America, and a rough map of it is spread over that continent and its voice is pounding and screaming out the news of what is to come to pass on the earth. Observe the American man -through your tele- scope. He clings like a leech to the gigantic machine of American industry. He is shot out of a slum as if a volcano had erupted under the tenement he was born in, and there he is dancing in the air on a tight rope, over the swarming canon of Wall Street, or perhaps he lifted his tiny head once like a prairie dog from a little hole somewhere in the West, and presto ! the invisible hand whisked him across prairies and deserts and dropped him into Los Angeles, Chicago, Pittsburg or Detroit, into a wheat pit, an oil well, or the stockyards, into the cinema business or the motor business or the steel business, and lo and behold he is now a captain of industry, a nervous dyspeptic and an old man at fifty but a millionaire.
The American world is visible enough. It stands gorgeous and terrible on the horizon of the twentieth century, a grinding, glittering, roaring edifice.- The sky- scraper is its emblem. Its sharp strident tower pierces the sky, but can you distinguish the American man in the pano- rama of the American world ? Truly he is barely dis- tinguishable. - He is so tiny that he has no face, no shape, no voice. You can only pick him out with your spy glass because he moves spasmodically and not as_the machinery round him moves, smoothly, relentlessly, faultlessly, with beautiful and cruel precision. The American man is an insect swarming over the machine. He is scrambling and struggling, balancing dizzily, falling, perhaps to pick himself up -and struggle on again, perhaps to be crushed underfoot or in the teeth of the machine. One of a swarm fighting and tussling, in a desperate jubilant frenzy of enthusiasm.
What is he fighting for and what is he fighting against ? He thinks that he is fighting for success, for money, to win out in the greatest game on earth. At first he takes it all as a great game. He finds himself playing with oil, steel, wheat, motor cars, and railways as a boy would play with miniature trains in a schoolroom. But as the excitement increases his nerves get jumpy. His digestion goes back on him. He feels very tired. He thinks he would like to get out of the game. He finds that he can't. Suddenly he becomes aware that he has been caught up in the grip of something terrific, monstrous and inimical to himself, to his health, to his family life, to his morals, to his very identity. . He is really fighting the machine that he has created for the right to live, and at forty or so he finds it out. , The future of the human race is being tried out in America. There you have the clash of forces that have been let loose on the earth by modern inventions and that are slowly bringing about the same transformation of life and the same problem in every country in Europe.
The American man's position is peculiar because everything has happened to him so quickly. He didn't have time to get ready to be the richest man on earth. He was taken unawares by prosperity. The American nation is like a farm hand who has suddenly come into a business worth a million pounds. • But to go back a little. One may mean two things by the term American man.- One may-mean-any man who is a citizen of the United States, or one may mean a man by birth and breeding and tradition the product of America. If you mean the former then the American man .is probably a Swede, a German, a Slav, an Italian, or a Jew, and he may or may not speak English or more exactly the American version of the English language. When I was a child there were two hundred and fifty thousand American citizens in the city of Chicago who spoke nothing but Polish. There are more to-day. Hence the election of Bill Thompson as Mayor. The connexion is obvious, but I am not analysing the elements of American politics, I am trying to define the nature of the American man.
What is he like really, the real American whose father and grandfather were American born ? There are first of all very few of them. One to a thousand of those others, black; yellow, or brown, who speak strange languages, would be a generous estimate, so few that it is extra- ordinary that- they have not been completely submerged. This is in itself almost a miracle. • There is actually an American type, and it dominatea the polyglot mob of 120 millions that is not yet a race and is scarcely conscious of being a nation. - You recognize the American when you see him. His head is already shaping itself on the model of the Red Indian, and in youth he has the same lithe movements, the way of - moving of the pathfinder and the woodsman. Look at a film showing American troops on the march and you will see what I mean. Nature- intended him to be a fine elastic animal fitted for prowess in such games as polo, tennii, golf; etc. But big business gets him and heturns to fat quickly and goes bald, and at forty his women find him -a bore for he is Ignorant of everything except b-usiness, and they are not interested in his business.
He lives in a world separate from theirs. All the excitement and romance of life for hi/44S: concentrated,iii- ftis office. He goes home in the evening- exhausted to ifnd his wife fresh as a daisy starting out for the night. If she insists on his going with her, and- she does insist, he can only • do so after a couple of cocktails, or three or four. So that what he sees of the world of women he sees in a -daze of weariness and alcohol. The tragedy of such American men is that they are never allowed to go to bed. They are the slaves of wives who are utterly bored with their company yet will not dispense with it.
The American man's upbringing and education have been quite different from that of his sisters. He has been taught to despise the arts, to have a contempt for all such graces as foreign languages; music, literature, painting. He talks with his teeth shut and is barely inteffigible to Englishmen who find it quite easy to understand his wife. His wife has made a study of being agreeable, decorative, social, and adaptable. He has paid no attention to any of these things. He has had no time for them and secretly despises them. He slaves for his wife hut almost everything that his wife does strikes him as rather silly, and the foreigners whose company she prefers to his own appear to him as wasters, adventurers, and scarcely more human than _giraffes. Nothing round him seems very human, nothing human continues to engage -his attention. He. lives in a world of roaring- machines and jigging figures, of soaiing buildings, spouting oil wells; leaping stocks and shares, arid bursting-crops of grain or cotton. All these things are alive with a life energy greater than his own. His wife and children fade to shadows. He himself becomes a shadow. The wonder is that in the turbulent onrush of his country's incredible material progress he has survived as an individual with any character at. all, The faet- is that-he is the -miraculous proof-of-the-power of an idea. It is an idea, or if you like a set of ideas, embodied in-a faith that men acted on long ago, that once produced him and that now keeps him alive. Everything in modern America is bent upon the destruction of the idea and upon his own destruction. Everything that _happens is the direct negation of the idea. Everything that he is expected to do gives it the lie. All the same it persists. The idea that I allude to is the idea that took the Quakers from England and the Huguenots from France. It is one of the most powerful ideas in the world, and it lies hidden within the astounding and spectacular edifice of American life, and it is still a living thing and it is keeping the American man alive.
One can defme it in various ways and call it by various names, but it is not my purpose to define it. We all know what it is. If you don't like it you call it one thing. If you do you call it another. It is spartan, austere, rigid. It postulates the worthlessness of worldly posses- sions and worldly glory and the equality in the sight of God of all human beings. It is an elemental and vital part of the Christian faith. It involves the principle of democracy and a belief in the dignity of labour and in the wickedness of idleness. But you will say : America is the very opposite of this. Exactly, that is my point. It is a defiant challenge to the whole gorgeous opulent fabric of American civilization and a flat contradiction of the value of America's astounding success. In a word, it gives the lie to America's gigantic achievement, is at war with the American world and is the only power on that continent that is saving. the American man from the complete disintegration that would surely result froni the c=ombined influences of skyscrapers, gold, bootleggers, and machinery, and the Americaa man believes in it,. He still, in spite of everything that has happened to him; knows it to be true. The faith of the Pilgrim Fathers and their moral Bode remain his faith and his code. This is the strange thing about him. Even when his steel mills and oil wellts, and+. railways involve him, in in the frenzied immora'l game of doubtful finance and corrupt politics, even though they leave hini no time to cultivate his mind, love his children, or enjoy- his friends, even when he forgets that he has a wife, or has had two or three and ,,vonders what On earth women are for and prefers oblivion in the whisky bottle to any other form of enjoyment, he still secretly believes in the God of the pioneer Pilgrims who sent men out to work with their hands in the wilder- ness, and he remains at heart a child and an idealist whose ideal of life is one of spartan simplicity, so that I see him standing in his palatial office in a skyscraper, or in his more palatial house on some Fifth Avenue, looking Wearily round him with bewilderment, boredom, and contempt, and I hear him. asking' himself what it all means. " What is the good of this ? " he says to himself. " This isn't what I've been working for. I hate it. It makes me sick." But he can't get out of it and he can't . get back to the plaee where he came from, a log cabin, a farm, a clearing in a forest. And his expression is a little ashamed and a little wistful. He has worked all his life for .Something and he doesn't know quite what it was: He only remembers dimly that it was for something splendid and'firie. He only knows.that it wasn't for this.. How could it have been for this ? • This house of his is a strange plate and he is a stranger in it. _ It is empty. Where is his- wife ? 'Where "are his children ? He hasn't an idea. _ He has lost track of them. They too are strangers. There remains his office. WearY -to exhaustion, he goes back to it. He has nowhere else to go." The world' is a lonely place except for the machines in it whose wheels are whirling, whirling, ceaselessly whirling.
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