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Editor: Harold E. Stearns

CIVILIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES

EDITED BY HAROLD E. STEARNS

NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

PREFACE This book has been an adventure in intellectual co-operation. If it were a mere collection of haphazard essays, gathered together to make the conventional symposium, it would have only slight significance. But it has been the deliberate and organized outgrowth of the common efforts of like-minded men and women to see the problem of modern American civilization as a whole, and to illuminate by careful criticism the special aspect of that civilization with which the individual is most familiar. Personal contact has served to correct overemphasis, and slow and careful selection of the members of a group which has now grown to some thirty-odd has given to this work a unity of approach and attack which it otherwise could not possibly have had.

The nucleus of this group was brought together by common work, common interests, and more or less common assumptions. As long ago as the autumn of last year Mr. Van Wyck Brooks and I discussed the possibility of several of us, who were engaged in much the same kind of critical examination of our civilization, coming together to exchange ideas, to clarify our individual fields, and to discover wherein they coincided, overlapped, or diverged. The original desire was the modest one of making it possible for us to avoid working at cross-purposes. I suggested that we meet at my home, which a few of us did, and since that time until the delivery of this volume to the publishers we have met every fortnight. Even at our first meeting we discovered our points of view to have so much in common that our desire for informal and pleasant discussions became the more serious wish to contribute a definite and tangible piece of work towards the advance of intellectual life in America. We wished to speak the truth about American civilization as we saw it, in order to do our share in making a real civilization possible--for I think with all of us there was a common assumption that a field cannot be ploughed until it has first been cleared of rocks, and that constructive criticism can hardly exist until there is something on which to construct.

Naturally the first problem to arise was the one of ways and means. If the spirit and temper of the French encyclopaedists of the 18th century appealed strongly to us, certainly their method for the advancement of knowledge was inapplicable in our own century. The cultural phenomena we proposed to survey were too complicated and extensive; besides, we wished to make a definite contribution of some kind or another while, so to speak, there was yet time. For the cohesiveness of the group, the good-humoured tolerance and cheerful sacrifice of time, were to some extent the consequence of the intellectual collapse that came with the hysterical post-armistice days, when it was easier than in normal times to get together intelligent and civilized men and women in common defence against the common enemy of reaction. We wished to take advantage of this strategic situation for the furtherance of our co-operative enterprise, and decided, finally, that the simplest plan would be the best. Each of us was to write a single short essay on the special topic we knew most thoroughly; we were to continue our meetings in order to keep informed of the progress of our work and to see that there was no duplication; we were to extend the list of subjects to whatever legitimately bore upon our cultural life and to select the authors by common agreement; we were to keep in touch with each other so that the volume might have that inner consistency which could come only from direct acquaintance with what each of us was planning.

There were a few other simple rules which we laid down in the beginning. Desirous of avoiding merely irrelevant criticism and of keeping attention upon our actual treatment of our subjects rather than upon our personalities, we provided that all contributors to the volume must be American citizens. For the same reason, we likewise provided that in the list there should be no professional propagandists--except as one is a propagandist for one's own ideas--no martyrs, and no one who was merely disgruntled. Since our object was to give an uncompromising, and consequently at some points necessarily harsh, analysis, we desired the tone to be good-natured and the temper urbane. At first, these larger points of policy were decided by common agreement or, on occasion, by majority vote, and to the end I settled no important question without consultation with as many members of the group as I could approach within the limited time we had agreed to have this volume in the hands of the publisher. But with the extension of the scope of the book, the negotiations with the publisher, and the mass of complexities and details that are inevitable in so difficult an enterprise, the authority to decide specific questions and the usual editorial powers were delegated as a matter of convenience to me, aided by a committee of three. Hence I was in a position constantly to see the book as a whole, and to make suggestions for differentiation, where repetition appeared to impend, or for unity, where the divergence was sharp enough to be construed by some as contradictory. In view both of the fact that every contributor has full liberty of opinion and that the personalities and points of view finding expression in the essays are all highly individualistic, the underlying unity which binds the volume together is really surprising.

It may seem strange that a volume on civilization in the United States does not include a specific article on religion, and the omission is worth a paragraph of explanation. Outside the bigger cities, certainly no one can understand the social structure of contemporary American life without careful study of the organization and power of the church. Speaking generally, we are a church-going people, and at least on the surface the multiplicity of sects and creeds, the sheer immensity of the physical apparatus by which the religious impulse is articulated, would seem to prove that our interest in and emotional craving for religious experience are enormous. But the omission has not been due to any superciliousness on our part towards the subject itself; on the contrary, I suppose I have put more thought and energy into this essay, which has not been written, than into any other problem connected with the book. The bald truth is, it has been next to impossible to get any one to write on the subject; most of the people I approached shied off--it was really difficult to get them to talk about it at all. Almost unanimously, when I did manage to procure an opinion from them, they said that real religious feeling in America had disappeared, that the church had become a purely social and political institution, that the country is in the grip of what Anatole France has aptly called Protestant clericalism, and that, finally, they weren't interested in the topic. The accuracy of these observations I cannot, of course, vouch for, but it is rather striking that they were identical. In any event, the topic as a topic has had to be omitted; but it is not neglected, for in several essays directly--in particular, "Philosophy" and "Nerves"--and in many by implication the subject is discussed. At one time Mr. James Harvey Robinson consented to write the article--and it would have been an illuminating piece of work--but unfortunately ill health and the pressure of official duties made the task impossible for him within the most generous time limit that might be arranged.

I have spoken already of the unity which underlies the volume. When I remember all these essays, and try to summon together the chief themes that run through them, either by explicit statement or as a kind of underlying rhythm to all, in order to justify the strong impression of unity, I find three major contentions that may be said to be basic--contentions all the more significant inasmuch as they were unpremeditated and were arrived at, as it were, by accident rather than design. They are:

First, That in almost every branch of American life there is a sharp dichotomy between preaching and practice; we let not our right hand know what our left hand doeth. Curiously enough, no one regards this, and in fact no one consciously feels this as hypocrisy--there are certain abstractions and dogmas which are sacred to us, and if we fall short of these external standards in our private life, that is no reason for submitting them to a fresh examination; rather are we to worship them the more vociferously to show our sense of sin. Regardless, then, of the theoretical excellence or stupidity of these standards, in actual practice the moral code resolves itself into the one cardinal heresy of being found out, with the chief sanction enforcing it, the fear of what people will say.

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