Your United States by Arnold Bennett

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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.

[Illustration: THE ASTOUNDING POPULOUSNESS OF THE EAST SIDE]

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 the
open country--is an uninhabited desert! The architecture seemed to sweat
humanity at every window and door. The roadways were often impassable.
The thought of the hidden interiors was terrifying. Indeed, the hidden
interiors would not bear thinking about. The fancy shunned them--a
problem not to be settled by sudden municipal edicts, but only by the
efflux of generations. Confronted by this spectacle of sickly-faced
immortal creatures, who lie closer than any other wild animals would
lie; who live picturesque, feverish, and appalling existences; who amuse
themselves, who enrich themselves, who very often lift themselves out of
the swarming warren and leave it forever, but whose daily experience in
the warren is merely and simply horrible--confronted by this
incomparable and overwhelming phantasmagoria (for such it seems), one is
foolishly apt to protest, to inveigh, to accuse. The answer to futile
animadversions was in my particular friend's query: "Well, what are you
going to do about it?"

* * * * *

My second glimpse of the folk was at quite another end of the city of
New York--namely, the Bronx. I was urgently invited to go and see how
the folk lived in the Bronx; and, feeling convinced that a place with a
name so remarkable must itself be remarkable, I went. The center of the
Bronx is a racket of Elevated, bordered by banks, theaters, and other
places of amusement. As a spectacle it is decent, inspiring confidence
but not awe, and being rather repellent to the sense of beauty. Nobody
could call it impressive. Yet I departed from the Bronx very
considerably impressed. It is the interiors of the Bronx homes that are
impressive. I was led to a part of the Bronx where five years previously
there had been six families, and where there are now over two thousand
families. This was newest New York. No obstacle impeded my invasion of
the domestic privacies of the Bronx. The mistresses of flats showed me
round everything with politeness and with obvious satisfaction. A stout
lady, whose husband was either an artisan or a clerk, I forget which,
inducted me into a flat of four rooms, of which the rent was twenty-six
dollars a month. She enjoyed the advantages of central heating, gas, and
electricity; and among the landlord's fixtures were a refrigerator, a
kitchen range, a bookcase, and a sideboard. Such amenities for the
people--for the _petits gens_--simply do not exist in Europe; they do
not even exist for the wealthy in Europe. But there was also the
telephone, the house exchange being in charge of the janitor's
daughter--a pleasing occupant of the entrance-hall. I was told that the
telephone, with a "nickel" call, increased the occupancy of the Bronx
flats by ten per cent.

Thence I visited the flat of a doctor--a practitioner who would be the
equivalent of a "shilling" doctor in a similar quarter of London. Here
were seven rooms, at a rent of forty-five dollars a month, and no end of
conveniences--certainly many more than in any flat that I had ever
occupied myself! I visited another house and saw similar interiors. And
now I began to be struck by the splendor and the cleanliness of the
halls, landings, and staircases: marble halls, tesselated landings, and
stairs out of Holland; the whole producing a gorgeous effect--to match
the glory of the embroidered pillow-cases in the bedrooms. On the roofs
were drying-grounds, upon which each tenant had her rightful "day," so
that altercations might not arise. I saw an empty flat. The professional
vermin exterminator had just gone--for the landlord-company took no
chances in this detail of management.

Then I was lifted a little higher in the social-financial scale, to a
building of which the entrance-hall reminded me of the foyers of grand
hotels. A superb negro held dominion therein, but not over the telephone
girl, who ran the exchange ten hours a day for twenty-five dollars a
month, which, considering that the janitor received sixty-five dollars
and his rooms, seemed to me to be somewhat insufficient. In this house
the corridors were broader, and to the conveniences was added a
mail-shoot, a device which is still regarded in Europe as the final word
of plutocratic luxury rampant. The rents ran to forty-eight dollars a
month for six rooms. In this house I was asked by hospitable tenants
whether I was not myself, and, when I had admitted that I was myself,
books of which I had been guilty were produced, and I was called upon to
sign them.

The fittings and decorations of all these flats were artistically
vulgar, just as they are in flats costing a thousand dollars a month,
but they were well executed, and resulted in a general harmonious effect
of innocent prosperity. The people whom I met showed no trace of the
influence of those older artistic civilizations whose charm seems subtly
to pervade the internationalism of the East Side. In certain strata and
streaks of society on the East Side things artistic and intellectual are
comprehended with an intensity of emotion and understanding impossible
to Anglo-Saxons. This I know.

The Bronx is different. The Bronx is beginning again, at a stage earlier
than art, and beginning better. It is a place for those who have learnt
that physical righteousness has got to be the basis of all future
progress. It is a place to which the fit will be attracted, and where
the fit will survive. It has rather a harsh quality. It reminded me of a
phrase used by an American at the head of an enormous business. He had
been explaining to me how he tried a man in one department, and, if he
did not shine in that, then in another, and in another, and so on. "And
if you find in the end that he's honest but not efficient?" I asked.
"Then," was the answer, "we think he's entitled to die, and we fire
him."

The Bronx presented itself to me as a place where the right of the
inefficient to expire would be cheerfully recognized. The district that
I inspected was certainly, as I say, for the fit. Efficiency in physical
essentials was inculcated--and practised--by the landlord-company, whose
constant aim seemed to be to screw up higher and higher the self-respect
of its tenants. That the landlord-company was not a band of
philanthropists, but a capitalistic group in search of dividends, I
would readily admit. But that it should find its profit in the business
of improving the standard of existence and appealing to the pride of the
folk was to me a wondrous sign of the essential vigor of American
civilization, and a proof that public spirit, unostentatious as a coral
insect, must after all have long been at work somewhere.

Compare the East Side with the Bronx fully, and one may see, perhaps
roughly, a symbol of what is going forward in America. Nothing, I should
imagine, could be more interesting to a sociological observer than that
actual creation of a city of homes as I saw it in the Bronx. I saw the
home complete, and I saw the home incomplete, with wall-papers not on,
with the roof not on. Why, I even saw, further out, the ground being
leveled and the solid rock drilled where now, most probably, actual
homes are inhabited and babies have been born! And I saw further than
that. Nailed against a fine and ancient tree, in the midst of a desolate
waste, I saw a board with these words: "A new Subway station will be
erected on this corner." There are legendary people who have eyes to see
the grass growing. I have seen New York growing. It was a hopeful sight,
too.

* * * * *

At this point my impressions of America come to an end, for the present.
Were I to assert, in the phrase conventionally proper to such an
occasion, that no one can be more sensible than myself of the manifold
defects, omissions, inexactitudes, gross errors, and general lack of
perspective which my narrative exhibits, I should assert the thing which
is not. I have not the slightest doubt that a considerable number of
persons are more sensible than myself of my shortcomings; for on the
subject of America I do not even know enough to be fully aware of my own
ignorance. Still, I am fairly sensible of the enormous imperfection and
rashness of this book. When I regard the map and see the trifling
extent of the ground that I covered--a scrap tucked away in the
northeast corner of the vast multi-colored territory--I marvel at the
assurance I displayed in choosing my title. Indeed, I have yet to see
your United States. Any Englishman visiting the country for the second
time, having begun with New York, ought to go round the world and enter
by San Francisco, seeing Seattle before Baltimore and Denver before
Chicago. His perspective might thus be corrected in a natural manner,
and the process would in various ways be salutary. It is a nice question
how many of the opinions formed on the first visit--and especially the
most convinced and positive opinions--would survive the ordeal of the
second.

As for these brief chapters, I hereby announce that I am not prepared
ultimately to stand by any single view which they put forward. There is
naught in them which is not liable to be recanted. The one possible
justification of them is that they offer to the reader the one thing
that, in the very nature of the case, a mature and accustomed observer
could not offer--namely, an immediate account (as accurate as I could
make it) of the first tremendous impact of the United States on a mind
receptive and unprejudiced. The greatest social historian, the most
conscientious writer, could not recapture the sensations of that first
impact after further intercourse had scattered them.

THE END

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