Introducing the American Spirit

The Herr Director Meets the American Spirit

THE Herr Director and I were sitting over our coffee in the Café Bauer, Unter den Linden. In the midst of my account of some of the men of America and the idealistic movements in which they are interested, he rudely interrupted with: "You may tell that to some one who has never been in the United States; but not to me who have travelled through the length and breadth of it three times." He said it in an ungenerous, impatient way, although his last visit was thirty years ago and his journeys across this continent necessarily hurried. I dared not say much more, for I am apt to lose my temper when any one anywhere, criticizes my adopted country or questions my glowing accounts of it.

But I did say: "When you come over the next time, let me be your guide."

"Why should I want to go over again?" he replied. "It's a noisy, dirty, hopelessly materialistic country. You have sky-scrapers, but no beauty; money, but no ideals; garishness, but no comfort. You have despatch, but no courtesy; you are ingenious, but not thorough; you have fine clothes, but no style; churches, but no religion; universities, but no learning. No, I have been there three times. That's enough. I know all about it. Fertig!" And with that he dismissed me without giving me a chance to relieve my feelings, of which there were many; although he took advantage of a minute that was left and told me that I was an Unausstehlicher Americaner whose judgment had been warped by my great love for my adopted country.

Evidently the Herr Director reversed his decision not to come to this country; for the following spring I received a cablegram to meet him on the arrival of his ship at the Hamburg-American dock, which of course I promptly did. The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin stepped onto the soil of the United States with a predisposition to be martyrs, to endure the sufferings entailed by travel with as little grace as possible, and to suppress to the utmost all pleasurable emotion.

On the other hand, I was determined to show off my United States from its best side, to woo and win the Herr Director's and the Frau Directorin's approval. In my laudable endeavor I seemed to be supported by that divine providence which watches over the whole world in general, but over the United States in particular. The weather was perfect, the sky festooned in fleecy clouds, the air charged by a divine energy; and when the sun shines upon the harbor of New York-well, even the most taciturn European cannot resist it.

The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin greeted all the good Lord's endeavor and mine, with an air of condescension as something due their station. From force of habit they worried and fussed about their baggage, although there was nothing to worry or fuss about, for it was safe on its way to the hotel. They were shot under the river and the busy streets of Manhattan and whirled up to the twenty-first story of their thirty-two-storied hotel without having taken more than a dozen steps to reach it.

The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin refused to be impressed by the rooms assigned them, in which not a single comfort or luxury was missing, and complained because they were not as big as barns and the ceilings not as high as a cathedral. The Frau Directorin eyed the bath-room almost in silence; but she did wonder why they put out a whole month's supply of towels at once, instead of doing it in the provident European way of one towel every other day.

The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin, like all Europeans who can afford to travel, are exceedingly ?sthetic, and at the same time fond of good food, and their first approving smile was won at the breakfast table, when they were each face to face with half a grapefruit of vast circumference, reposing upon a bed of crushed ice. Their smiles broadened when they had introduced their palates to an American breakfast food, a crispy bit of nut-flavored air bubble, floating upon thick, rich cream; and, although they had made up their minds that American coffee was vile and they must not taste it, they could not resist its aroma, and drank it with a relish.

When the Herr Director said: "Der Kaffee ist gut," I knew that my prayers were being answered, and that the good Lord still loves the United States of America.

Most of us have shown off something-a baby, school-children, a schoolhouse, a town, an automobile, a cemetery. You know that feeling of pride which thrills you, that fear lest pride have a fall if it or they fail to "show up." But have you ever tried to show off a country-a country which you love with a lover's passion; a country whose virtues are so many, whose defects are so obvious; a country whose glory you have gloried in before the whole world, but whose halo has so many rust spots that you wish you might have had a chance to use Sapolio on it ere you let it shine before your visitors? A country of one hundred million inhabitants, of whom every fourth person smells of the steerage, when you wish that they all smelled of the Mayflower; a country where more people are ready to die for its freedom than anywhere, and more people ought to be in the penitentiary for abusing that freedom; a country of vast distances, bound together by huge railways and controlled by unsavory politicians; a country with more homely virtues, more virtuous homes, than anywhere else, yet where the divorce courts never cease their grinding and alimonies have no end?

Ah! to show off such a country, and to have to begin to do it in New York, beats showing off babies, school-children, automobiles, and cemeteries.

The Herr Director was sure he would hate our sky-scrapers; he had seen them from the ship, and the assaulted sky-line looked to him like the huge mouth of an old woman with its isolated, protruding teeth. Frankly, I myself am not interested in sky-scrapers; I prefer the elm trees which shade the streets of the quiet town where I live. I thank God daily for the men who had faith enough to plant trees upon those wind-swept prairies. They were mighty spirits who came to the edges of civilization and drove the wilderness farther and farther back by drawing furrows, sowing wheat, and planting trees-those men whom heat and a relentless desert could not separate from that other ocean with its Golden Gate to the sunset and the oldest world. Determining to have and to hold it till time is no more, they proceeded to unite the two oceans in holy wedlock. A task which involved another nation in hopeless scandal and bankruptcy, they completed with as little ceremony as that which prevails at a wedding before a justice of the peace. Those were the men who went among savages, yet did not become like them; who for homes dug holes in the ground among rattlesnakes, prairie-dogs, and moles, and made of such homes the beginnings of towns and cities.

If I admire the sky-scrapers it is because they are an attempt on the part of this same type of people to do pioneering among the clouds. Public lands being exhausted, they proceed to annex the sky and people it, now that the frontier is no more.

What the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin would say to the sky-scraper meant to me, not whether they would say it is beautiful or ugly, but whether they would discover in it the Spirit of America, the daring spirit of the pioneers who built Towers of Babel, though reversing the process; for they began with a confusion of tongues which outbabeled Babel, and finished on a day of Pentecost when men said: "We do hear them all speaking our own tongue, the mighty works of God."

We moved along Broadway, pressing through the crowds, the Herr Director puffing and panting, the Frau Directorin doing likewise. The Flatiron Building with its accentuated leanness lured them on until we came to the open space of Madison Square and they were face to face with the Metropolitan tower.

The Herr Director said: "Gott im Himmel!" The Frau Directorin said: "Um Gottes Himmels Willen!" And then they gazed their fill in silence.

I have never "done" Europe with a guide, nor have I ever had an American city introduced to me through a megaphone, so I scarcely knew what to say.

I did not know the exact height of that tower, nor how many tons of steel support it, nor the size of the clock dial which tells the time of day up there "among the dizzy flocks of sky-scrapers"; but I did know that the tower represented some big, daring thing, an expression of the spirit which could not be defined nor easily interpreted to another.

After his first outburst the Herr Director continued to say nothing-he was stunned; so was the Frau Directorin. We walked on, looking up, higher and higher still, until our eyes met another tower, the Woolworth Building-a shrewd Yankee five-and-ten-cent enterprise, flowering into purest Gothic.

The cathedrals of Europe are wonderful, undoubtedly. Master minds drew the plans and master hands built them, slowly, by an age-long process. They turned religious ideals into stone lace and lilies, hideous gargoyles and brave flying buttresses, aisles and naves and rose windows. Yes, they are quite wonderful. But to turn spools of thread, granite-ware, and dust-cloths into this glory of steel and stone is, to me, more marvellous still. The spirit of the pioneer cleaving the sky has become beautiful as it has ascended.

We are worrying a great deal about our lack of sensitiveness to beauty and form; we chide ourselves as being crude and unresponsive to art; we rush madly into the study of ?sthetics and buy Old Masters at the price of a king's ransom; yet we are not truly fostering America's art sense. It ought not to come in the Old World's way-by glorifying dogmas and creeds, by petrifying religion into buttresses and incasing our dead in tombs of beryl and onyx. It ought not to come with its mixture of paganism and religion, its armless Venus and its headless Victory. It should come first as it is coming-with the making of homes good to live in, factories planned to work in, stores fit to do business in, and schools built to teach in. It is coming-yes, it is coming.

But when our strong boys shall make filagree silver ornaments, carve pretty things on bits of ivory, or exhaust their energy in painting a lock of hair-when that time comes, we shall be an old people ready for our ornamented tombs.

Next I took the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin through a portal flanked by pillars worthy to crown any Athenian hill; I led them into a Parthenon in which Athena herself might have joyed to be worshipped, and we heard the echoing and re?choing of a chant which lacked nothing but incense and organ notes to make one think one's self in an Old World cathedral. The chant was not a Miserere, but a call to entrust one's self to the depths of the earth-to descend into tubes of steel, beneath the river, and then travel to the fair cities of the living, throbbing, thriving West. It was a railway terminal without choking smoke, blinding dust, or deafening noise; also without that hideous mechanical ugliness which Ruskin so hated. This was merely a place from which one started to reach Oshkosh or Kokomo, Keokuk, Kalamazoo, or Kankakee. Yet more beautiful portals never swung to mortals in their fairest dreams of journeying to the abodes of bliss. The Spirit of America, at last crowned by beauty.

We reached our hotel fairly exhausted by our morning's walk; but, after being properly refreshed, the Herr Director ventured to criticize.

"Yes, you are a wonderfully resourceful people, keen and energetic, but chaotic. You take an Italian campanile and elongate it fifty times; or a Gothic church, and attenuate it; or a Romanesque cathedral, and support it by Ionic pillars; or a cigar box, and enlarge it a million times. You put all these things side by side, and no one asks: Will they harmonize, or will they clash?

"Each man builds as he pleases, although he may blot out the other man's work and waste colossal energy merely to express himself. The result is confusion. You can feel that unrest, that discord, in the air. My nerves fairly ache! No, we shall not go out this afternoon. We must rest our nerves."

The Herr Director always spoke for his wife as well as for himself, thus expressing the collective spirit of the Old World. They both retired for a long rest, while I was left wondering how to introduce New York to them in the evening.

At five o'clock in the afternoon they emerged from their apartments, their wearied Old World nerves rested, and, after being stimulated by a cup of coffee, were ready for further adventures.

Broadway at that hour of the afternoon is bewildering. The shoppers have almost deserted it, and it is crowded by the clerks who served them, the cashiers who received their money, the girls who trimmed their hats, the men who cut their garments, the bookkeepers and the floor-walkers.

Whole towns seem to pour out of the department stores and lofts; the makers and menders of garments flee from the heart of the city, from this pulsing machine which has been going at a dangerous speed. They go from it eagerly, with a brave show of courage, as if the ten hours' labor had not broken their spirits or wearied their energy. To count the ants of a busy hill would be easier than even to estimate the numbers of that throng.

They climb the steps of the elevated railway trains, and crowd them, and cram the cars until they fairly bulge.

They lay siege to the surface cars, which merely crawl through the busy streets, so heavy are they and so closely does one car follow the other.

They descend into the depths of the earth, and breathe the humid, human air of those noisy catacombs. They walk by companies, regiments, and great armies, dodging automobiles which infest the streets with their speed and their stenches.

They accomplish it all with so little friction to each other's spirit, with such a silent good nature, with such a sense of self-reliance, and with so little official machinery to control them, that even the Herr Director said:

"This is wonderful!" although he declared that he would suffocate in that throng, and the Frau Directorin cried out every few minutes, "Um Gottes Himmels Willen!"

There was an absence of politeness, but we saw little rudeness; there were accidents, but the crowd did not lose its head; there were discomforts, but little display of ill nature; each for himself, and yet no clashing. The American crowd is more wonderful than the American sky-scrapers.

At the Royal Opera in Vienna, the approach to the ticket office is guarded by steel inclosures in which every prospective buyer is separated from the other, and one has to zigzag between these pens until he reaches the official's window. Crowding is rendered impossible, but, to make the obviously impossible more actually impossible, there is the usual number of uniformed guards.

Watch the American crowd-this group of unlike, self-centered individuals; in a moment it is organized, it obeys itself-or rather, it obeys its spirit, the American spirit of self-direction, with its genius for organization.

To me, the American crowd is so wonderful because it shows this other side of its spirit. It is heterogeneous, like the architecture of its buildings, perhaps even more so-if that be possible.

Here are Jews from Russia's crowded Pale, where they had to slink along with shuffling gait and dared go so far and no farther-so fast and no faster.

There are the Slavic peasants, who on their native soil, prodded by the goad, moved ox-like along an endless furrow, drawing the plow of autocracy.

Next is the Italian, volatile and yet static with his age-long burdens, with his fiery nature cramped into his diminutive frame.

Here is the Negro, the child-man, the shackles of whose slavery are scarcely broken.

The Asiatic, too, comes with hardly courage enough to lift his softly treading feet; while leading them all is this strident, giant child of the Anglo-Saxon race whose wind-swept cradle was rocked by freedom, and who with dominant will has spanned the oceans and crossed the mountains.

Of these myriads whom he leads, some will be a drag upon progress, and detain the strong or perhaps retard the race; yet they are trying to keep up, and by their efforts, by delving in the deep, by feeding with their brute strength our huge enginery, may make the flowering of the American spirit easier.

Yes, the Anglo-Saxon is leading them; but will he continue to lead, now that he no longer travels in the prairie schooner, but in the automobile-now that he wields the golf club and tennis racket, rather than the spade and plow on the prairie?

Will he now lead them from the breakers of Newport as well as once he led them from Plymouth Rock?

Will he lead them from the exclusive club as once he led them into the inclusive home?

These were the doubts which filled my mind, but which I did not share with my guests as I guided them; for we were to spend the evening together, and one needs all one's faith in New York at night.

We spent the early evening hours travelling around the world. We went to Arabia, where dusky children from the desert play in the gutters of Bleecker Street; to Greece, where Spartan and Athenian youth dream of the golden days of Pericles; to China, with its joss-house, its faint odors of sandalwood, and its stronger odors wafted from the Bowery. We visited Russia, and saw its ghetto-dwellers more numerous than Abraham ever thought his progeny would become; we spent some time in Hungary, with its Gulyas and Czardas. We went to Bohemia, with its Narodni Dom; to Italy, south and north, with its strings of garlic, its festoons of sausages, its hurdy-gurdy, and its rich harvest of children. We had glimpses of France, of its table d'h?te and painted women; travelled through darkest Africa, touched upon India, and then were back again upon Broadway.

As in the sky above us the architectures of the world strive to blend and fuse, making a mighty new impress; so below, these colonies to the right and colonies to the left, like the huge limbs of some ill-shapen monster, try to blend into America.

What is it all to be when blended?

Of course we went to the theater. We saw a German problem play made over to please the American taste. The Herr Director knew the play almost by heart, and he nearly jumped upon the stage in righteous indignation when in the last act, where the author drops all his characters into a bottomless pit and everything ends in confusion, the play ended in the conventional "God-bless-you-my-children," "happy-ever-after" manner.

We walked the streets of New York until past midnight, and finally looked down upon it from the roof of our hostelry. We could see the moon creeping out and shedding its mellow glow over the gayly lighted city. The noises were almost musical up there-like sustained organ notes-and we talked about the play with its happy ending.

"You are right," I said; "that happy ending is foolish and childish. Things do not always end happily; but this thing, this experiment in making a nation out of torn fragments, this founding of cities in a day out of second and third hand material, this experiment in man-making and nation-building must end well; for, if it doesn't, God's great experiment has failed. Shall I say, God's last experiment has failed? You see we mustn't fail-it must end well."

The streets were all but silent. From the great clock on the Metropolitan tower hanging in mid-air, came the flashes that marked the morning hour. Thick mists floated in from the sea and filled the narrow, chasm-like streets with weird, fantastic shapes.

The Herr Director said good-night. The Frau Directorin did likewise. They said it very solemnly, as behooves those who have looked deep into the heart of a great mystery who have felt the touch of a mighty spirit striving, struggling, agonizing to shape a new nation out of the world's refuse.