Two Americas

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

AMERICA as the novelist sees it just now is a very confusing country. Indeed it is not one country at all, but two, and outwardly they very little resemble each other.

One is the dun America and the other is rosy America. The dun America is a land of back yards, spittoons, Main Streets, cement walks, shiny stiff rooms, and ugliness everywhere. It is inhabited by fearfully bourgeois people, whose humor is confined to "jollying," and whose life, for the males, is business, and either drinking or fishing, or both; and for the females, gossip or bridge, or both. Its range of interests is about as broad as the front yard and as long as Main Street, no longer. When it goes to parties to amuse itself it is either barbarous or vulgar or stupid, or all three of them. Its attitude toward international politics is that of 1890, its opinion of labor problems dates from before the industrial revolution. The prevailing dunness is shot through with streaks of yellow and weak violet, but dingy is its color, dingy its soul.

In sharp, in impossible contrast is rosy America. This is a land of hearty villages and vigorous towns, clean and prosperous, shrewd and homely, kindly and in the best sense aspiring. It is a land of quaint wise age and naïve youth. It is humorous, it is energetic : it won the war even if it did not fight much of it, saved Europe from starving, and showed itself capable of organization as well as sacrifice. It is a common-sense country, deeply idealistic, and its æsthetic sense has already outrun its environment. New York amuses it, the immigrants do not dismay it, its "home towns," with all their imperfections, it adores.

Which is the true America? Which are the true observers? The writers who give us rosy America (if we exclude the senti-mentalists) are intelligent people, good to meet, good to talk with, wise and humorous. They have been a little too fortunate in their own lives perhaps for absolute clarity of vision; but they convince you of their America—are they not of it !

The writers who write of dun America, on the contrary, are usually rebels against environment, men and women who have felt themselves misfits in the home town, misfits in college, critics of the existing order wherever they lived, and happy nowhere. They are the nomads who wander from oasis to oasis, their horses always saddled, their arrows ever bright.

Are there then rather than two Americas only two states of mind, two sets of experiences, two moods of observation which turn plain America into sweetness or bile? That is a conclusion too weak to stand upon.

For, of course, the two-sidedness is in America as well as in the observers. The virtues and the faults are both there. From the window one sees a jumble of ugly brick walls, a sky tainted by coal smoke, signs offensive in vulgarity as in ugliness. Yet beneath is a good sort of people busy supporting families that are cheery as often as mean minded, as often interested in China, child welfare, good books, and happy conversation as in the price of stocks, the sins of their neighbors, and alcohol. In short, no Main Street is just as it looks to any individual at any given moment of mood and time. But this is a conclusion too platitudinous to rest upon.

For the two Americas which interest us are by no means so simple as the ancient struggle between good and evil that goes on in every village. They are special phases of this old conflict and just now they may be denominated city and town.

The city in America has gathered to itself sweetness and vigor; it has sucked from the country whence all strength comes, and now goes back for refreshment. The city encourages breadth of thinking and living. It encourages and rewards vitality. But it is the city also which is the prime vulgarizer, which produces the man without angles and with-out home, the woman without occupation, the life without individuality. And the city is master.

The town is slave. It apes the city and apes it badly. Its vulgarity is second-best and its mediocrity imitative. Its faults are all displayed on Main Street, like cans of vegetables in a grocer's window. City faults are easier to study in a town than in the place of their origin because they are unrelieved and cruder. Yet the town keeps its individuality, keeps its pride, keeps its friendships. It is the country freshman in college, with big, hearty hands, and a big, hearty voice, and a big heart under impossible "college cut" clothes, acquiring vices that when he is more civilized he will forget.

The American soul is passing from the country through the town to the city, and perhaps back to the town and on to the country again. It was the country that first en-gaged our novelists. Then it was the city.

Now, for a while, because it reveals our soul in transition, it is the small town. The rosy writers on the whole see not untruly. The American town is not all Main Street, and Main Street is not as bad as it is painted, or even built. Ugliness is a phase of transition, like the unshaven chin on Sunday morning. The city, with all its leadership toward light and sweetness of living, is more dangerous than the town to America.

But the nomads come sweeping down upon our complacencies like the Arabs and the Scythians that Wells describes, restlessly discontent, stirring up our fat lives, pricking illusions, shooting arrows of satire down smug streets. They disturb us, but they keep us moving. They make us feel the dunness of life that has lost the simple reality of labor and has not yet reached breadth of interest and experience. Now that the Indian and the pioneer and the cowboy have gone, and the founders have become stolid and wealthy, Main Street needs them.