Transcriber’s Note
Cover image created by Transcriber, using part ofan image of the original book’s Title page,and placed into the Public Domain.
CIVILIZATION IN THE
UNITED STATES
AN INQUIRY BY THIRTY AMERICANS
EDITED BY HAROLD E. STEARNS
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.
iii
PREFACE
This book has been an adventure in intellectual co-operation.If it were a mere collection of haphazard essays, gatheredtogether to make the conventional symposium, it would haveonly slight significance. But it has been the deliberate andorganized outgrowth of the common efforts of like-minded menand women to see the problem of modern American civilizationas a whole, and to illuminate by careful criticism thespecial aspect of that civilization with which the individualis most familiar. Personal contact has served to correct overemphasis,and slow and careful selection of the members of agroup which has now grown to some thirty-odd has given tothis work a unity of approach and attack which it otherwisecould not possibly have had.
The nucleus of this group was brought together by commonwork, common interests, and more or less common assumptions.As long ago as the autumn of last year Mr. Van WyckBrooks and I discussed the possibility of several of us,who were engaged in much the same kind of critical examinationof our civilization, coming together to exchange ideas, toclarify our individual fields, and to discover wherein they coincided,overlapped, or diverged. The original desire was themodest one of making it possible for us to avoid working atcross-purposes. I suggested that we meet at my home, whicha few of us did, and since that time until the delivery of thisvolume to the publishers we have met every fortnight. Evenat our first meeting we discovered our points of view to haveso much in common that our desire for informal and pleasantdiscussions became the more serious wish to contribute a definiteand tangible piece of work towards the advance of intellectuallife in America. We wished to speak the truth aboutAmerican civilization as we saw it, in order to do our sharein making a real civilization possible—for I think with all ofus there was a common assumption that a field cannot beivploughed until it has first been cleared of rocks, and that constructivecriticism can hardly exist until there is somethingon which to construct.
Naturally the first problem to arise was the one of ways andmeans. If the spirit and temper of the French encyclopædistsof the 18th century appealed strongly to us, certainly theirmethod for the advancement of knowledge was inapplicable inour own century. The cultural phenomena we proposed tosurvey were too complicated and extensive; besides, we wishedto make a definite contribution of some kind or another while,so to speak, there was yet time. For the cohesiveness of thegroup, the good-humoured tolerance and chee