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EVERYDAY AMERICANS

EVERYDAY AMERICANS

BY
HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

Author of “College Sons and College Fathers,”
“Our House,” “Education by
Violence,” etc.

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1920

Copyright, 1919, 1920, by
The Century Co.

This is emphatically not a war book; and yetthe chapters that follow, in one sense, are thefruits of the war, inasmuch as they representreflections upon his own people by one returningto a familiar environment after active contactwith English, Scottish, Irish, and Frenchin the turbulent, intimate days of 1918. Theyare complementary, in a way, to a volume ofessays which sprang from that experience andwas published in 1919 under the title “Educationby Violence.” But though representingin its inception the fresher view of familiarAmerica of one returning from abroad, thisbook in its completed form is tendered as amodest attempt to depict an American typethat was sharpened perhaps, but certainly notcreated by the war. The “old Americans”came to racial consciousness many years ago,[vi]although their sense of nationality has been immeasurablystrengthened by the events of thelast few years. It is no picture of all America,no survey of our complete social being that Iattempt in the following pages; but rather ahighly personal study of the typical, the everydayAmerican mind, as it is manifested in theAmerican of the old stock. It is a study ofwhat that typical American product, the collegeand high school graduate, has become inthe generation which must carry on after thewar.

New Haven, Connecticut,
    June 4, 1920.