Chapter 52

Finale

BUT I have had to leave out so much!

What other country could have headlines like WAR WITH JAPAN PERILS WORLD SERIES, or speed “limits” of sixty miles an hour on the endless undulant roads of Utah, or the sign on the Success Cafe in Butte in 1932, EAT HERE OR I’LL VOTE FOR HOOVER, or another headline, one from a New York tabloid about a woman soon to be electrocuted, SHE’LL BURN, SIZZLE, FRY ! or about the way salesmanship is the greatest profession in the land.

There is nothing in this book, and now it’s too late to put it in, about how airplanes spray trees with DDT in Oregon or why Pullman washbowls have the water tap set in so close, or how Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts, or how a canny Englishman pointed out that you can write a barometer of American ups and downs from the titles of popular songs, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” to “Yes We Have No Bananas” to “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” to “Accentuate the Positive.”

There is nothing in this book about the fact that Truman met Roosevelt only once between the time of his nomination as vice president and his accession to the presidency, and that Willkie and McNary had never met when in 1940 they were nominated for president and vice president respectively; nothing about the grave elk eating up the golf links near Salt Lake City, or how fifty years ago twenty-four American states forbade minors to smoke or chew tobacco in public; no mention of the sign in front of the Presbyterian Hospital, For the Poor of New York without Regard to Race Creed or Color, or of the contemptible filth-mongering of the Hearst press during a recent antifilth campaign; nothing of ear-shattering neologisms like Ripco, Kantwet, Trimz, Chix, Mor, Flexees, and Linit, or lunatic gibberish like L.S./M.F.T.

I haven’t even mentioned that there were seventy-two thousand G.I.’s named Smith; or the sagging lines of men with brief cases in the big hotel lobbies and the crisp snapping bark of the clerks, “Sold Out!” or whaling towns like New Bedford in Massachusetts and a civilization as unique as that of Nantucket; or the way International Business Machines runs its company town and never sells, but only leases, certain of its machines; or children in scarlet mufflers patting their scarlet mittens together and listening to Santa Claus out in the snow in a Vermont public square; or college fraternities and sororities and their adolescent hocus-pocus; or the lonely red railway stations and their water towers and greased switches in northern Minnesota; or people as authentically part of the American scene as Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates, Blondie, and Superman.

Nothing about such forms of American music as police sirens and boogie woogie! Not even one word for name bands! Nothing about Joe Louis, the Stork Club, Leo Durocher, Information Please, or why Walter Winchell has to call Orson Welles “George O.” Welles! Nothing about Dixie cups, the three Compton brothers who are all presidents of universities, the smooth elegant butcher shops of New York City, the hotel elevator lined with tile in Bismarck, North Dakota, the “junior sidewalk superintendents” outside Best’s on Fifth Avenue, hoods on milk bottles, the silver fields acre-solid with discarded B-17’s at Lubbock, Texas, such utterly key figures in politics as Bernard M. Baruch and Leslie Biffle, the wind slicing hot through the streets in Oklahoma City, the red-painted propeller tips of Continental Airlines, the shops for artificial limbs opening up in the western cities, the drunks propped on chairs on steaming nights along Sixth Avenue, the yellow egg-sized Castilian roses in New Mexico and the laurel in the valley of the Tennessee. Nothing—not a word!—about the railway brakeman with a ten thousand dollar collection of postage stamps in Montgomery, Alabama, about Hungry Sam Miller of Pennsylvania who once ate 144 fried eggs, 48 pies, and 200 oysters, about characters in contemporary American folklore like Clark Gable, Damon Runyan, Lana Turner, Billy Rose. Not a word about advertisements for “supertomatoes” or why all American radio stations begin with the letters K or W or the American general who once killed an Alaskan bear by yelling at it—the bear died of fright. Man from Mars, you don’t know anything! You can’t have the foggiest idea of what America is like if you don’t know of Paul Bunyan’s Babe, the weight of metal a lamp post can carry in New York City, Lunt and Fontanne, the songs of Hildegarde, Nicholas Murray Butler, and the policeman in Kansas City who once smoked 500 packages of Kools in a year to get a $9.50 inlaid bridge table, free.

There is nothing in this book about public libraries in America, which are incontestably the finest in the world, nothing about the retired broker aged sixty-nine whom I found working in the Kaiser shipyards, nothing of the way the sunset bends down the hills cupping Augusta in Maine and very little of what Will White saw across the Kansas plains. Nothing about the beautiful kids around the Beverly Wilshire pool in Los Angeles and the jalopies bumping along the high taut Dakota roads and the earth smoking and spitting hell near Harrisburg and the deep gray quiet lanes in upper New York state and the slow crunching wagons, drawn by ancient horses, packed full of golden-golden corn on hot Ohio afternoons.

And surely the man from Mars, our friend by now, should know that the microfilm edition of the New York Times costs $175.00 per year; that in some Atlanta bars you can check your bottle; that Calvin Coolidge once translated Dante—oh yes, this is a country crammed with the unexpected !—that radio helps to solve one of the supreme American problems which is loneliness, that the chamber of commerce in middle-sized cities must of necessity be its lowest common denominator, since it has to oppose anything likely to hurt anybody at all, and that you have to enter almost all state capitols by the side or back door, because the front steps are too long a climb.

Nothing in this book about how American children are so often ashamed of their parents, and vice versa! Nothing about how Postal Telegraph disappeared overnight without trace, or why ducks prefer muddy water to fresh in Wisconsin! Nothing about Cardinal Spellman, J. Edgar Hoover, Juan Trippe, Francis Biddle, Harold Ross, Beardsley Ruml, Marriner Eccles, the Dulles brothers, Nicky Arnstein, or Bishop Manning. Nothing about how a B.A. degree even from a good university means less today than a high school education did forty years ago, about how people at hotel conventions are tagged and ticketed like animals in a zoo, about the remarkable careers subsequently enjoyed by most heads of the Securities Exchange Commission and all the bright young lawyers who were once secretaries to Mr. Justice Holmes, or about bits of conversation overheard in night clubs, like “Say, I hear minks are going to take a hell of a drop, a really precipitous drop, but after all they had the greatest rise in the mercantile market.”

There is very little in this book about the supreme inventiveness of Americans, their boastfulness, their practical aptitude for making things work, their sentimentality, or the crazy drugstore food they eat. Very little or nothing about the diocesan press, or the spectacular variety of technical and professional magazines. Nothing about the queues of sweating men in shirt sleeves, waiting for busses at Greyhound depots, or the wonderful mechanical ingenuity of American industrial fabricators—consider the newer kitchen gadgets—or the equally wonderful imitativeness of American industrial fabricators—consider how a dozen followers of Spam are packed in a can the identical shape and size. Nothing at all about the Big Inch Pipe Line, or even Little Inch, or the Canol project, or modern plastics, or even bobby socks and bubble gum. Nothing about the masterful way that Eastman Kodak packages and labels its goods, or how trains of both Northern Pacific and Great Northern pant together on adjoining tracks at Garrison, Montana, rivals worn out by the climb across the mountains. Or about the shop on Madison Avenue that sells “genuine diamond-back rattlesnake meat at $1.59 per five-ounce can,” the magazine publisher who called the German labor leader, Dr. Ley, “one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived in this or any other age,” about Lafayette Park in Washington where the four statues facing the White House are of four non-Americans, and of millions of people in New York who spend I don’t know how many thousand man-hours per year waiting for red lights to turn green.

Nonserious Moment before Serious Matters

The cleanest city I saw in America was Phoenix, Arizona; the dirtiest, Indianapolis, Indiana; the ugliest—with an intense, concentrated, degrading ugliness—Knoxville, Tennessee. The most beautiful house I saw was in Princeton, New Jersey; the ugliest building was a brewery in Spokane, Washington. The most crowded town I visited was San Diego, with Columbus, Ohio, as a close second choice; the least crowded was St. Louis. The most unexpectedly good hotels were in Denver, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Kansas City, and Spokane; the worst was in Charleston, South Carolina. The best beef I ever ate was in Montana, and the best ice cream in Richmond, Virginia; the best single meal I had in America was in Milwaukee, and the worst—but I give up!

The ugliest state capitol I saw was in Concord, New Hampshire, the most charming, that in Montpelier, Vermont; the most dramatic that of Nebraska, with Louisiana and North Dakota runners-up; the biggest, that of Rhode Island; the most unusual, because filled with showcases like a museum, that in Utah. The state with the dirtiest politics is probably Pennsylvania; the cleanest, a tossup between Wisconsin and Vermont. The worst-bossed state is Tennessee or New Jersey; the least-bossed, Washington or Arizona. The best-governed state is probably New York, and for the worst just blindfold yourself and stick a finger anywhere below the Mason and Dixon’s line.

The most sensational view I ever saw in America is that from the Top of the Mark in the Hotel Mark Hopkins, in San Francisco, and the most spectacular road I have ever driven on is the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. The most satisfying flight I ever took was from San Francisco up the coast past Mount Shasta; the most trying, from Jackson, Mississippi, to New Orleans. The smoothest roadbed I have ever known on an American railroad is the velvet line of the Milwaukee into Chicago; the worst trip I ever took on a railroad was from Salt Lake City to Cheyenne.

The city in America with the least visible street signs is Butte, Montana, and the town best policed is Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The most turbulent city is Chicago or Kansas City, and the quietest, Madison, Wisconsin or Santa Fe. The crudest newspaper in the United States is (or was) the Denver Post; the most enterprising and courageous is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The best conversation I heard was in Boston, Nashville, and Seattle; the best draft beer was in Baltimore or Denver; the rowdiest atmosphere was in Omaha or Memphis; the funniest thing I saw was a Thurber drawing owned by the late Bob Benchley, with the caption, “So you think you’re going to leave me, do you!”

Adding It Up: Tendencies and Questions

So now, at last, we come to the end of this long, detail-choked and multicolored journey. Our procession through forty-eight states is finally done. Without regard to any sectional or regional conclusions, let us try now to sum it all up—to weave out and twist together some of the variegated strands of this book, and hemstitch the whole job.

Everybody knows the celebrated epigram that all generalizations are untrue including this one. However, sticking the neck out is good exercise for the head:

First, no one can fail to recognize the immense and superexcessive physical vitality of the United States, a vitality often perverse and ill-directed, but a vitality just the same—massive, overriding, and of incomparable scope. This is probably a contributing factor to two extremely notable American characteristics, competition for competition’s sake and worship of success.

Second, diversity within unity. Whoever invented the motto E. Pluribus Unum has given the best three-word description of the United States ever written. The triumph of America is the triumph of a coalescing federal system. Complex as the nation is almost to the point of insufferability, it interlocks. Homogeneity and diversity—these are the stupendous rival magnets. Time and time again I felt, almost physically, the forces tending to pull a given community down to conformity, no matter how it struggled. I felt that the nation was like some huge monster bound down with an iron net, so that cushions in the flesh bulged out—but the net holds, the iron brace tingles with strain but contains its prisoner. Change the metaphor and think of the United States as an immense blanket or patchwork quilt solid with different designs and highlights. But, no matter what colors burn and flash in what corners, the warp and woof, the basic texture and fabric is the same from corner to corner, from end to end.

We could at considerable length sketch the main forces making for disunity—extremist politicians, pleaders for special privilege, each-for-himself-ism, and lack of discipline. Similarly the compounding unifying forces are easily open to inspection—everything from Abraham Lincoln to the advertising business, from abstractions in democratic theory to the Five and Ten and the corner movie. America is the country that is at home no matter where it goes.

Third—the point is a convenient one to make sequentially but its importance is not too great—the United States is, despite unparalleled development of all the known means of communication, despite unity and diversity both (each of which should contribute to knowledge of the nation as a whole), still an enormously provincial nation. I do not know any country that is so ignorant about itself. Sociologists have collected appalling statistics to show how little of American history American school children know, and although many good citizens can tell a visitor glibly and with authority what is going on in Uruguay or the Ukraine they know astonishingly little about affairs in the next county or who owns the local gasworks. The New York newspapers are the best in the nation. But try finding out from them what is really going on in New Orleans or St. Paul.

Fourth, I have sought to avoid mentioning in this list so far the well-known fact that the United States is “big.” Actually, though it is quite big, there are several other nations bigger—Russia, Canada, Brazil. Moreover physical bulk and size, or even physical incongruity, should not preclude self-knowledge and intercommunication.

I have also sought to avoid saying that the United States is “young” and “new.” As a matter of fact it is not so very young or new; it has an older record than any other important country except England of history under one form of government; what people usually mean when they say “new” is merely that our pace is so fast and headlong. To use “newness” as an excuse for American rawness, crudity, lack of coherence, administrative futilities, and much infantilism and slipshodness in social behavior, is surely a too facile begging of the question.

The very powerful and deep-seated American tendency to lawlessness and love of violence, a factor in the national scene never to be discounted, cannot altogether be explained on the ground that we are children growing up. Plenty of children are not criminals. Actually American lawlessness has roots very deep in the past.

Perhaps a fifth general point might have to do with the frontier. I have several times mentioned that, in the 1890’s, the American frontier in the traditional sense was considered closed. Of course a new “frontier” evolved promptly in the shape of high industrial wages, mass production, and the automobile industry in particular. But as a matter of fact there is plenty of frontier left in America; late in 1946 some western lands (except those that might contain ores of fissionable metals) were thrown open once more to homesteading. Cross the United States in an airplane; you cannot fail to note the huge and spectacular amount of emptiness; even in parts of the East and Middle West, to say nothing of the Great Plains and mountain states, you can fly for miles without seeing a house or a human being. The United States government still owns 455,183,251 acres of public domain, and almost anybody who wants to be a farmer can go out and get some, a fact unique in the panorama of the contemporary world. The generally prevalent idea that America is a “crowded” country is nonsensical. Don’t remind me of this sentence while waiting for a hotel room in New York City. But keep in mind that, even with homesteading latterly discouraged for various reasons and then cut off by the war, about a million American acres of farm land are open for homestead entry every year.

Sixth, a major American problem, discanted upon so often in this book, is the accelerated speed and magnitude of consumption of our natural resources, the reckless and inordinate waste of timber, petroleum, and above all soil. Against this, as the most potentially hopeful corrective, stands the work of TVA and the development of the valley authority idea in general.

Seventh, the American nation is by no means so materialistic as is often thought, but the fact remains that what it seems to be most married to is money. The United States was built on industrial expansion under capitalism; the risks were great, the rewards were greater. And what should be more natural than that the giant bulk of the population, whether rich or poor, should be money conscious, inasmuch as millions upon millions of people came here during the past hundred years precisely in order to find the pot of gold shining just beyond Ellis Island.

Eighth, pressure groups. Who runs the United States? We have named so far an infinity of lobbies and special interests, from Coca-Cola to the Masonic orders, from the American Legion to the embattled schoolteachers, from the agricultural co-operatives in California to the dairymen in Vermont. Everybody, it seems, runs this country; a jovial answer to the question might well be, “Too many people!” If one should try to draw up a list of members of some mythical “inner circle,” it could run to ten thousand names. And this—the intensely variegated and extraordinarily broad spread of public and private interest—is, as we stated in this book’s Foreword, basically a factor making for health and strength. At the same time, it is only too painfully obvious that any organized pressure group devoted to special privilege is dangerous and evil if it militates against the needs and interests of the nation as a whole—and many do. Despite the proliferating variety of special interests and power factors, it is not too difficult to find a common denominator. The common denominator is of course the propertied class. I do not mean “big” property necessarily though that certainly counts. I mean property in the sense of a banker’s loan large or small, a widow’s trust fund, a professor’s house, a student’s jalopy, a workman’s tools. That the United States of America is in final distillation and essence still run by the propertied class in the broadest sense of that term, is, it seems, the biggest single factor making for national unity. Also the fact that this class has failed in many of its duties, responsibilities, and obligations is the greatest single impediment to unity and the chief force making for discontent.

Now, ninth, we have also to consider men, that is leadership. There are cheap shysters in American public life, poltroons, chiselers, parvenus, and an infinitude of politicians bloated with intellectual edema. There are also wonderful old men like Stimson, and wonderful young men like Lilienthal. There is a splendid but disconcertingly small procession of able and useful citizens whether holding or aspiring to office or not—Stassen, La Guardia, Eisenhower, Bowles, Frank Graham, governors like Goodland, ex-governors like Arnall, Henry Wallace and Averell Harriman both, Krug and Ickes both, John G. Winant, General Marshall, General Bradley, Sumner Welles, Vannevar Bush, Milo Perkins, Aiken and Flanders of Vermont, Archibald MacLeish, David Sarnoff, Philip Murray, Dean Acheson (a conservative liberal), Will Clayton (a liberal conservative), Robert M. Hutchins, senators like O’Mahoney, Robert Moses, and Messrs. Justice Douglas, Jackson, and Hugo Black. The common denominator here is brains, integrity of conviction, good will, and social energy. That several folk on this list are Jews, that several are Catholics, that at least one is (or was) a violent isolationist, that one was born in Minsk, that both extreme conservatives and red-hot liberals are represented, and also that two or three of those named have violent hatreds for two or three others on the same list, makes no difference. They are all Americans who not only believe in America but in an America that could be better. What this country needs above all is effective national unity. Men like these can help provide it.

A familiar question is why so few United States citizens of the first category go into public life. The best answer in older days was double; men of the highest echelon in ability, imagination, brains, either devoted themselves to carving out the frontier or to making money, or both. Neither of these avenues for enterprise is, it would seem, quite what it used to be. A few folk, at least, seeing that payment must come nowadays in a different kind of coin are still entering into public careers at great personal sacrifice. But the number remains grotesquely small. Perhaps if the country itself had more confidence in its own institutions, a better sense of unity and direction and national will, more good people would be tempted to the enterprise of running it; yet it is only people themselves who can give will and direction, and so we have a vicious circle. An auxiliary point is that the United States has evolved no successful means of getting rid of a public servant once he has outlived his usefulness. It is after all an unkindness to our neighbors to make senescent party hacks our ambassadors abroad. As I heard it put in Washington, it would be God’s mercy if we had a House of Lords.

That this country needs more and better disinterested (in the sense of unselfish) leadership goes without saying; interested leadership from the point of view of clarity of purpose, singleness of mind, stability of plan and aspiration. This brings us, tenth, to considerations of politics, since one reason why many good men do not adopt public careers is that the professional politicians squeeze them out. About politics in the large there are a good many things to be said, and on each a whole chapter might well be written.

(1) Politicians in America rise predominantly from what used to be called “the lower middle class”; most are self-made men—as we know from dozens of examples—with careers behind them in everything from dentistry to butter-and-eggs; most depend on their political jobs for a livelihood and most have little time, inclination, or opportunity for adult education; hence the dominating qualities of so many are greed, vulgarity, attention to special interest, avarice, and selfishness.

(2) The greatest danger to American democracy may well reside in that group most particularly pledged to espouse it, the professional politicians, since it is their own incompetence and ineptitude—if coupled with financial depression—that is most likely to cause a breakdown.

(3) All this is in part the fault and responsibility of the people themselves since it is the people who elect the politicians, and is a result of inadequate education. But political apathy, except at election time, is a famous American characteristic; that bad politics should be taken for granted by so many good citizens is a long-standing paradox. Of course this strikes at the very root of democratic theory and procedure; a dichotomy has existed since this republic was born and it is still a potent element, the instinct of Americans generally to distrust and hold in contempt government as such, while at the same time professing loyalty to the democratic principles without which government could not exist.

(4) The legend that this country operates under a two-party system is to a certain extent an illusion. The South, Texas, Vermont, parts of the Southwest, are so much dominated by one party that, as we well know, the general election is only a formality; and in many other sections of the country the real struggle is in the primaries. That the major parties overlap and have little inner cohesion, except once every four years, is a point too obvious to be stressed. The two-party system, such as it is, has its usefulness however; it has tended to prevent growth of the kind of splinter politics that temporarily destroyed democracy in France, say; also, since each party is big and diffuse enough to include both left and right wings in a sloppy embrace, it has tended to inhibit in America the development of politics based on class.

(5) Politically speaking the most important issue in the United States today is the persistent tendency toward conflict between the executive and legislative branches of the government; but this is outside the province of this book.

(6) The veterans. The phenomenon may be temporary: but it is the veterans who hold the edge in almost all political contests nowadays, as was clearly indicated in 1946. But since veterans themselves are widely separated into various camps and groups, their impact is not felt singly. Related to this is, in a way, the development—also probably temporary—whereby many military people are holding critically important jobs at home and abroad that would normally go to civilians. Almost beyond doubt the most important governmental agency this country has ever created will be the five-man Atomic Energy Commission set up last year. Attending this was a battle between civilians and the military. The civilians won, but it was not an altogether clear-cut victory.

(7) The rise of labor as a distinct and self-conscious political force for the first time in American history on a national level, in part through the agency of the PAC.

(8) A great capacity to dig deep and pull out unknowns. Somebody unheard of now may very well be president of the United States in 1952.

Eleventh, the most gravid, cancerous, and pressing of all American problems is that of the Negro, insoluble under present political and social conditions though capable of great amelioration.

Now, twelfth, I should like to make a special small category of the fact, so often indicated in this book, that most American men and issues resist being put in categories. American mixedupness, which was caused by the extreme fluidity of industrial and social development during the last century and by the melting pot, which really does melt, and also by the institution of universal free primary education, is a standing puzzle to observers. I have noted that party lines are not clear. Neither are many other lines. The CIO is supposed by some to be “Communistic.” But Philip Murray and James B. Carey, two of its most distinguished leaders, are ardent Roman Catholics, and it is well known that Roman Catholics are never Communists. Labor leaders by general convention are often labeled “radical”; but John L. Lewis sometimes takes a line conservative in the extreme. The great metropolitan dailies live by advertising and might be presumed to be exclusively the mouthpieces of the commercial class; but in presentation of news the New York Times is much less the organ of a special interest than is the Daily Worker. High functionaries of the Catholic church are almost always assumed to be extreme conservatives; but two of the most outspoken liberals in the United States, except on matters involving Russia, are archbishops Lucey of San Antonio and Shiel of Chicago. Of course some leading Catholics are reactionary. There is a widespread belief that most Jews are liberal; but of five leading political columnists of Jewish faith or origin (Lipp-mann, Sokolsky, Lawrence, Grafton, Krock), one is as reactionary as Metternich plus Sewell Avery, and two are very definite conservatives. But of course many leading Jews are liberal. One could go on almost indefinitely with such contradictions. There are two Democrats and one Republican on the Civil Service Commission; the Republican is the only liberal. Or take journalism again. The best-known liberal weekly in the country is in part financed by a fortune made by association with the Morgans, and its competitor for many years was similarly in part dependent on a great railway fortune. Or look at PM which is, or was, supported largely by Marshall Field.

Thirteenth, no conspectus even as brief as this could possibly be complete without mention of the role played by women in American life. Consider simply their stupendous purchasing power. Not only is American civilization more matriarchal and dominated by women than any other; women voters outnumber men and actually hold the balance at the polls.

Fourteenth, the future of this country depends more on foreign policy than on any other factor, but I do not deal with it in this book. Foreign policy is, of course, nothing more or less than a reflection of domestic policy, and a glance immediately above will show why it is so confused—as well as a multitude of previous passages. It isn’t very easy for a country to have world sense when it hardly knows its own.

Occasionally somebody uses a phrase like “America believes” or “the United States thinks.” The subliminal absurdity of this should be clear by now. “America” never thinks. What does think is a whole great lot of people in America who most of the time are thinking very different things.

… And to Conclude

The United States became great largely because it was founded on a deliberate idea—a complex and enveloping idea including equality of opportunity for all, government only by the consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights; the form and spirit and texture of American society is based on individualism, civil liberties, and the democratic process. What will happen to it in a world that, even Mr. Churchill admits, has veered into a “permanent swing” toward totalitarianism and the left?

Two things are worth stating flatly. The long-run mood of this country is progressive. Never mind the 1946 off-year elections. Let no one think that the broad social gains that have come to the American people in the last generation can be easily dismissed; let no one think that Americans will ever again permit other Americans to starve without a struggle. There were, in this richest nation on earth, 22 million people on relief in 1935. On the other hand let nobody so delude himself as to think that the system of free enterprise (using that cliché in its broadest sense, and forgetting that it was often “free” only for the privileged, that it was often licensed enterprise) is dead in this country. The United States is still above all the land of the self-made man, where opportunities, though by no means “equal,” are incontestably open to more citizens than anywhere else on earth.

In blunt, naked fact the paradox just expressed—more than a mere paradox, in fact, the most blatant and insulting kind of contradiction—lies deep in the glossy roots of the earliest American history and tradition. It goes straight back to the first expanding-muscle days; it was a focus of the controversy between Jefferson and Hamilton. The problem of how to reconcile economic libertarianism with political democracy: or, to put it in slightly different terms, how to insure that, if the economic system breaks down, the political system can still carry on, is certainly no new thing. Democracy and capitalism have often been intertwined; when one goes down, so may the other. But it has never been very easy to make the accumulation of private property and vested interests go to bed with such paraphernalia of democracy as free compulsory education, social service, and universal suffrage—and enjoy it.

Actually the age of the Pleistocene marauders and despoilers has passed. People in this country who think that 1929 can ever come again are very rare. If I were asked to prophesy I should say—though reiterating a conviction that the permanent durable ground swell in this country is progressive—that the United States may well have a temporary period of very definite conservatism or even of reaction. But the era of unmitigated monopolistic control of the means of production, of unlimited accumulation of property by economic anarchists, is as dead as Tutankhamen. This is a country the heart fabric of which is puritan and radical, in the old frontier sense of the word “radical,” and it believes in two things above all else—no matter with what temporary divagations—progress and reform.

Not merely since the New Deal but since the turn of the century a tremendous transfer of power, political and economic power, from big holders of property to little has been going on. The stake of the nation in itself has been multifariously spread out. For a considerable time the propertied magnates were much stronger than the government, either the national government or the state legislatures. This produced in the end a variety of catastrophes, and the subsequent reaction brought about a condition wherein the government became stronger than the magnates. This is, very roughly, the situation that obtains today. But the essential self-perpetuating bone marrow of the capitalist system was, though deeply bitten into, not destroyed. The best definition of the New Deal I ever heard was that it was an attempt by a lot of milksop liberals to save capitalism for the “dumb” capitalists themselves.

Further progress and reform is certainly going to be inevitable and necessary. The next New Deal will make the last New Deal look mild. Because, in plain fact, no matter how buttressed up and artificially stimulated and massaged, the free enterprise philosophy is not working well enough; it is not sufficient. Fortune estimated in 1940 that 23 per cent of the American people had perforce to live “outside” the American system, and stated flatly that there are faults in the system “that will prove to be fatal if not corrected.” The lesson of much in Europe is that, if people have to choose between security and liberty, they will choose security. So at all costs the United States should avoid having to make this deplorable choice. Why not have both? What frightens so many people is “fear of government interference,” “regimentation,” and similar hobgoblins. These same hobgoblins have been wandering at large since the Interstate Commerce Commission was established in 1887; the great, indispensable, and altogether salutary institution of Rural Free Delivery was bitterly attacked as “socialism” when it was inaugurated in 1896; the United States did not even have an effective income tax until 1912. That so many Americans should fear government to the extent they do is an interesting phenomenon, since it means in a way that they fear themselves.

That some degree of government intervention and control in economic life—under the bright observing eyes of an absolutely free press and always under the stout guardianship of an absolute political democracy—has become a necessity, if only because of the enormously increased complexity and interdependence of the modern world, goes without saying. There is no group in this country that does not benefit from some sort of government enterprise. The most reactionary manufacturer wants the tariff. The most revolutionary plebeian wants public schools. Perhaps landlords don’t like rent control. But they don’t object to roads. Farmers don’t like a lot that goes on in Washington. But what a mighty explosion there would be if the government stopped supporting the price of cotton or wheat!

The splitting asunder of the world between left and right, which is the result both of revolutionary forces and of complacency and greed, has not—we should now point out with emphasis—produced in the United States anything like the gap that divides much of Asia and Europe. For this we have, strange as it may seem, the free enterprise system itself to thank in that equality of opportunity is still, despite everything, a pivotal keystone of American life and thought. There is much dissatisfaction with the system; but, by and large, even the have nots believe in it. It is still another great American paradox that many underpossessed citizens are among the most conservative the country has. Yet one should sound a note of warning here. Let the free enterprise system collapse, as a result of mismanagement or inflation, and the mood of this nation could dangerously change. Let there be fifteen million unemployed again, and blood can smear and spot the streets. Yet the folk who fear revolution most are at one and the same time those who oppose most bitterly the government planning and controls that seek to fend off disaster.

Two more pervasive generalizations are possible about the United States. One is that, more than any other, it is a lucky country with an almost obsessive belief in the happy ending. Read the Declaration of Independence, a remarkably pungent document; the phrase “pursuit of happiness” comes very near the top. The other is that, more than any country except England perhaps, it believes in compromise. The Constitution is fixed and absolute on its essential principles, freedom and the rights of man. But underneath is a veritable melange of compromises—over states’ rights, over slavery—and our whole history has been healthily relaxed by compromise, which means the rational approach, reason, the meeting of minds in honorable agreement after open argument. In these two considerations there lies great hope. An instinct for happiness often produces happiness; and nothing can be more valuable than reason, in an age shaken and made miserable by lack of faith, with a disintegration of so many values and with people pallid through fear and confusion and moral crisis.

American scientists are ceaselessly attacking in every sphere the frontiers of the unknown; American economists and social engineers have at hand techniques that can forestall a new depression; there is no valid reason why the American people cannot work out an evolution in which freedom and security are combined. Creative good will, coherent large-minded planning, clarity of vision, a grasp of the realities of the nation as a whole, spring-mindedness, education and more education, a fixed national purpose to make out of contemporary civilization weapons that will cure, not kill—all this is possible. In a curious way it is earlier, not later, than we think. The fact that a third of the nation is ill-housed and ill-fed is, in simple fact, not so much a dishonor as a challenge. What Americans have to do is enlarge the dimensions of the democratic process. This country is, I once heard it put, absolutely “lousy with greatness”—with not only the greatest responsibilities but with the greatest opportunities ever known to man.

Nine-tenths of this book is the result of direct evidence picked up by my own eyes and ears; overwhelmingly my sources are primary and personal, i.e., word-of-mouth. This is a proper and indeed unavoidable technique in journalism, and I make no pretense of being a historian. Yet certain historical passages were necessary, if only because that which precedes an event is often as interesting as the event itself, and because much in the contemporary American scene simply cannot be understood without some embryonic knowledge of the background. So I had to read a good deal of history and commentary. I like the direct eyes-and-ears approach; but after all you cannot “look” at the Dred Scott decision or “listen” to the Hartford Convention. Always I wanted to tell the whole story if I could. Some source material I have acknowledged in footnotes or the text itself as I went along. For other general sources the reader is referred to the bibliography and to a special list of material that follows.

The preparation of this book has, from first to last and from top to bottom, been a one-man job. I employed no professional researchers whatever, I tried to see what I could for myself. But a great number of friends and acquaintances helped me with the utmost benevolence and robust zeal, and I want to thank them all stoutly, at the same time issuing a disclaimer that nobody but me is to be held accountable for lopsided opinions, mistakes in judgment, or plain factual errors. A thousand generous people helped me. My real bibliography is the names that follow. But the final responsibility must be mine.

I prepared an early outline of this book and the book to ensue as long ago as September, 1944, and then followed it a few months later with a more concrete and ample syllabus. I sent this out to a variety of folk asking for their comments, if any; dozens responded and some went to the trouble of sending me long, well-considered memoranda, from which I derived great and chastening profit. Let me list some of their names, with thanks; Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs; Hamish Hamilton, my London publisher; the late Wendell L. Willkie; Professor Raymond Walsh of the CIO; Thomas W. Lamont of J. P. Morgan & Co.; Stuart Chase; colleagues like Dorothy Thompson, Jay Allen, Vincent Sheean, William L. Shirer, Walter Duranty, Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Junius B. Wood, Louis Fischer, and the late John T. Whitaker; Arthur H. Sulzberger of the New York Times and Helen R. Reid of the New York Herald Tribune; Thomas IC. Finletter; James A. Farley; Archibald MacLeish; Frank Darvell of the British Ministry of Information and later British consul in Denver; Robert Moses of New York City; Howard Vincent O’Brien of Chicago; Norman Corwin and Edward R. Murrow in the world of radio; Herbert Nicholas of Exeter College, Oxford; Jonathan Daniels; Anne O’Hare McCormick; Nicholas Roosevelt; George S. Messersmith, American ambassador to Mexico, and John C. Wiley, American ambassador to Colombia; Robert Riskin of the world of the movies; Harry Scherman of the Book-of-the-Month Club; Mark Van Doren; Clifton Fadiman; Robin Cruikshank j of the London News Chronicle; and the Schoeninger family of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Many of these helped me too by stimulating and corrective conversation.

Next I have to thank cordially those who read the entire book in manuscript—Cass Canfield of Harper and Brothers, my publisher; Carl Brandt, my agent; Tyler Kepner, of Brookline, Massachusetts, coauthor of America, Its History and People; Marguerite Hoyle of Harper and Brothers; and John Fischer, of the editorial staff of Harper’s Magazine, to all of whom my debt is inestimable. Also several folk read and criticized the MS in part, among them Lewis Gannett, literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune; Amy Loveman of the Book-of-the-Month Club; and Alexander Lindey, attorney at law. Hearty thanks are additionally due to Nancy Barnett, my secretary, who struggled ably and with patience over the whole manuscript, typing it in many drafts; Bernice Baumgarten of Brandt & Brandt; and to Kathleen Voute, who did the maps. And I have my son, John Jr., to thank for reading much of the script, especially in its early forms, and for working out the route on the front end paper. The back end paper is the work of the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Denver.

I sent various chapters and sections of the manuscript, though not the whole book, for criticism, correction, and amendment, to various friends in watch towers all over the country whom I had previously talked to. Among these, to whom my deep thanks are hereby rendered, are Professor J. Frank Dobie and Professor Robert H. Montgomery, both of the University of Texas; Chester H. Rowell and Ruth Newhall of the San Francisco Chronicle; Joseph Kinsey Howard, Montana newspaperman and author; Professor Morris E. Garnsey, chairman of the department of economics at the University of Colorado; John E. Lokar, secretary to ex-Governor Lausche of Ohio; Jennings Phillips Jr. of Salt Lake City, to whom my debt is indeed immense; James Pope, Don McWain, and Allan Trout of the Louisville Courier-Journal; James D. Blake of Harper and Brothers; Aubrey Drury, author of California, an Intimate Guide; George Springmeyer, attorney at law, Reno, Nevada; Richard L. Neuberger, member of the Oregon legislature, journalist, and author of Our Promised Land; Nelson C. Hazeltine and several of his associates on the Bonneville Power Administration; Judge and Mrs. R. M. Rainey of Oklahoma City; Harnett T. Kane, author of New Orleans Woman; Annette H. Peyser of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; John M. Henry of the Des Moines Register and Tribune; Charles Krutch, Chief of Graphic Services, TVA; William B. Chamberlain, secretary of the Sunshine Climate Club of Tucson, Arizona; Mrs. R. F. Love of the Wyoming State Tribune and Leader; and Virginius Dabney, distinguished editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. But again I want to emphasize that, just as I did every inch of the original research myself, so did I do all the irrevocable last-ditch checking myself, and if malproportions and blunders remain, the fault is mine alone, not that of these authorities I have named.

This book, and in particular the final detailed work thereon, was done under massive pressure of time and painful circumstance, and in its last stages it was written so quickly that there was no time for serialization. But some chapters did appear in various magazines, in abbreviated form thoroughly reworked and rewritten later, and for permission to reprint, I have the editors of Harper’s Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Pageant, Liberty, and Holiday to thank. Also the Reader’s Digest helped substantially to make my long trip possible. I should mention too that I used a few passages that originally appeared in that splendid newspaper, the Chicago Daily News, for which I was a reporter and foreign correspondent for many years.

Finally I want to express with grateful emphasis my special thanks to a special few, for the pleasure and profit I derived from their encouragement, hospitality, and illuminating talk: Douglas Southall Freeman, historian, editor of the Richmond News Leader, and biographer of General Lee; Archibald MacLeish; Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont; George W. Healy Jr., editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Attorney General Robert W. Kenny of the State of California; David E. Lilien-thal of TVA; Morris Ernst of New York City; Frederick L. Allen, editor of Harper’s Magazine, and John Fischer whom I have named above; Leon Henderson; Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Ralph Coghlan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Estes Kefauver, congressman from Tennessee; Brooks Emeny of Cleveland and Waldo Pierson of Cincinnati; Clarence A. Dykstra, provost of the University of California, Los Angeles; Eleanor Roosevelt; H. L. Mencken; Countess Eleanor Palffy; James Kerney Jr., editor of the Trenton Times, and Manchester Boddy, editor of the Los Angeles News; Colonel Joseph W. Evans, president of the Houston Cotton Exchange; Roy A. Roberts of the Kansas City Star; Bartley C. Crum of San Francisco; Robert E. Sherwood; Roderick Peattie, professor of geography, Ohio State University; Raymond Swing; Carl Friedrich, professor of government at Harvard; Clare Boothe Luce; Sinclair Lewis; J. David Stern of Philadelphia; Gideon Seymour, executive editor of the Minneapolis Star-Journal; Silliman Evans, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean; Lillian Smith, author of Strange Fruit; E. D. Nicholson of United Airlines, Denver; Charles P. Curtis Jr., of Boston, co-editor of the Practical Cogitator; B. L. Anderson of Forth Worth, Texas, and David Caughren of Sauk Centre, Minnesota; former Chief Justice Howard A. Johnson of the supreme court of Montana; Mr. and Mrs. Albert D. Lasker; Dr. Cornelius Horace Traeger of New York; Barnet Nover, foreign affairs columnist of the Washington Post, and Thomas K. Finletter, attorney and former special assistant to the secretary of state.