From the early years of the Republic, Americans have lived with an international reputation for excessive love of money and the obsessive pursuit of gain. They became accustomed to it. It came from all sides, friend and foe, and appeared to amount to an international consensus. It was expressed in varying degrees of opprobrium and was mixed at times with traces of envy or admiration. It continued in currency, decade after decade from the eighteenth century to the present. The word “materialism” apparently did not come into usage in this sense until the middle of the nineteenth century. It was soon marshalled for this purpose, though “American materialism” did not reach full notoriety until the twentieth century.

Long before the term “materialism” was applied to it, the idea had accumulated a considerable literature of elaboration. Reporting that a conversation between Americans was never heard without the word “dollar” being used, Mrs. Trollope remarked, “Such unity of purpose, such sympathy of feeling, can, I believe, be found nowhere else except, perhaps, in an ants' nest.”¹ To Charles Dickens it appeared that “all their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations seemed to be melted down into dollars.”² Everything spiritual and temporal was measured in money. “And how they talk of money!” echoed a critic from the next century. “In snatches of conversation caught in the streets, the restaurants, and the cars … always ‘dollars-dollars-dollars!’”³

These foreign characterizations of American life took on a less unflattering form when phrased as descriptions of American work habits. In that form they emphasized industriousness, energy, efficiency, and zeal for the task at hand. As Michel Chevalier put it, “The American mechanic is a better workman, he loves his work more, than the European. He is initiated not merely in the hardships, but also in the rewards, of industry.”⁴ A Scottish worker with three years in the States put it rather less attractively: “‘Hurry up’ is a phrase in the mouth of every person. … Work, work, work, is the everlasting routine of every day life. … To say that these people are extremely industrious would by no means convey a correct idea of their habits; the fact is they are selfish and savagely wild in devouring their work.”⁵ Adjustment to the pace of the American work-work-work ethic was a shock for European immigrant workers. They were warned by a Scottish businessman that they should not make the effort unless prepared “to do much more than even hard-working men do here,”⁶ an adjustment that Anthony Trollope thought “to an English workman would be intolerable.”⁷ Sir Charles Lyell at mid-nineteenth century described “a country where all, whether rich or poor, were laboring from morning till night” and where “the national motto should be, ‘All work and no play.’”⁸ This foreign perception of American habits persisted in the next century. “The American not only works faster,” wrote George Smart in 1912, “he walks faster,—everything he does is done more fiercely. He is increasing his pace continually. …”⁹ And a German visitor of 1928 thought “This sense of hurry has permeated American homes; the women and even the children are imbued with it. Americans do not know what leisure is. …”¹⁰

In making such generalizations about work and leisure in America, those who mentioned the South at all in this connection did so to make an exception of it. The southerner was understood to “possess less of the enterprising spirit,” to be fond “above all, of idleness,” to give way to “indolence,” and to cultivate leisure in a European and most un-American way.¹¹ The West, on the other hand, was quite a different story. “For the West is the most American part of America,” as James Bryce saw it; “that is to say, the part where those features which distinguish America from Europe come out in the strongest relief. What Europe is to Asia, what England is to the rest of Europe, what America is to England, that the Western States and Territories are to the Atlantic States. … All is bustle, motion, and struggle. … They throw themselves into work with a feverish yet sustained intensity. They rise early, they work all day, they have few pleasures, few opportunities for relaxation. I remember in the young city of Seattle on Puget Sound [in the 1870s] to have found business in full swing at seven o'clock A.M.: the shops open, the streets full of people.”¹²

Even in the streets of the effete East, Europeans were struck with the feverish bustle and connected it with what one called a “greater uniformity of stature, shape, feature, and expression, among both the men and women of America, than there is in England.”¹³ In spite of mixed origins, Anthony Trollope thought “no man has a type of face so clearly national as an American,” who was “as completely marked as … any race under the sun.” He attributed the uniformity to “hot-air pipes and … dollar-worship.”¹⁴ Captain Marryat was struck by “a remarkable family likeness among the people,” so much so that every man on the street seemed to be “a brother or a connection of the last man who had passed me.” He decided it was because “they were all intent and engrossed with the same object”—money, and that “this produced a similar contraction of the brow, knitting of the eyebrows, and compression of the lips—a similarity of feeling had produced a similarity of expression, from the same muscles being called into action.”¹⁵ Herbert Spencer lent his support to the theory. “I perceive in American faces generally,” he said in 1882, “a great amount of determination—a kind of ‘do or die’ expression,” which he associated with “a power of work exceeding that of any people.”¹⁶

Europeans felt impelled to explain the national peculiarity they observed and offered numerous theories to account for the feverish striving of Americans and its concentration on pursuit of wealth. An obvious explanation was that there was so much wealth to be pursued, so many fortunes still to be made, whereas in the Old World “the lottery is long since over … the great prizes are already drawn.”¹⁷ Another was the preoccupying challenge of an unbroken continent to be settled and subdued. Neither tradition nor law tied them to home or land. The Polish writer Adam G. Gurowski noticed that an American youth would announce a trip to Canton as casually as a European would plan a visit to a neighboring province. “Mobility urges the American incessantly to work, to undertake, to spread, create, produce,” said Gurowski.¹⁸

A standard explanation for concentration on money-making was the relative absence of competing goals and interests. While Europeans of ambition and talent might pursue careers in literature, science, or the arts, Americans, in Tocqueville's damning opinion, were “swayed by no impulse but the pursuit of wealth.”¹⁹ He and many later critics assumed that politics in America were too petty and mean to attract ability of the first order. The pursuit of wealth had a peculiar attraction in a democracy. Since democracy ruled out distinction by title, rank, or heredity, wealth was likely to be the chief or only means of gaining status and distinction in society. Since the rules supposedly opened competition to all and since, as Achille Murat said, “every thing is to be won by competition: fortune, power, love,” the stimulus to ambition was enormous, and the means of satisfying it was money.²⁰ One critic reflected the opinion of many in concluding that in America the “word money seems to stand as the representative of the word ‘happiness’ of other countries.”²¹ So the pursuit of happiness came to mean for many the pursuit of money.

Realizing that to indict a whole nation for cupidity was a serious thing, foreign critics have at times tempered the indictment with various modifications. Few have denied that love of money was peculiarly strong in Americans, for that charge in one form or another has stuck with them for two centuries. What the more temperate or friendly commentators did was to advance another theory of American exceptionalism. Money and the getting of it had a different significance in America. Rather than the result of greed or avarice or rapacity, money was the “counter in the game,” the only token or symbol of strivings that in Europe could find outlet in social, aesthetic, intellectual, or political achievements. The pursuit of money, said Gurowski, “becomes an intellectual drilling, and a test of skill. It becomes a game, deeply combined, complicated—a struggle with men and events, exciting, captivating, terrible. …”²² As Hugo Münsterberg understood it, “Money is not the thing which is considered, but the manner of getting it.”²³

Behind the American's attitudes toward money were his deeper attitudes toward work, which George Smart thought he made a sort of religion: “he makes labor per se an obscuring idolatry. His joy of living is a joy of working, that exceeds the patient laboriousness of Europe; and the élan that Europe keeps for military and social life he keeps for work alone.” Compared with the European, “The American works longer, to a later age, he has hardly yet begun to feel the monotony of labor or business.”²⁴ Europeans deemed the work ethic a national trait, but considered its cult aspects the contribution of the business class. “The rough, broad difference between the American and the European business man,” wrote Arnold Bennett, “is that the latter is anxious to leave his work, while the former is anxious to get to it. … It is not his toil, but his hobby, passion, vice, monomania.”²⁵ As G. K. Chesterton put it, “the American talks about his work and the Englishman about his holidays. His ideal is not labour but leisure.”²⁶ The Americans, southerners excepted, either abominated leisure or did not know what to do with it; nor, it was generally agreed, did they really know what to do with the money they made.

For all that, European critics through the early years of the twentieth century were inclined to view American money-making as a youthful exuberance in response to unprecedented opportunity, a temporary obsession they would outgrow. Some went so far as to concede that “The American esteems money as money less than the Englishman of equal station,—less than the French rentier.”²⁷ And a German believed that “in Europe materialism is more materialistic, brutality more brutal, and the dullness of life is even duller than in America, where spaciousness and plenty seem to soften and mellow these traits.”²⁸ All along, however, the spaciousness was contracting, the opportunities were diminishing, and the scramble for riches was limited to fewer and fewer. Fortunes of the few became greater and the poverty of many more apparent. While Europe struggled out of the ruins of the First World War and watched the great boom of prosperity across the Atlantic, the rhetoric of criticism took on a sharper edge.

“Materialism” had been associated with Americanism in the European vocabulary for three-quarters of a century, but in 1926 America became “the Baphomet of the age—Materialism gross and unrefined, bloated with the wind of strange beliefs.”²⁹ In the titles that books on the subject took in that period America was variously described as a Midas, in two titles as a Menace, in another a Cancer, in still another as a Babbit Warren, and in a French title simply as The Enemy. It was not only a menace to its own people, but to European civilization as well. It sold everything. It was a plutocracy untrammelled, without countervailing forces of civil service, army, or navy, much less aristocracy. Business ruled all it surveyed. Amateur anthropologists of the previous century had pointed out that Americans pay visits rather than make them, that they incur social debts and discharge them with interest, that “everything in America is a matter of business. A dinner is a transaction of barter, for which another equally good is expected. …”³⁰ The twentieth-century school of amateur anthropologists extended the old thesis to embrace the commercialization and business domination of an entire culture—church, state, school and press, marriage, family, home, and club, art, literature, all. It was a machine civilization, “a paradise for Robots.” It was “organized to produce things rather than people, with output set up as a god.” André Siegfried, the critic last quoted, added: “In its pursuit of wealth and power, America has abandoned the ideal of liberty to follow that of prosperity.”³¹ As pictured by extremists, it was a society without a soul. In its extreme form this indictment of the business civilization in America matches the severity of rhetoric leveled later on at the “blue ants” and their masters in modern collectivist societies.

The charge of materialism carried with it the charge of an indifference to the non-material in civilization, the life of the mind and imagination, the world of arts, letters, science, and learning. Long before the label of “materialism” gained currency, the new republic's shortcomings in this realm were the subject of consensus among European commentators. A famous early statement of their point of view by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review of 1820 is worth recalling. Summing up the first forty years of independence of the Americans, he declared that “they have done absolutely nothing for the Sciences, for the Arts, for Literature, or even for statesman-like studies of Politics or Political-Economy.” And then his battery of contemptuous questions, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons … ? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans?”³² The poverty of arts remained a persistent theme in the European commentary on American civilization for the next century. Few critics went so far as the French author in the 1850s whose chapter entitled “Les Beaux-Arts en Amerique” consisted of three perfectly blank pages.³³ But it was a standard theme among French writers such as Balzac, Stendhal, to some extent Hugo, and on through Renan and Taine.³⁴

The main question among Europeans in the nineteenth century was not the extent of this cultural poverty but the reason for it and particularly whether the basic cause was democracy and equality. Tocqueville readily acknowledged that “in few of the civilized nations of our time have the higher sciences made less progress than in the United States; and in few have great artists, distinguished poets, or celebrated writers been more rare.” He went on to say there were “no great historians and not a single eminent poet,” and that Americans looked on literature “with a kind of disapprobation” and were “averse to general ideas. …” He was less clear, however, about the connection between these shortcomings and the existence of democracy. On the one hand he deplored the tendency of many Europeans to regard this “as a natural and inevitable result of equality,” for that was “to mingle, unintentionally, what is democratic with what is only American.” He pointed out that the situation of the Americans was “quite exceptional,” and that there were “a thousand special causes,” including “their exclusively commercial habits” that tended “to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts … to fix the mind of the American upon the purely practical objects” and to draw him “earthward.” On the other hand, he could sometimes support the opposite view, as when he wrote: “There is no class … in America in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary posture and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal want of the desire and the power of application to these objects.” And again he wrote that “the reason” for the absence of great writers was that “freedom of opinion does not exist in America,” a circumstance he attributed to the tyranny of the majority in a democracy.³⁵

As was natural to expect, the more conservative critics generally fixed upon democracy and equality as the real reason for the American desert of the beaux arts. According to Captain Basil Hall, “one of the effects of democracy” was “unquestionably, to lower the standard of intellectual attainment, and, also, by diminishing the demand for refinement of all kinds, to lessen the supply.” Under these circumstances “it would be the most unreasonable thing imaginable to expect the arts and sciences to flourish.”³⁶ Thomas Hamilton agreed that the democratic society of America provided no leisure, no audience, no sympathy, and no encouragement for arts, letters, and learning, and that taste and enlightenment among “the younger portion of the richer classes” were markedly lower than that of their fathers' generation.³⁷ The artist in America, observed Thomas Colley Grattan, was “disappointed and dyspeptic” and those artists who could fled to Europe. “In his own country he must be little better than a drudge, with incompetent critics and niggardly patrons, excluded from ‘fashionable’ society.” “Democracy secures great physical enjoyment to a people,” he wrote, “but it cramps the nation's intellect.” It was America's fate “to do the labour of the world. All the higher duties of human improvement are done for her. The exercises of lofty thought, and the elegances of art, all come from Europe.” In all this America was a consumer, not a producer.³⁸ “The lamp of artistic truth burns with a feeble flame; and mediocrity is allowed to take the highest place,” wrote Sir Lepel Griffin in 1884; “in no department of art, has any work, drama, novel, poem, painting, or musical composition been produced which could justly be placed in the first class.”³⁹

Americans laughed at the posturing of Oscar Wilde, but they took Matthew Arnold with terrible seriousness, though he reached his conclusions before coming to America. There was little they could do about what Arnold called the “want of what is elevated and beautiful, of what is interesting” by which he explained the “great void” in American civilization. These deficiencies included “ancientness,” and he specified cathedrals, parish churches, feudal castles, and Elizabethan country homes. He also found the landscape “not interesting” and the climate harsh. He assured Americans in the most “friendly” fashion, he said, that “the great bulk of the nation” were Philistines, “a livelier sort of Philistine than ours,” but a greater percentage. He quoted Renan on “their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence.” Yet they were irretrievably given to self-flattery. Arnold was quite prepared to admit that democracy had solved “the human problem,” the problems of economics and politics, but he held that “everything is against distinction,” particularly “the glorification of the common man.” Washington and Hamilton were distinguished, but they “belong to the pre-American age”; Lincoln had many virtues, but “not distinction.” Arnold entertained doubts that anything of true excellence and distinction was forthcoming from the democracy.⁴⁰

Other Victorian greats added their bit to the picture in their individual styles. Carlyle hailed “the supreme achievement of the American people,” which was “to have begotten, with a rapidity beyond recorded example, Eighteen Millions of the greatest bores ever seen in this world before.” And Ruskin saluted their “lust of wealth, and trust in it; vulgar faith in magnitude and multitude, instead of nobleness; … perpetual self-contemplation issuing in passionate vanity; total ignorance of the finer and higher arts. …”⁴¹

Americans derived what soothing they could from the salve with which James Bryce usually applied his criticism. “All things considered,” he wrote, “I doubt whether democracy tends to discourage originality, subtlety, refinement, in thought and expression.” He pointed out that arts and literature had been debased and vulgarized “under absolute monarchies and under oligarchies.” This was not to deny the deficiencies mentioned. In fact his appraisal was rather similar to Arnold's. “Life is not as interesting in America … as it is in Europe,” he said flatly; “because society and the environment of men are too uniform.” He too mentioned the absence of “objects which appeal to the imagination,” including those “castles gray with age.” It was not merely a question of why America “has given us few men of highest and rarest distinction, but whether it has failed to produce its fair share of talents of the second rank.” Granted there was a distinctive note in American letters that “may be caught by ears not the most delicate,” he professed his inability to say which “peculiarity of American literature is due to democracy.” No, the question remained, “why the trans-Atlantic branch, nowise inferior in mental force, contributes less than its share to the common stock,” for they “draw from Europe far more than they send to her, while of art they produce little and export nothing.” Bryce thought “the causes lie deeper.” He mentioned tentatively the hustle and bustle, the exciting distractions, the lack of patience and time, and the lack of an atmosphere “charged with ideas as in Germany” or with “critical finesse as in France.” He hoped cheerfully that time would change all that.⁴²

Low estimates of American culture explained by the affects of democracy and equality were not confined to conservative Europeans, for they were often shared by radicals of the twentieth century. The English socialist Beatrice Webb believed that “there is something in the way of life and the mental environment of the U.S.A that hinders or damps down the emergence of intellectual or artistic distinction.” She observed that America in the previous generation had produced “no men or women in any way comparable in mental force to a Bismarck, a Renan, or a Darwin,” or for that matter “to the host of literary men” and men of genius turned out every year by “the three great European races.” She explained this deficiency by “two radically false assumptions with which all Americans start their career. …” The second of these was their addiction to classical economic theory, but first and foremost “of these fallacies is the old constitutional maxim that ‘all men are born free and equal’ …” This doctrine prevented Americans from showing proper respect to intellectuals with “real originality of outlook or intensity of talent.” In England, on the other hand, she said, “the old attitude of reverence to kings, nobles, priests has been gradually transferred to men of distinction during the transitional years from political oligarchy to political democracy.” Mrs. Webb once described herself as “the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world,” claims that probably did not gain immediate endorsement in America. She observed during a visit to the country in 1898 that “the very qualities he [the American] most needs” were “reverence for authority and historical knowledge of human affairs.”⁴³ The first extensive communist critique of civilization in the United States appeared in 1922 under the title Americanism: A World Menace. The author wrote contemptuously of the “intellectual and spiritual poverty of American life,” scorned its pretensions of equality and democracy, and attributed the vulgarization of culture to the power of big business.⁴⁴

Not all European critics were so harsh or sweeping in their estimates of American cultural strivings, and there were some who offered words of encouragement, though most often in a patronizing manner. Even an occasional Frenchman such as Paul Bourget could speak of the appearance of “admirable American artists” and discount “the prediction that there will never be any American art.”⁴⁵ A German pundit could note with approval the appearance of museums, orchestras, and theaters, though adding that the source of these activities was “not the creative genius, but the average citizen, in his striving after self-perfection and culture.”⁴⁶ From time to time Europeans were belatedly discovering or rediscovering a Winslow Homer or a George Innis or a John Singer Sargent, a St. Gaudens or a Remington, and perennially rediscovering jazz and attributing it to Africa. Brooklyn Bridge received due praise and later the George Washington Bridge. The Europeans had least trouble agreeing on admiration for twentieth-century architecture, though they did not always admire the same things or the right things. Mainly they were staggered by the skyscrapers and lavishly admired their vitality, even when adding that they were more the product of engineering than art, or were “for the most part entirely a matter of economics.” Still, they were the perfect expression of American civilization and a relief from the “classic banalities” of Washington's Roman temples, or the “Gothic monstrosities” of public architecture. Few foreign critics appear to have noticed industrial or domestic architecture, and almost none appear to have heard of the architectural genius of the age, Louis H. Sullivan.⁴⁷ Along with detractors and deplorers, American arts won a few champions, mainly amateurs. Arnold Bennett was exasperated by the failure of upper-class Americans to appreciate native genius, especially in the theater and in industrial architecture.⁴⁸ Sir Philip Gibbs, a popular novelist, could be quite carried away by his enthusiasm for a predicted American Golden Age. It would be “fresh and springlike, and rich in vitality and promise,” like the Elizabethan period because Americans were “hearty, healthy, and rich,” much like the Elizabethans.⁴⁹

In the meantime, pending the flowering of an Elizabethan Yankeedom, European skeptics carried on their venerable tradition of finding no oasis in the American cultural desert. “There is no culture in America,” wrote G. Lowes Dickinson, philosopher and critic. He declared that, “Nowhere on that continent,” was there any class who “respect not merely art but the artistic calling. Broadly, business is the only respectable pursuit.”⁵⁰ In the twenties C. N. Bretherton echoed, “America has not, at present, any civilization of its own.” Looking ahead he asked, “Will the Americans of a hundred years hence have any intellect?” The answer was, “they will, if they proceed along the road they are now taking, have none at all.”⁵¹ Hilaire Belloc thought an indigenous national literature had not even begun.⁵² A German editor concluded that “Material prosperity covers up an inner void. Probably the American atmosphere is a handicap to cultural progress.”⁵³ André Siegfried declared that “modern America has no national art and does not even feel the need of one.” It sacrificed all to “material progress.”⁵⁴ The classic speculation about what the future archaeologists would find in the ruins produced one Cassandra who doubted there would be anything at all to indicate a loss to mankind.⁵⁵ Another, Georges Duhamel, agreed that, “Should it fall into ruins tomorrow, we should seek in its ashes in vain for the bronze statuette that is enough to immortalize a little Greek village. Ruins of Chicago!—prodigious heap of iron-work, concrete, and old plaster.”⁵⁶ And there were still more Cassandras. “Meanwhile, on the western side of the Atlantic,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “the progressive falsification of values steadily continues.”⁵⁷

If our European critics have found the American cultural scene so desolate, what profit or reward could they have found in exploring it so often and at such length? What justification did they find for such efforts? They have spilled barrels of ink on the subject through the centuries. Speculating on their outpourings, Harold Laski, who contributed more than his share of the ink, once wrote: “In the complex relationship between the European tradition and Americanism, the European has found it hard to surrender his right to patronize the American. He has had, therefore, to find some way of rationalizing this right.”⁵⁸ I think the fundamental rationalization amounts to an unacknowledged consensus about American civilization among European critics. Vaguely formulated as it was, it could be shared by both friendly and unfriendly commentators with contrasting implications. It appeared in the eighteenth century and collected a variety of adherents in the next two hundred years.

In the final lines of the book on his American travels in 1788, Brissot de Warville gave the more friendly turn to the conception. First he pointed out that the way to despotism lay through men of power, ambition, and genius using the ignorant populace to destroy “the enlightened but aristocratic middle order.” But then, he cheerfully added, “Here in America there are no men of great power, no men of genius, no aristocratic middle order, no populace.” Lacking both men of genius and ignorant masses, America escaped despotism. “General prosperity can be found only in this mean,” he wrote.⁵⁹ Brissot would probably not have been averse to calling “this mean” of his the Golden Mean, le juste milieu. Nor would La Rochefoucauld, who used the same concept in as friendly a way.⁶⁰ Less sympathetic critics, who also found the idea useful, have called it “the way of mediocrity.” Instead of the Golden Mean, perhaps a Brazen Mean. Between the mean conceived as golden and that conceived as brazen stretched the flexible bounds of the European consensus on America.

Tocqueville, as usual, fell between the extremes, but well within the broad consensus. At the conclusion of his Democracy in America, he summed up the thesis that ran through many of his pages: the painful dilemma with which America confronted the modern world. There was no country in the world, he observed more than once, where “there are so few ignorant and at the same time so few learned individuals.” One's estimate of America depended on “what is wanted of society, and its government.” If the object were “to refine the habits, embellish the manners, and cultivate the arts, to promote the love of poetry, beauty, and glory,” that was one thing. If on the other hand, the goals were “the production of comfort and the promotion of well-being,” if it were “to ensure the greatest enjoyment and to avoid the most misery,” that was another. He compared losses with gains. In the democratic world, “The sentiment of ambition is universal, but the scope of ambition is seldom vast … life is not adorned with brilliant trophies, but it is extremely easy and tranquil … genius becomes more rare, information more diffuse … less perfection, but more abundance in all the productions of the arts. … Almost all extremes are softened or blunted: all that was most prominent is superseded by some middle term, at once less lofty and less low, less brilliant and less obscure, than what before existed in the world.” Tocqueville confessed that “the sight of such universal uniformity chills and saddens me,” but conceded that this feeling stemmed from his “own weakness.” In the sight of the Creator, he believed that a “state of equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just: and its justice constitutes its greatness and beauty.”⁶¹

Europeans since Tocqueville have played many variations on this theme. They have tried to capture their meaning in a variety of metaphors—some more flattering than others. “If the social structure … has no florid Corinthean capital rising into the clear air above,” wrote Alexander Mackay, “neither has it a pedestal in the mire beneath.” Wanting in ornament, it was “also wanting in much of the painful and degrading.”⁶² In Europe, as Anthony Trollope put it, men stood “on a long staircase, but the crowd congregates near the bottom,” whereas “in America men stand upon a common platform, but the platform is raised above the ground, though it does not approach in height the top of our staircase.”⁶³ Granting much “general well-being among the people at large,” Thomas C. Grattan added: “Each man at all elevated in the social scale seems to pay a certain per centum of his better qualities—a sort of intellectual property-tax into the public treasury of morals,” thus leaving no one outstanding. Minus what he called “the splendid contrasts of the European system,” he thought that “a medium civilization is alone feasible.” No towering peaks and no abyss: only the green and placid plains of American democracy.⁶⁴ Even so stalwart a pro-American as John Bright conceded that the advance of general intelligence came at the cost of individual eminence, but held that “instead of individual greatness you have the greatness of a nation.”⁶⁵

It was certainly the golden rather than the brazen side of the American mean that James Bryce held up in this passage: “Life in America is in most ways pleasanter, easier, simpler than in Europe; it floats in a sense of happiness like that of a radiant summer morning.” Yet he followed that with the qualification that “life in any of the great European countries is capable of an intensity, a richness blended of many elements, which has not yet been reached in America.”⁶⁶ This lacked the sting of Tocqueville's estimate: “Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with petty interests—in one word, so anti-poetic—as the life of a man in the United States.”⁶⁷ Yet the latter was probably nearer to the center of the European consensus than the former. If America, said G. Lowes Dickinson, “is not burdened by masses lying below the average, [she] is also not inspired by an elite rising above it. Her distinction is the absence of distinction. No wonder Walt Whitman sang the ‘Divine Average.’ There was nothing else in America for him to sing.”⁶⁸ George Santayana put it more genially: “American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.”⁶⁹

Most Europeans of the classes from which the critics of American life came were prepared to concede that it was good enough, even better than Europe, for working-class people—but not for them. “These people are happy,” wrote Fanny Kemble, “—their wants are satisfied, their desires fulfilled—their capacities of enjoyment meet with full employment … but how is it with me?” That was another matter. “The heart of a philanthropist may indeed be satisfied, but the intellectual man feels a dearth that is inexpressibly painful.”⁷⁰ Sir Charles Lyell, the famous geologist, who made four extended visits to America, thought that for the laboring class it was “the land where they are best off, morally, physically, and intellectually”; yet he declared he had “no wish whatever to live there” himself.⁷¹ Lord Bryce said he had “never met a European of the upper or middle classes who did not express astonishment when told that America was a more agreeable place than Europe to live in. ‘For working men,’ he would answer, ‘yes’ …” Bryce was one of the few of his time—though many joined him later—who could find appeals in American life “which may well make a European of any class prefer to dwell there.” Prominent among these appeals were those that sprang from the very source of traditional upper-class disdain—that is, equality. There was, he thought, “a certain charm, hard to convey,”—but more good nature, heartiness, frankness, ease “than is possible in countries where every one is either looking up or down.” Whatever it was—and he thought equality was the key—it enabled people “to take their troubles more lightly than they do in Europe.” But against that he admitted one “serious drawback—its uniformity”—that dreadful uniformity that had been and remained the common complaint. “Travel where you will,” he observed, “you feel that what you have found in one place you will find in another.”⁷²

The question remained whether with all their equality and uniformity, their energy and their zeal, their bustle and abundance the Americans had enjoyed any genuine success in their pursuit of happiness. Another form the question took was whether the happiness they claimed to enjoy was worthy of the name. The arcadian bliss attributed to post-Revolutionary America for a period was largely a projection of European dreams. But then the doubts and denials they later developed were largely the projections of European fears and darker moods. The assessment of another people's happiness is necessarily a subjective exercise. Subjective or not, our critics often thought they perceived signs of unhappiness, strains of melancholy, emptiness, and inner loneliness running through American life. Although he thought these people were “placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords,” it seemed to Tocqueville that “a cloud habitually hung, upon their brow,” that they were “serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures,” and that they were haunted by “that strange melancholy” which he associated with democracy, “easy circumstances,” and uniformity.⁷³ A century later a sympathetic German observer of Americans spoke of an “inner loneliness” and “a feeling of dissatisfaction which prevents them from being fundamentally at peace,” a malaise they “try to cover up” by “hurrying and rushing” and feverish “outward activity.”⁷⁴ A generally benign Englishman who eventually became an American citizen, thought there were “more lonely people in the United States than in any population of equal size in European lands.” He arrived at a conclusion that we may hope he overcame before taking out naturalization papers. “For a country that makes ‘the pursuit of happiness’ one of its political programs,” he wrote, “America has stupendously failed.”⁷⁵ A contemporary and most unbenign compatriot of his searched “the hurrying, stampeding thousands,” in American streets in vain for “one face that looks happy or contented, or even satisfied with his lot.”⁷⁶

A sunnier side of the national disposition had been noted by many other European critics—all the way back to Crevecœur, including Barbé-Marbois, Brissot, Chevalier, Grund, Gurowski, Bremer, Cobden, Bryce, Kipling, Muirhead. All that heartiness, cheerfulness, good-natured humility, outgoing hopefulness, all that optimistic fatalism or fatalistic optimism could not be wholly denied by the Cassandras. But even their concessions were linked with a denial. Thus Captain Marryat: “Again, I repeat, the Americans are the happiest people in the world in their own delusions.”⁷⁷ Or that most consummate of Irish snobs, Thomas Colley Grattan: “They possess one great element of true happiness in a general placidity of temper, although it arises from a negative cause.”⁷⁸ And finally, a rarer philosophic, if sardonic, spirit, Aldous Huxley in the role of Diogenes investigating American happiness in Los Angeles, the “City of Dreadful Joy,” he called it. There was, indeed, joy in America. “And what joy! The joy of rushing about, of always being busy, of having no time to think, of being too rich to doubt.” It provoked even darker reflections: “In modern America the Rome of Cato and the Rome of Heliogabalus coexist and flourish with an unprecedented vitality.” And all this among a people “unaware of war or pestilence or famine or revolution.” It made him wonder if the “truest patriots” were not “those who pray for a national calamity.”⁷⁹

It has been noted before that for every trait attributed to the national character, its opposite has been attributed with equal conviction if not equal authority. One would not expect to find in Hilaire Belloc, the Catholic poet, novelist, historian, and indomitable champion of thirteenth-century values, the antithesis of the prophets of American doom. Yet it was Belloc who could write that “the Americans were happier than any people of the Old World,” indeed “much happier,” in fact “the happiest white people in the modern world.” And he thought “the cause of the happiness is Candour,” for “The American people live in truth,” and with “that sort of freedom in the soul which is the breeding soil of happiness.”⁸⁰

Unimpeded and uninformed by these contradictory advices from abroad, the Americans continued, as they had from the time of their eighteenth-century proclamation of the policy, their pursuit of happiness—with success perhaps as widely varied as their numerous European critics' estimates of their happiness.

Notes

1. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Donald Smalley (New York, 1949; original ed., 1832), 301.

2. Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (New York, 1843-44), 273.

3. Philip Burne-Jones, Bart., Dollars and Democracy (New York, 1904), 74.

4. Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners and Politics in the United States (Boston, 1839), 430-31.

5. James Dawson Burn, Three Years Among the Working-Classes (London, 1865), 11.

6. John Leng, America in 1876: Pencillings during a Tour in the Centennial Year: With a Chapter on the Aspects of American Life (Dundee, 1877), 67.

7. Anthony Trollope, North America (2 vols., London, 1862), I, 186.

8. Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America (2 vols., London, 1850), II, 91.

9. George Thomas Smart, The Temper of the American People (Boston, 1912), 137.

10. Arthur Feiler, America Seen Through German Eyes (New York, 1928), 259.

11. Francis J. Grund, The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations (Boston, 1837), 374; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, 1972), I, 395; II, 235; Chevalier, Society, Manners and Politics, 114-15; Thomas Holley Grattan, Civilized America (2 vols., London, 1859), II, 246; C. Vann Woodward, American Counterpoint: The North-South Dialogue on Slavery and Racism (Boston, 1971), 13-46.

12. James Bryce, American Commonwealth (2 vols., London, 1888), II, 681.

13. James Silk Buckingham, The Slave States of America (2 vols., London, 1842), I, 487-88.

14. A. Trollope, North America, I, 291.

15. Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America, ed. Sydney Jackman (New York, 1962; original ed., 1839), 423-24.

16. E. L. Youmans, Herbert Spencer on the Americans and the Americans on Herbert Spencer (New York, 1883), 11-12.

17. Alexander Mackay, The Western World (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1849), II, 296; James Fullerton Muirhead, America the Land of Contrasts (London, 1898), 102-3.

18. Adam G. Gurowski, America and Europe (New York, 1857), 151.

19. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 35.

20. Achille Murat, A Moral and Political Sketch of the United States of America (London, 1833), 343.

21. G. N. Featherstonehough, Excursions Through the Slave States (London, 1844), I, 281.

22. Gurowski, America and Europe, 73-74.

23. Hugo Münsterberg, The Americans (New York, 1904), 132, 235-36.

24. Smart, The Temper of the American People, 81.

25. Arnold Bennett, Your United States (New York and London, 1912), 93-94.

26. G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (London, 1922), 105.

27. Smart, The Temper of the American People, 80.

28. Feiler, America Seen Through German Eyes, 282.

29. George Harmon Knoles, The Jazz Age Revisited: British Criticism of American Civilization During the 1920's (Stanford, London, 1955), 31.

30. Gurowski, America and Europe, 377; Grattan, Civilized America, II, 93.

31. André Siegfried, America Comes of Age (New York, 1927), 69, 348.

32. The Edinburgh Review XXXIII (Jan. 1820): 78-80.

33. A. D'Alembert, Flânerie parisienne aux Etats Unis (Paris, 1856), 145-47.

34. Simon Jacob Copans, “French Opinion of American Democracy, 1852-1860” (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, May 1942).

35. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I, 52, 265, 315; II, 35-37.

36. Captain Basil Hall, Travels in North America (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1829), II, 55.

37. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1833), I, 194-96; also F. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 330.

38. Grattan, Civilized America, I, 235; II, 96, 106, 110-11.

39. Griffin, The Great Republic, 97.

40. Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States … (Freeport, N.Y., 1972), 127, 173, 176-89.

41. Quoted in Pelling, America and the British Left, 3.

42. Bryce, American Commonwealth, II, 437, 617-18, 622-28, 641.

43. Beatrice Webb, American Diary, ed. David A. Shannon (Madison, 1963), 40, 146-47. Her self-characterization is quoted by the editor in his introduction, xii-xvi.

44. W. T. Colyer, Americanism: A World Menace (London, 1922), II, 33, 78-79.

45. Paul Bourget, Outre-Mer: Impressions of America (New York, 1895), 370.

46. Münsterberg, The Americans, 361.

47. Knoles, The Jazz Age Revisited, 104-24; Andrew J. Torrielli, Italian Opinion on America (Cambridge, 1941), 238.

48. Bennett, Your United States, 100-101, 137, 163-67.

49. Philip Gibbs, People of Destiny: Americans As I Saw Them at Home and Abroad (New York, 1920), 156-57.

50. G. Lowes Dickinson, Appearances (New York, 1914), 194, 198.

51. C. H. Bretherton, Midas: or the United States and the Future (London, 1926), 64, 86.

52. Hilaire Belloc, The Contrast (New York, 1924), 183.

53. Feiler, America Seen Through German Eyes, 263.

54. Siegfried, America Comes of Age, 350.

55. Elijah Brown, The Real America (London, 1913), 3-5.

56. Georges Duhamel, America: The Menace (New York, 1931), 86.

57. Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate (London, 1926), 279.

58. Harold Laski, The American Democracy: A Commentary and an Interpretation (New York, 1948), 724.

59. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States …, ed. Durand Echeverria (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 424.

60. François Alexander Frédéric, duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels Through the United States … (2 vols., London, 1799), II, 678-79.

61. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I, 51-52, 252-53, 315; II, 247-48, 331-34.

62. Mackay, The Western World, II, 296.

63. A. Trollope, North America, II, 315.

64. Grattan, Civilized America, I, 81-82; II, 471.

65. Quoted in Pelling, America and the British Left, 22.

66. Bryce, American Commonwealth, II, 676.

67. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 74.

68. Dickinson, Appearances, 141.

69. George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York, 1956).

70. Frances A. Kemble, Journal of a Residence in America (Paris, 1835), 55n.

71. Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States, II, 217.

72. Bryce, American Commonwealth, II, 660-74.

73. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 136-39.

74. Feiler, America Seen Through German Eyes, 56-57, 260-61.

75. Smart, The Temper of the American People, 110-11, 167.

76. Brown, The Real America, 95.

77. Marryat, A Diary in America, 162. Emphasis added.

78. Grattan, Civilized America, II, 317.

79. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 267-68, 287.

80. Belloc, The Contrast, 72.