Our Business Civilization: Some Aspects of American Culture
James Truslow Adams
9781465548108
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
As one grows older and, let us hope, wiser, one becomes more and more shy of easy generalizations and classifications. As one moves through one’s world, the old generalized types, for example, of fiction and youth, standing for an “artist,” a Frenchman, or an Englishman, break into the many and varying individual artists or Frenchmen or Englishmen of one’s acquaintance, much as a ray of white light is broken into a rainbow of colors through a prism. But age and experience would be but poor substitutes for youth and freshness if they resulted only in bringing chaos to our minds, a substitution of multitudinous individuals for species and genus. If the old crude stock-in-trade types compact of ignorance and too facile generalizing have to be submitted to the spectrum of experience, individuals we find, in spite of seemingly baffling variety, do somehow combine to form distinct group types, and in the national sphere characteristics emerge that set one nation off from another even though their millions of inhabitants may differ among themselves almost more than some of them differ from foreigners. For a traveler constantly passing from one country to another and now long past the stage of mere romantic interest in the exotic, there is no more fascinating task than to attempt to establish the genuine characteristics of a nation out of the welter of individual impressions. It would be absurd to contend that America offers a simple problem to the observer. If the scene is less varied than in some other countries, nevertheless, to see about one only Babbitts means that one is not an acute observer. But as one comes back again and again from foreign countries, with fresh eyes and new standards of comparison, one comes to simplify our civilization in some respects, as a scientist does the continent. To the lover of scenery the Long Island beaches, the Big Smoky Mountains, the prairies, the Arizona desert, the golden coast of California, or the glaciers of Alaska offer variety in plenty; yet the geologist finds North America the simplest of all the great continents in the basic lines of its structure. In the same way, as we penetrate below the surface variety of its social life, we begin to see that its civilization is equally remarkable as that of the continent itself for its extreme structural simplicity. This simplicity lies in the fact that it has come to be almost wholly a business man’s civilization. It may be asked why, in a modern industrial world in which everyone must have money to live, and in which most people are engaged in making it in one way or another, is America any more of a business man’s civilization than that of any other country? The answer is to be found in a wide variety of social, economic, historic, geographic, and other factors. Let us, for example, contrast it with England, the country which I know best outside of my own, and where I happen to be writing at the moment. England has always been a great commercial and, for the last century, a great manufacturing country, the “nation of shopkeepers” in the eyes of European continentals. Business and trade are foundation stones of England’s prosperity and power, yet English civilization, whatever it may one day become, is not as yet a business man’s civilization in the same sense as is America’s. The reason is that the influence of the business man here upon society has been limited by the presence of other and very powerful influences stemming from sources other than business and having nothing to do with it. In the first place, there is that relic of feudalism, the aristocracy, including in its numbers, of course, many men and fortunes made by trade, but exerting its influence through a long tradition.
