AMERICAN STOCKTAKING
America Now : An Inquiry Into Civilisation in the United States. By Thirty-six Americans. Edited with an Intro- duction by Harold E. Stearns. (Scribner. I2S. 6d.) IN 1922 Mr. Stearns edited a symposium called Civilisation in the United States. It was amusing and highly critical. Published in the second year of Harding normalcy, with the great twin brethren, Messrs. Mencken and Nathan, among its contributors, it could hardly fail to be so. Its successor is less amusing and, in some ways, less critical. The standards of decency, of civilisation or of hope were so much higher in 1922 than in 1939! Then Europe had, or was thought to have, a lot to teach the raw Americans flown with insolence and bath-tub gin. Now we are, from the Americans' point of view (and who can gainsay it ?), either barbarians or the predestined and not very. deserving victims of barbarians. In 1922 it was possible to suggest that there was no civilisation in the United States ; today it is increasingly harder to -cc it anywhere outside the United States. The emigrants from Mr. Stearns to Mr. Pegler have come home ; café society now means " 21 " and not the Dome. So it naturally follows that this is a 'ess debunking book, less the work of professional knockers, than of Americans conscious that all is not well with America, but equally conscious that it is "the last, best hope of earth," at any rate the last. Not all or, indeed, most of the articles are listings of American brands saved from the European burning. The mobility of the modern American, especially the middle-ag -d and elderly American, has resulted, for example, in the legiti- mate discussion of tourist camps and trailers in the artiLle on architecture, as well as a discussion of the Rockefeller Center as the last great successful sky-scraper group. In an excellent article on sport, Mr. John Kieran is even optimistic about the future of the Olympic Games as well as caustic and candid on the fraud of amateur tennis, whose casuistry is the American equivalent of non-intervention sop:nstry. The family and the small town ; the newspaper and the radio ; all are discussed with candour and under- standing, if not always with a very profound sense of their social implications. If the second version lacks the unity of the first the fault is in our stars, not in the editor's judgement.
From this general praise, alas, two articles must be excepted. In the earlier volume, advertising was described by the late Thorne Smith who was, I imagine, an escaped copy-writer. In this it is done by Mr. Roy S. Durstine, a partner in the greatest of American advertising agencies. It is not merely that Mr. Durstine does not write as well as did Thorne Smith, who was, after all, a writer, not an executive (although the difference is excessive, even so). But instead of admitting faults and explaining weaknesses, Mr. Durstine ha; treated his mystery with the reverence of an advertising agency given a chance to do all the publicity for General Motors. We get, consequently, a picture of a world where, if a great deal of almost anything is sold to almost everybody, hardly anybody has any grounds for criticism. Or as Lin Yutang makes his interlocutor say in one of the two good cnes of the three articles by foreigners in the book (the other good one is by Sir Wilmott Lewis), "' I sell' and ' I serve' become identical."
The same lack of capacity to admit any flaws in a prac- tically perfect set-up mark an article which Mr. Stearns, for unfathomable reasons, goes out of his way to praise in his preface. The role of the Roman Catholic Church in America is of greatest importance. It is the religion of a sixth of the American people and by far the largest of the American denominations. Yet, as the author of the article in this book, Father Talbot, S.J., realises, it is very little understood by the other five-sixths. This is true, and one of the reasons why it is true is well exemplified by Father Talbot's own article. This, though much better written than Mr. Durstine's, is like that unfortunate effort a sales-talk, a company prospectus before the days of the Securities and Exchange Commission. That point could be illustrated in many ways. One will suffice. Rightly proud of his Church's unity and fixity in face of the disunion and fluidity of American society and religion, Father Talbot, after some preliminary statistics of a booster kind, declares that " in all essential matters of doctrine and morals, the American Catholics are indissolubly united." So far so good. But what are we to make of this : " In all other matters, social, economic, ethical, moral, cultural (but not political) they think in almost identical patterns." Do they? Unless " almost " is going to be badly stretched, this is quite untrue, and, if it were true, would be quite enough to account for the failure of the Church to have any weight except that of numbers. But it is not true. Do John Longo and Frank Hague think alike (and which of them is Father Talbot for)? Do Cardinal Mundelein and the great Catholic executives of the Hearst Press think alike? Does Father Talbot's own paper, America think alike with the Commonweal on one side, and the Brooklyn Tablet on the other? There is, indeed, a great degree of conventional conformity in American Catholicism which is one reason why the idea of an American Maritain or Matniac is so startling, but things are not as bad as Father Talbot boasts! In this volume two results of this attitude can be seen. In one of the best articles, Mr. John Chamberlain talks as if it were the best authenticated historical fact that the Jesuits teach that the end justifies the means, and Lin Yutang states the case for the family virtues, so prized by Father Talbot, far better than he does. In a dissolving society, the Roman Catholic Church could play a great and useful role in America, but that role will be limited and not necessarily beneficent as long as the attitude of Father Talbot, the " duco finish" put over a complex and not alto- gether healthy situation, remains the standard attitude of the spokesmen of the Church, and their reply to criticism is, as Mr. Westbrook Pegler has discovered, to call in the secular arm of a boycott.
On the law, on business, on painting and music, on education 'tj'"ugh too closely related to merely university problems) or the pathology of Marxism, and the place of psychiatry in a
nation of success-hunters, this survey is of great value as information, and as entertainment. Two important topics are not dealt with directly : the Jews (which is a great pity) and straight politics are left out, for no very apparent reason except, possibly, the intellectual's dislike for such unrationalisable institutions as the Democratic and Republican parties. No book could quite live up to the promise of America Now, but this is a remarkably successful attempt to do so.
D. W. BROGAN.
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