Everyday Americans

This is emphatically not a war book; and yet the chapters that follow, in one sense, are the fruits of the war, inasmuch as they represent reflections upon his own people by one returning to a familiar environment after active contact with English, Scottish, Irish, and French in the turbulent, intimate days of 1918. They are complementary, in a way, to a volume of essays which sprang from that experience and was published in 1919 under the title “Education by Violence.” But though representing in its inception the fresher view of familiar America of one returning from abroad, this book in its completed form is tendered as a modest attempt to depict an American type that was sharpened perhaps, but certainly not created by the war. The “old Americans” came to racial consciousness many years ago, although their sense of nationality has been immeasurably strengthened by the events of the last few years. It is no picture of all America, no survey of our complete social being that I attempt in the following pages; but rather a highly personal study of the typical, the everyday American mind, as it is manifested in the American of the old stock. It is a study of what that typical American product, the college and high school graduate, has become in the generation which must carry on after the war.