Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans

This book has been an adventure in intellectual co-operation. If it were a mere collection of haphazard essays, gathered together to make the conventional symposium, it would have only slight significance. But it has been the deliberate and organized outgrowth of the common efforts of like-minded men and women to see the problem of modern American civilization as a whole, and to illuminate by careful criticism the special aspect of that civilization with which the individual is most familiar. Personal contact has served to correct overemphasis, and slow and careful selection of the members of a group which has now grown to some thirty-odd has given to this work a unity of approach and attack which it otherwise could not possibly have had.

The nucleus of this group was brought together by common work, common interests, and more or less common assumptions. As long ago as the autumn of last year Mr. Van Wyck Brooks and I discussed the possibility of several of us, who were engaged in much the same kind of critical examination of our civilization, coming together to exchange ideas, to clarify our individual fields, and to discover wherein they coincided, overlapped, or diverged. The original desire was the modest one of making it possible for us to avoid working at cross-purposes. I suggested that we meet at my home, which a few of us did, and since that time until the delivery of this volume to the publishers we have met every fortnight. Even at our first meeting we discovered our points of view to have so much in common that our desire for informal and pleasant discussions became the more serious wish to contribute a definite and tangible piece of work towards the advance of intellectual life in America. We wished to speak the truth about American civilization as we saw it, in order to do our share in making a real civilization possible—for I think with all of us there was a common assumption that a field cannot be ploughed until it has first been cleared of rocks, and that constructive criticism can hardly exist until there is something on which to construct.

Naturally the first problem to arise was the one of ways and means. If the spirit and temper of the French encyclopædists of the 18th century appealed strongly to us, certainly their method for the advancement of knowledge was inapplicable in our own century. The cultural phenomena we proposed to survey were too complicated and extensive; besides, we wished to make a definite contribution of some kind or another while, so to speak, there was yet time. For the cohesiveness of the group, the good-humoured tolerance and cheerful sacrifice of time, were to some extent the consequence of the intellectual collapse that came with the hysterical post-armistice days, when it was easier than in normal times to get together intelligent and civilized men and women in common defence against the common enemy of reaction. We wished to take advantage of this strategic situation for the furtherance of our co-operative enterprise, and decided, finally, that the simplest plan would be the best. Each of us was to write a single short essay on the special topic we knew most thoroughly; we were to continue our meetings in order to keep informed of the progress of our work and to see that there was no duplication; we were to extend the list of subjects to whatever legitimately bore upon our cultural life and to select the authors by common agreement; we were to keep in touch with each other so that the volume might have that inner consistency which could come only from direct acquaintance with what each of us was planning.

There were a few other simple rules which we laid down in the beginning. Desirous of avoiding merely irrelevant criticism and of keeping attention upon our actual treatment of our subjects rather than upon our personalities, we provided that all contributors to the volume must be American citizens. For the same reason, we likewise provided that in the list there should be no professional propagandists—except as one is a propagandist for one’s own ideas—no martyrs, and no one who was merely disgruntled. Since our object was to give an uncompromising, and consequently at some points necessarily harsh, analysis, we desired the tone to be good-natured and the temper urbane. At first, these larger points of policy were decided by common agreement or, on occasion, by majority vote, and to the end I settled no important question without consultation with as many members of the group as I could approach within the limited time we had agreed to have this volume in the hands of the publisher. But with the extension of the scope of the book, the negotiations with the publisher, and the mass of complexities and details that are inevitable in so difficult an enterprise, the authority to decide specific questions and the usual editorial powers were delegated as a matter of convenience to me, aided by a committee of three. Hence I was in a position constantly to see the book as a whole, and to make suggestions for differentiation, where repetition appeared to impend, or for unity, where the divergence was sharp enough to be construed by some as contradictory. In view both of the fact that every contributor has full liberty of opinion and that the personalities and points of view finding expression in the essays are all highly individualistic, the underlying unity which binds the volume together is really surprising.