The Same Size Shoe
THE SAME SIZE SHOE OUITE apart from all such matters as the tariff, the United States is today a spectacle which fills many citizens of the old world with terror and foreboding. Henri Massis,...
...Indeed, M. Massis does not fail to suggest that it is "an Inferno without an Alighieri...
...Whitman was really quite like Victor Hugo, excepting that his conceit was of smaller girth...
...One really cannot get far with that kind of thing —if, indeed, one can get anywhere at all...
...And who can forget the dozens of American moralists who wrote that Satan himself had taken charge of the city on the Seine, and might be seen there any time, preferably after midnight...
...and he all but permitted the enacting of potentially ruinous pension legislation...
...One may suffice, especially since it leads rather far afield...
...But—M...
...Hoover may be a symbol of the nation which he leads...
...Even though the vast majority of its citizens hailed from the far-famed "Occident" and still cling to accents acquired there, greed and irrationality often rode in command of the vast hordes which rushed to the conquest of a new world...
...This substitution appears to be the guiding principle of Mr...
...Terrestial mysticisms flourished in New England as in the Rhenish Palatinate...
...And finally, to make a long story short, there was saving the world for democracy —a crusade memorable chiefly for the tales of horror which a government meted out to its citizens like pints of fire-water...
...Western newspapers, loudest in their denunciation of gang war, started the "gang system" as a way of building circulation...
...the French believe that Chicago is, when considered from the vantage-ground of civilization, something very like hell...
...Unfortunately he seems to be either too ready to believe that others adhere to the same principle, or unable to make converts...
...Hoover's activity...
...But it is worth while noting that the American impressions of M. Massis are surprisingly like the idea of France which former generations of well-reared tourists brought home with them...
...Nevertheless we shall confess that the outlook for civilization seems not one whit more hopeless here than it does in any other country...
...In arguing that a sudden indulgence in public construction will not remedy a business depression unless the factors of time, legality and competent planning have been reckoned with, the report shows once again what can be done by substituting sense for politics...
...Or its mind...
...Our system is supposed to foster initiative and competition...
...Naturally the source of alarm is different...
...The United States is a precocious nation which has grown so fast that it has never learned how to control its muscles...
...To enumerate the many signs of the dawn of reason would be to write an extensive catalog...
...He allowed a mistaken impression of popular sentiment to run away with him on the subject of prohibition...
...What is a genuine and serious cause of alarm is the extent to which reason has been dispensed with in the conduct of affairs which pertain to the community...
...Massis to the contrary notwithstanding—is it so very different in this respect from France or Germany or any other European land...
...Reason was understood as little here as abroad...
...In between you can place the religious, political and social hysterias, including the latest brands of prohibition and legalized birth control...
...And the Declaration of Independence is just a little more than a hundred and fifty years old...
...Ready to advance the cause of reason, it has not yet found out how to do so...
...The report of public works and unemployment, recently prepared by the President's Committee on Economic Changes, is surely an instance of what can be accomplished by the application of sound common sense to a public problem...
...First it was the rush westward, to Mexico and gold...
...Either we are riding astraddle an unprecedented prosperity, or our psychology turns so gloomy that the very chance to prosper is blighted...
...Now if we are honest we shall concede that the development of the United States has not always been a credit to the human race...
...An historian who contemplates what has happened since 1840—that is, since the country has really begun to expand—cannot help being struck by the waves of hysteria which have followed one after the other...
...Who knows...
...Doubtless there is some justification for this alarm, which we shall consider in a moment...
...Then the headlong plunge into the Civil War, which ended in dead men, ruined property and the race question...
...he lost control of Congress in the tariff debates...
...The past two years have staged economic entertainment which the cynic would regard with uncontrollable laughter and which fills the poet's eyes with tears...
...In the realm of economics, similar crescendos of eccentricity have abounded...
...While the King of the Hessians (comparable in this respect with most monarchs of the golden age) sold his subjects to foreign generals in need of recruits, captains of enterprise in the United States bought theirs where obtainable, without squeamishness...
...Oddly enough it is Chicago—stockyards and Tribune, west side apartments and the night clubs—which seem to arouse the greatest consternation...
...Small wonder that the time is ripe for behaviorism 1 We have not only produced, by quantity methods, more automobiles than we can sell, but more teachers, lawyers, writers and dentists than we can hire...
...And yet, through a policy of absorptions and mergers, competition and initiative are slaughtered daily amidst high jinks...
...We felt that Paris was the fountainhead of moral decay...
...Corporations talk of "employee welfare" and profit-sharing, but the moment sales drop off men are discarded like ballast from a balloon...
...The popularity of Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair abroad, even in translations studded with ridiculous errors, is another testimonial to the same prevalent fears...
...Henri Massis, who is of course more than relatively extremist in tendency, writes that the "destiny of man" is at stake, that civilization is in real peril of two kinds of barbarism, one Russian and the other American...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 10
