How Americans Do Things:

...The audiences to whom Professor Stewart spoke as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Athens were indeed fortunate, and it is good that he has further developed his theme in this volume...

...Stewart, with his customary tact, adds: "We need not assume that the original metal was gold...

...and their fears proved justified when, as Bradford bitterly recorded, they were "hasted ashore and made to drink water, that the seamen might have the more beer...

...After a long period during which he crowded his house as close to his neighbor's as he had in the Old World, he learned to take advantage of the abundance of space to enjoy front, back and side yards...

...He is, on the whole, content to record the surface appearances of things, and does not analyze American society or plumb the depths of the American soul...

...Bismarck once said that the decisive fact of history was that America and Britain spoke the same language...

...John Public of Britain became John Q. Public of America...

...He takes particular pleasure in puncturing the Puritan myth...

...Reviewed by David C. Williams THE TITLE of this book suggests the sort of self-conscious cant with which lesser breeds without the law have been deluged in recent years, but American Ways of Life is refreshing in its modesty and good humor...

...The impact of immigration after 1840 he finds to be small, the newcomers largely conforming to the patterns of life as they found them...

...maize and a multitude of other new foods delighted his palate...

...The Americans have thus escaped what in other parts of the world is the most typical cause and symptom of chauvinism, and indeed appear in these pages generally as unaffected by the crasser aspects of petty nationalism...

...As for sex, Stewart suggests that the disapproval of it on Sunday hardly implied lack of interest in it the rest of the week...

...Americans had become whisky- rather than beer-drinkers, the Established Church had lost its dominant position to more homespun sects, and the institution of the dowry and the "arranged" marriage, based on a surplus of marriageable females, had fallen into discard...

...By the time they caught up...

...It is a lively and entertaining story, and Mr...

...If something was lost, something was gained as well...

...Stewart tells it well...

...Let us merely call it 'the American metal.' " The early immigrants, of course, had to travel light...

...In the voyage across the Atlantic, and even more in the push further into the wilderness, much had to be left behind--such varied luggage as beer, ministers of the gospel, and single women...

...America thus functioned not as the traditional melting pot, but as a "transmuting pot"—and Mr...

...The author does not profess to cover the whole of his vast field, but his topics--language, food, drink, clothing, shelter, sex, personal names, play, holidays and the arts--range wide...

...Probably the most significant fact about the American way of life cited by Stewart is that (in contrast, for example, to the Boers of South Africa) "there has been little connection between nationalism and language in the United States [no] strong movement to express American nationalism by making its language more different from that of Great Britain...

...Most recently of all, he has ended his slavish subservience to British austerity in clothes and, led by President Truman, has blossomed into all the colors of the rainbow...

...The ways of life discussed he finds to be essentially those brought by the earliest settlers to the New World, modified somewhat but not radically by environment, native development and later influences from abroad...

...Far from being prohibitionists, the Pilgrim Fathers viewed the prospect of being reduced to drinking water as one of the perils of colonization...