Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
An American Trait
Harper’s Weekly (January 11, 1913) : 40
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There is something faintly appalling about America’s readiness to grasp a new idea. She takes it up with such a rushing avidity that the undeveloped idea is reduced to a stale banality. We kill things with our quickness and kill them in their embryonic stages. Our passion for being up to date makes us murderously premature. We are becoming more and more volatile, superficial, and, to the serious-minded, terrifying. Our passion for being up to date makes us murderously premature. We are becoming more and more volatile, superficial, and, to the serious-minded, terrifying. We must put any one, coming to us with a great and difficult scheme for whose perfection he wants aid, through a trying cycle of emotions. Our gobbling of a thing because it is novel has all the air of being inspired by foresight. We appear so gallant and open-minded in our “champoining” in print championing of ultra-modernity that to a man ahead of his time there must come a period of delirious relief and the feeling that he has found his way into the future. This cannot but be followed by depression and a desire to steal back his beloved idea, hide it under his coat, and slip away to a country where minds work slowly. For there it is possible to mistake the oblivion meted out to a new idea for careful consideration and serious investigation, for an unwillingness to harden a vital tendency into a glibly worded system before the main theme has been allowed a fair amount of growth in its natural medium of thought. It may even be possible for a creator to continue in this belief until the day of his death, which permits him a quietly hopeful end. In America he sees himself welcomed, misconstrued, and done for before he has finished his explanation of what it is he has brought. A hug of appreciation is, in its after effects, frequently like the embrace of a boa-constrictor. In America he sees himself welcomed, misconstrued, and done for before he has finished his explanation of what it is he has brought. A hug of appreciation is, in its after effects, frequently like the embrace of a boa-constrictor.
There are moments when one feels that incensed critics and lusty denunciators are the only safe ingredients wherewith to make up a public. Their treatment necessitates the most desirable thing possible, an open and detailed explanation of what it is one stands for. While a generous-hearted reception, an insistence that you are understood perfectly, is a gag so effective as to plunge one into despondency. It leaves nothing to be said. The loudest spoken elaborations and cautions are drowned in the chorus of limited comprehension. It is as though one could and did offer the world salvation and it in turn acclaimed the giver great because he had healed a few of its surface wounds. His greatness would be momentary, their gain maddening in its insufficient measure, and the pain of frustrated output for the creative mind quite sufficient to tempt a double death — that of his idea and of himself.
All the world appears at times to be divided up into two parties: the radical-minded and the conservative-minded, and evolution is carried on by their perpetual hectoring of each other. The radical side of humanity grasps an idea while it is still too hot for use, flings it at the conservative side, who jump about in their effort to grasp so maleable a thing, loathing the thing and loathing the activity forced upon them, worthily afraid that the things they hold good shall be up-rooted and tossed away while the good remains in them. As soon as they have grasped the idea they fling it back at the radical side, denouncing it in terms strongly influenced by their inability to deal with anything so fresh from the creative fire. When the idea has been tossed about sufficiently to lower its temperature considerably, three things happen When the idea has been tossed about sufficiently to lower its temperature considerably, three things happen: the conservatives become used to the idea, they have been stirred by discomfort to a point where action comes more easily to them, and they suddenly steal the idea from the radicals. From then on they work like slaves to prevent the radicals from putting it into practice before society is ready for the idea and the idea is ready for society, always with the laudable excuse that they mean to introduce it themselves in good time. And they do introduce it, or, rather, the long fight between the two parties to prevent each other from harming society has gradually opened society’s mind, so that at its end the idea is found to be quite at home in that heterogeneous, docile brain, and the conservative party is not obliged to do anything except pass a law and begin a new fight over a new idea which is dangerously intoxicating the radical mind.
This is true of all the world except America. There one feels sure a different law holds. The writer takes it for granted that every one by now believes all new ideas to be created by a busy little group who are always in the minority and always in the right and who never get the majority to hold a view until the minority have long discarded it and gone on to the next higher one. The minority in America, however, must be in a very different and slightly chagrining position. They must be forever embarrassed at what seems a leakage of their news. A leakage is invariably taken advantage of by the majority, who taste the drops, name them, reduce them to catchwords, and dismiss them; while the revolutionary minority, made against its will to seem over-thorough and plodding, is still dwelling on what has the tattered appearance of an old idea, but is in reality not one, is hectored by the majority who clamor pettishly for something new to amuse them.
Nothing is more happily sympathetic than talking with a light touch of cumbersome topics, but... this would be Florida Pier, her “gentler view”Nothing is more happily sympathetic than talking with a light touch of cumbersome topics, but we have an idea at present — it is growing, it may become a national trait — that it is chic to be serious-minded, with the result that conversation in our larger cities is sometimes wholly grotesque. The way in which we glibly chatter on street corners, elevators, or wherever we happen to meet for a moment about eugenics, the Montessori method, social reform, and a dozen infinitely more startling subjects, causes us to present a nude and slightly insane appearance to a foreign eye.
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