Chapter VII: I Hate This Shallow Americanism

“_I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credits, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship, or sale of goods through pretending they will sell, or power through making believe you are powerful. They think they have got it, but they have got something else._”

A contemporary of Emerson was Judge Haliburton of Nova Scotia, the creator of Sam Slick. Mr. Slick of Slickville, Connecticut, was a typical Yankee as seen by neighbors across the northern border. He was shrewd, enterprising, inquisitive, good-humored, and in his way religious. He was an ardent patriot, with his eye on the main chance. He was good at a bargain, and still better at an argument in defense of his rectitude in the transaction. He was no hypocrite, for he saw no reason to pretend to be something which he was not. He was simply a plain American citizen and he didn’t care who knew it. There were thousands in Connecticut just as good as he was. He felt it a privilege to represent the Great Republic.

The blatant Americanism of Sam Slick must be compared with the solid English complacency of Mr. Podsnap. Both were caricatures of national failings which were easily recognizable. Emerson was enough of an American to understand Sam Slick and to laugh with him as well as to laugh at him, but he recognized that this shallow Americanism had its dangers.

The very ease with which the American could make a living made him overestimate his own powers. He took the gifts of nature in a new continent for rewards for his own merit. Bold as he was and self-assertive in little things, he lacked in any standard by which to judge himself. He was gregarious in his mental habits, and curiously averse to strenuous intellectual effort.

“The timidity of our public opinion is our disease, or shall I say _the publicness_ of our opinion, the absence of private opinion. Good nature is plentiful but we want justice with heart of steel to fight down the proud.” America has not produced a sufficient number of men who will instinctively throw themselves “on the side of weakness, of youth, of hope; on the liberal, on the expansive side, never on the defensive, the conserving, the timorous, the lock-and-bolt system.”

“I find no expression in our State papers or legislative debate in our lyceums or churches, especially in our newspapers, of a high national feeling, no lofty counsels that rightfully stir the blood. I speak of those organs which can be presumed to speak a popular sense. They recommend conventional virtues, whatever will earn and preserve property; always the capitalist, the college, the church, the hospital, the theater, the hotel, the road, the ship, the capitalist, whatever goes to secure, adorn, enlarge these is good; whatever jeopardizes any of these is damnable.”

This description of a familiar kind of Americanism in 1844 is easily recognizable in 1920. The shallow reformers are equally familiar.

“Many a reformer perishes in the removal of rubbish, and that makes the offensiveness of this class. They are partial, they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way in the assault on the kingdom of darkness; they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two or twenty errors in our social system be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses.”

No foreign critic has ever pointed out more clearly the faults of the American temperament. But shallow Americanism, with its boastfulness and its conventionality, can not blind him to the ideal America that lies far deeper. It is yet in the making.

“We cannot look on the freedom of this country, in connection with its youth, without a presentiment that here shall laws and institutions exist on some scale of proportion to the majesty of nature. To men legislating for the area betwixt the two oceans, betwixt the snows and the tropics, somewhat of the grandeur of nature will infuse itself into the code. A heterogeneous population crowding on all ships from all corners of the world to the great gates of North America, namely, Boston, New York, and New Orleans, and thence proceeding inward to the prairie and the mountains, and quickly contributing their private thought to the public opinion, their toll to the treasury, and their vote to the election, it cannot be doubted that the legislation of this country should become more catholic and cosmopolitan than that of any other. It seems so easy for America to inspire and express the most expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land of the labourer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, she should speak for the human race. It is the country of the future. Like Washington, proverbially ‘the city of magnificent distances,’ through all its cities, States, and Territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.

“Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is guided--the race never dying, the individual never spared--to results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with or without their design.”

Emerson believed as much as the politicians of his day in Manifest Destiny. But he hoped for the country a destiny greater than that which the politicians planned. The commercial progress of the day was something to rejoice in as a part of a great onward movement. But commercialism was not the end toward which the nation was moving.

“Our part is plainly not to throw ourselves across the track, to block improvement, and sit till we are stone, but to watch the uprise of successive mornings, and to conspire with the work of new days. Government has been a fossil; it should be a plant. I conceive that the office of statute law should be to express, and not to impede the mind of mankind. New thoughts, new things. Trade was one instrument, but Trade is also for a time, and must give way to something broader and better, whose signs are already dawning in the sky.”