Chapter XVII: Giantism--the National Disease of America

Giantism is a disease. In the human body it is caused when certain glands do not function properly. A child does not stop growing in the right way or at the right time. Perhaps the whole body, more often parts of the body, grow to enormous size. The head or the hands may become too large. The features are apt to be made ugly by frightful distortions. For any child to grow too fast is dangerous. For certain organs or features, or the whole body, to keep on growing when the time has come for them to retain normal size is in itself a sign of this terrible disease of--Giantism.

Economic and social giantism is the curse of the United States. Our larger cities have grown far beyond the bounds of national safety. New York, Chicago, and a dozen other large cities are monstrosities. It will take a full generation, with no immigration at all, and the forces of reform fully mobilized, to bring them to correspond properly with the other parts of our country. Everywhere the disease works havoc. We crowd a few square miles with stupendous structures, leaving narrow chasms for streets. Each new building shuts the light and air away from many others. Then we pack ourselves into these buildings more like stifled vermin than human beings. Whereupon we go about the world boasting in a loud voice, as though we deserved praise for our achievement.

Giantism is found in every form of our national activity. We measure the greatness of a university by the size and number of its buildings, or by the millions of money which constitute its endowment. The richest among us in money figure most in the newspapers, which proves that they are considered by the public to be the most important. An author is held in esteem in proportion to the number of copies of his books which are sold. Works of art prove interesting because they bring fabulous prices on the market. At every census the inhabitants of our cities and states wait with bated breath to discover whether or not they have increased in numbers more than their neighbors.

Giantism everywhere. To boast of the greatest city as the city with the most people is like boasting of an enormous scrofulous swelling. We even boast of the height of mountains, the size of lakes, or the length of rivers, as though we had created them all. One state cries out that it is the first in the production of hogs, another that it slaughters more wild animals and peddles more furs than any other. Often there are not nearly enough houses to shelter the people of a "great" city; many of the students of a "great" university may leave as ignorant as they came, and weaker in mind and morals. The colossal battleships we build are used as targets before the sound of our boasting has died away. Our piled up statistics of "progress" mostly prove our degeneracy.

All this seems to escape the accredited leaders and teachers of the people. The tendency shows in us as individuals. A large proportion of our people are cursed by overeating, lack of exercise and overweight. Meanwhile the unemployed may starve. Everywhere that old and absolutely sound principle of "plain living and high thinking" is surrendered for the exact opposite. In all our great cities we build palatial private residences which are more fit for cold storage houses than for human habitations. A woman pays fifty thousand dollars for a fur wrap weighing two pounds. If the most abominable whiskey at ten dollars a quart did not find plenty of purchasers, the price would be falling instead of rising. Behold the size, weight and contents of our Sunday newspapers! They need no further describing here. A popular magazine recently contained eighty-two pages of advertising, and less than twenty pages of reading matter. In whole sections of our cities natural human affection is lavished on expensive dogs. In other sections the swarming children of the poor lack food, shelter, clothing, affectionate care and education. Meanwhile we boast of both the number of children and the value of the dogs. Fatty degeneration of the heart is one symptom of giantism.

If we continue in the way we are going, our future national self can be easily enough pictured. Any amateur mathematician can plot the curve of our "progress." Our wealth to-day totals two hundred and fifty billions. Pretty soon we shall be worth a full trillion. The last census of New York gives its population as 5,620,000. Of this total a single Brooklyn insane asylum contains four thousand. Several of our states spend as much of their taxes to care for the insane as to educate their young. Let us have pencil and paper and calculate how many will be shut up in lunatic asylums or homes for other defectives, and what will be the cost of their keep, when we number three hundred millions of people. If we bring all the underfed masses, all the beggars and peddlers and criminals from every country in the world, and thrust them into our over-populated cities to prey upon us, then, assuredly, we shall have soon enough more inhabitants than China or India. Some of our private dwellings now cost as high as eight millions each and the windows are boarded up because the owners live in Europe. According to our present standards that, too, may be taken as an indication of our "progress" and "greatness."

Of course the masses of the factory and office population, and most of the idle rich, are physical weaklings. They get no adequate exercise. They breathe no clean air. In some of our southern states the curse of degenerating factory labor for young children is still permitted by law. But whether enslaved in factory, idle upon the streets, or shut up in a crowded apartment the child of the city has no fair chance to grow. Always the thought--this mass of weaklings is fit only to be the subject of a more or less absolute monarch. They can not be citizens in a republic that is a reality. Any strong, healthy, normal American farmer turns from looking upon these city types, hopeless for his country. Our cities are not built to live in. They are built to get rich in. Jefferson was right. Unless they are reformed they will destroy both democracy and civilization. Somehow we must spread our cities out in the air and sun upon the countryside.

The old America of our fathers is everywhere fading from sight. The new America is full upon us. And that new America is rapidly becoming a stench in the nostrils of the decent and intelligent minority. We Americans must change our ways. We need a great revival--a revival of common sense and healthy-mindedness. Our national life is starving for the want of fine, thoughtful, educated, young persons with the courage to wish themselves poor. Our whole national life must change its direction. We are not going ahead. We are going backward. Instead of seeking to find, through our wealth, a richness of mind and heart, we crave yet more bigness and fatness in things purely physical. We seek our brother's purse strings instead of the affection of his heart. We are holding fast to lies instead of the truth. All this abnormal, distorted growth is making us ugly and disgusting in almost every feature. In us the better America will soon be hardly recognizable.

Never before have we so much needed the stalwart teaching of those who have led us in our greater past. These still speak to us if we would but listen. Benjamin Franklin still says on every page of "Poor Richard's Almanac" that "We are giving too much for our whistle," and that an old coat is often more to be desired than a new one. The tall Thomas Jefferson still rises above the petty minds about us to say that it were better that we had a nation composed of two persons, a man and a woman, who were truly free, than a nation with millions enslaved. The calm voice of Robert E. Lee urges upon our hearts that he who does his duty with all the strength he has may well leave even the matter of victory or defeat to Almighty God. During these later years, the entire nation has claimed to do honor to the name of Abraham Lincoln, even while we forget everything he stood for, by word and deed, when he was among the living. He is much honored for making the black man free. We have forgotten that great speech of his in which he declared that the white man's freedom should be forever guaranteed by free soil as a national institution. One Robert E. Lee or Abraham Lincoln is worth a great city full of crowding and scheming neurotics, treading upon one another's toes, always trading in their eternal souls for a chance to get rich and then mostly losing out and dying in misery and poverty.

Present-day America is unworthy of the mighty voices which have, in the past, led her and called her to the leadership of the world. Those voices spoke to us when we were weak, unformed and poor, yet so rich in thought and in the impelling forces of our national soul.