{Written a century ago, this essay characterizes Americans as adventurous, individualistic, practical, optimistic, and dedicated to a gospel of hard work and material prosperity. The essay also expresses a certain uneasiness about a country where ‘men and even houses are easily moved about and no one, almost, lives where he was born or believes what he was taught.’}
George Santayana, from “Materialism and Idealism” (1920):
If there are immense differences between individual Americans, yet there is a great uniformity in their environment, customs, temper, and thoughts. 1 They have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistibly in a space otherwise quite empty. To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career. Hence, a single ideal figment can cover a large part of what each American is in his character, and almost the whole of what most Americans are in their social outlook and political judgments.
The American is the most adventurous, or the descendant of the most adventurous of Europeans. It is in his blood to be socially a radical, though perhaps not intellectually. What has existed in the past, especially in the remote past, seems to him not only not authoritative, but irrelevant, inferior, and outworn. He finds it rather a sorry waste of time to think about the past at all. But his enthusiasm for the future is profound; he can conceive of no more decisive a way of recommending an opinion than to say that it is what everybody is coming to adopt. This expectation of what he approves, or approval of what he expects, makes up his optimism. It is the necessary faith of the pioneer.
What maintains this temperament and makes it national is social contagion or pressure—something immensely strong in democracies. The luckless American who is born a conservative, or who is drawn to poetic subtlety, pious retreats, or exotic passions, nevertheless has the categorical excellence of work, growth, enterprise, reform, and prosperity dinned into his ears; every door is open in this direction and shut in the other; so that he either folds up his heart and withers in a corner—in remote places you sometimes find such a solitary gaunt idealist—or else he flies to Oxford or Florence or Montmartre to save his soul—or perhaps not to save it.
The optimism of the American pioneer is not limited to his view of himself and his own future: it starts from that; but feeling assured, safe, and cheery within, he looks with smiling and most kindly eyes on everything and everybody about him. In his affections the American is seldom passionate, often deep, and always kindly. If it were given me to look into the depths of a man’s heart, and I did not find goodwill at the bottom, I would say without any hesitation, You are not an American. But as the American is an individualist, his goodwill is not officious. His instinct is to think well of everybody, and to wish everybody well, but in a spirit of rough comradeship, expecting every man to stand on his own legs and to be helpful in his turn. When he has given his neighbor a chance he thinks he has done enough for him; but he feels it is his absolute duty to do that. It will take some hammering to drive a coddling socialism into America.
Consider, though, the great emptiness of America: not merely the primitive physical emptiness, surviving in some regions, and the continental spacing of the chief natural features, but also the moral emptiness of a settlement where men and even houses are easily moved about, and no one, almost, lives where he was born or believes what he has been taught. Not that the American has jettisoned these impedimenta in anger; they have simply slipped from him as he moves. Great empty spaces bring a sort of freedom to both body and soul. You may pitch your tent where you will; or, if ever you decide to build anything, it can be in a style of your own devising. You have room, fresh materials, few models, and no critics. You trust your own experience, not only because you must, but because you find you may do so safely and prosperously; the forces that determine fortune are not yet too complicated for one man to explore. Your detachable condition makes you lavish with money and cheerfully experimental; you lose little if you lose all, since you remain completely yourself.
At the same time, your absolute initiative gives you practice in coping with novel situations and in being original; it teaches you shrewd management. Your life and mind will become dry and direct, with few decorative flourishes. In your works everything will be stark and pragmatic; you will not understand why anybody should make those little sacrifices to instinct or custom which we call grace. The fine arts will seem to you academic luxuries, fit to amuse the ladies, like Greek and Sanskrit; for while you will appreciate generosity in men’s purposes, you will not admit that the execution of these purposes can be anything but business. For the American, the urgency of his novel attack upon matter, his zeal in gathering its fruits, precludes meanderings in primrose paths; devices must be shortcuts and symbols must be mere symbols. If his wife wants luxuries, of course she may have them; and if he has vices, that can be provided for too; but they must all be set down under headings in his ledgers.
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George Santayana, a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, was born in Spain in 1863. He moved to America at the age of nine and lived in this country for forty years. He studied under William James and Josiah Royce; teaching at Harvard for two decades, his students included Conrad Aiken, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Santayana emigrated to Europe in 1912 and lived there until his death in 1952.
1 Santayana adds, almost apologetically, the caveat that “some Americans are black.” Having acknowledged that discomfiting fact, he gives no further thought to the matter.
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