G K Chesterton’s Thoughts on America

To extend my celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I decided to read one of my favorite authors' memoirs of his travels in America in the early 1920s. What I Saw in America is not a typical travelogue, but rather a collection of somewhat unrelated long essays on G. K. Chesterton's thoughts on various topics that occurred to him while on a lecture tour in the United States.

The chapter titles are a good indication of his wide-ranging interests in our country: What Is America?, A Meditation in a New York Hotel, A Meditation in Broadway, Irish and Other Interviewers, The American Businessman, Presidents and Problems, Prohibition in Fact and Fancy, Fads and Public Opinion, The Spirit of America, The Spirit of England, are among the subjects. Of course, there are plenty of Chestertonian "paradoxes" throughout the book. In fact, he kicks things off with one:

I HAVE NEVER managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.

Roaring Twenties America was a very different country from its 2020s outgrowth, but I think Chesterton makes some points that are still applicable to us today:

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.

During the war I felt that the very worst propaganda for the Allies was the propaganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point out that in one way America is nearer to Europe than England is. If she is not nearer to Bulgaria, she is nearer to Bulgars; if she is not nearer to Bohemia, she is nearer to Bohemians. In my New York hotel the head waiter in the dining-room was a Bohemian; the head waiter in the grill-room was a Bulgar. Americans have nationalities at the end of the street which for us are at the ends of the earth. I did my best to persuade my countrymen not to appeal to the American as if he were a rather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces and had not heard the latest news about the town.

Eighteenth-century ideals, formulated in eighteenth-century language, have no longer in themselves the power to hold all those pagan passions back. Even those documents depended upon Deism; their real strength will survive in men who are still Deists; and the men who are still Deists are more than Deists. Men will more and more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.

The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, ‘The kingdom of heaven is within you.’ That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit; but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else.

I found Chesteron's thoughts on Prohibition very interesting, having quickly realized that one's income level determined whether he or she had easy access to alcohol. He rails against American Prohibition as an attempt by labor management to squeeze more productivity out of its workers by denying them beer and wine, while the upper classes enjoy the benefits of having cocktails at high society functions.

He also tries to objectively describe the strengths and weaknesses of Americans compared to his fellow Britons. There is a very humorous passage where he makes the point that, far from sharing the same language, Americans and the English speak different ones:

Suppose that, in such an international interlude, an English girl and an American girl are talking about the fiancé of the former, who is coming to call. The English girl will be haughty and aristocratic (on the stage), the American girl will of course have short hair and skirts and will be cynical; Americans being more completely free from cynicism than any people in the world. It is the great glory of Americans that they are not cynical; for that matter, English aristocrats are hardly ever haughty; they understand the game much better than that. But on the stage, anyhow, the American girl may say, referring to her friend’s fiancé, with a cynical wave of the cigarette, ‘I suppose he’s bound to come and see you.’ And at this the blue blood of the Vere de Veres will boil over; the English lady will be deeply wounded and insulted at the suggestion that her lover only comes to see her because he is forced to do so. A staggering stage quarrel will then ensue, and things will go from bad to worse; until the arrival of an Interpreter who can talk both English and American.

He is also prophetic in observing that England and America are growing more culturally distant from each other, not closer, despite the expansion of communication technology and means of travel. The American literature he read as an English boy was easily understood by him, but recently published American stories and novels don't make any sense to a British audience:

I saw one of these narrative caricatures the other day in which the whole of the joke (what there was of it) turned on the astonishment of a housewife at the absurd notion of not having an ice-box. It is perfectly true that nearly every ordinary American housewife possesses an ice-box. An ordinary English housewife would no more expect to possess an ice-box than to possess an iceberg.

As I mentioned at the beginning, Chesterton is one of my favorite authors, but I would not recommend What I Saw in America as an introduction to his writings. If you've never read anything by him, try his Father Brown detective short stories or his comic novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. For his nonfiction, check out his spiritual history of humanity, The Everlasting Man. If you enjoy those, you'll find a huge bibliography of works to enjoy. You may have noticed that I find him quite quotable. There are two collections of quotes organized by subject: The Quotable Chesterton and More Quotable Chesterton, and Kevin Belmonte has just published a wonderful book, Chesterton On Life.