Introducing the American Spirit. Edward Alfred Steiner
and to have to begin to do it in New York, beats showing off babies, school-children, automobiles, and cemeteries.
The Herr Director was sure he would hate our sky-scrapers; he had seen them from the ship, and the assaulted sky-line looked to him like the huge mouth of an old woman with its isolated, protruding teeth. Frankly, I myself am not interested in sky-scrapers; I prefer the elm trees which shade the streets of the quiet town where I live. I thank God daily for the men who had faith enough to plant trees upon those wind-swept prairies. They were mighty spirits who came to the edges of civilization and drove the wilderness farther and farther back by drawing furrows, sowing wheat, and planting trees—those men whom heat and a relentless desert could not separate from that other ocean with its Golden Gate to the sunset and the oldest world. Determining to have and to hold it till time is no more, they proceeded to unite the two oceans in holy wedlock. A task which involved another nation in hopeless scandal and bankruptcy, they completed with as little ceremony as that which prevails at a wedding before a justice of the peace. Those were the men who went among savages, yet did not become like them; who for homes dug holes in the ground among rattlesnakes, prairie-dogs, and moles, and made of such homes the beginnings of towns and cities.
If I admire the sky-scrapers it is because they are an attempt on the part of this same type of people to do pioneering among the clouds. Public lands being exhausted, they proceed to annex the sky and people it, now that the frontier is no more.
What the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin would say to the sky-scraper meant to me, not whether they would say it is beautiful or ugly, but whether they would discover in it the Spirit of America, the daring spirit of the pioneers who built Towers of Babel, though reversing the process; for they began with a confusion of tongues which outbabeled Babel, and finished on a day of Pentecost when men said: “We do hear them all speaking our own tongue, the mighty works of God.”
We moved along Broadway, pressing through the crowds, the Herr Director puffing and panting, the Frau Directorin doing likewise. The Flatiron Building with its accentuated leanness lured them on until we came to the open space of Madison Square and they were face to face with the Metropolitan tower.
The Herr Director said: “Gott im Himmel!” The Frau Directorin said: “Um Gottes Himmels Willen!” And then they gazed their fill in silence.
I have never “done” Europe with a guide, nor have I ever had an American city introduced to me through a megaphone, so I scarcely knew what to say.
I did not know the exact height of that tower, nor how many tons of steel support it, nor the size of the clock dial which tells the time of day up there “among the dizzy flocks of sky-scrapers”; but I did know that the tower represented some big, daring thing, an expression of the spirit which could not be defined nor easily interpreted to another.
After his first outburst the Herr Director continued to say nothing—he was stunned; so was the Frau Directorin. We walked on, looking up, higher and higher still, until our eyes met another tower, the Woolworth Building—a shrewd Yankee five-and-ten-cent enterprise, flowering into purest Gothic.
The cathedrals of Europe are wonderful, undoubtedly. Master minds drew the plans and master hands built them, slowly, by an age-long process. They turned religious ideals into stone lace and lilies, hideous gargoyles and brave flying buttresses, aisles and naves and rose windows. Yes, they are quite wonderful. But to turn spools of thread, granite-ware, and dust-cloths into this glory of steel and stone is, to me, more marvellous still. The spirit of the pioneer cleaving the sky has become beautiful as it has ascended.
We are worrying a great deal about our lack of sensitiveness to beauty and form; we chide ourselves as being crude and unresponsive to art; we rush madly into the study of æsthetics and buy Old Masters at the price of a king’s ransom; yet we are not truly fostering America’s art sense. It ought not to come in the Old World’s way—by glorifying dogmas and creeds, by petrifying religion into buttresses and incasing our dead in tombs of beryl and onyx. It ought not to come with its mixture of paganism and religion, its armless Venus and its headless Victory. It should come first as it is coming—with the making of homes good to live in, factories planned to work in, stores fit to do business in, and schools built to teach in. It is coming—yes, it is coming.
But when our strong boys shall make filagree silver ornaments, carve pretty things on bits of ivory, or exhaust their energy in painting a lock of hair—when that time comes, we shall be an old people ready for our ornamented tombs.
Next I took the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin through a portal flanked by pillars worthy to crown any Athenian hill; I led them into a Parthenon in which Athena herself might have joyed to be worshipped, and we heard the echoing and reëchoing of a chant which lacked nothing but incense and organ notes to make one think one’s self in an Old World cathedral. The chant was not a Miserere, but a call to entrust one’s self to the depths of the earth—to descend into tubes of steel, beneath the river, and then travel to the fair cities of the living, throbbing, thriving West. It was a railway terminal without choking smoke, blinding dust, or deafening noise; also without that hideous mechanical ugliness which Ruskin so hated. This was merely a place from which one started to reach Oshkosh or Kokomo, Keokuk, Kalamazoo, or Kankakee. Yet more beautiful portals never swung to mortals in their fairest dreams of journeying to the abodes of bliss. The Spirit of America, at last crowned by beauty.
We reached our hotel fairly exhausted by our morning’s walk; but, after being properly refreshed, the Herr Director ventured to criticize.
“Yes, you are a wonderfully resourceful people, keen and energetic, but chaotic. You take an Italian campanile and elongate it fifty times; or a Gothic church, and attenuate it; or a Romanesque cathedral, and support it by Ionic pillars; or a cigar box, and enlarge it a million times. You put all these things side by side, and no one asks: Will they harmonize, or will they clash?
“Each man builds as he pleases, although he may blot out the other man’s work and waste colossal energy merely to express himself. The result is confusion. You can feel that unrest, that discord, in the air. My nerves fairly ache! No, we shall not go out this afternoon. We must rest our nerves.”
The Herr Director always spoke for his wife as well as for himself, thus expressing the collective spirit of the Old World. They both retired for a long rest, while I was left wondering how to introduce New York to them in the evening.
At five o’clock in the afternoon they emerged from their apartments, their wearied Old World nerves rested, and, after being stimulated by a cup of coffee, were ready for further adventures.
Broadway at that hour of the afternoon is bewildering. The shoppers have almost deserted it, and it is crowded by the clerks who served them, the cashiers who received their money, the girls who trimmed their hats, the men who cut their garments, the bookkeepers and the floor-walkers.
Whole towns seem to pour out of the department stores and lofts; the makers and menders of garments flee from the heart of the city, from this pulsing machine which has been going at a dangerous speed. They go from it eagerly, with a brave show of courage, as if the ten hours’ labor had not broken their spirits or wearied their energy. To count the ants of a busy hill would be easier than even to estimate the numbers of that throng.
They climb the steps of the elevated railway trains, and crowd them, and cram the cars until they fairly bulge.
They lay siege to the surface cars, which merely crawl through the busy streets, so heavy are they and so closely does one car follow the other.
They descend into the depths of the earth, and breathe the humid, human air of those noisy catacombs. They walk by companies, regiments, and great armies, dodging automobiles which infest the streets with their speed and their stenches.
They accomplish it all with so little friction to each other’s spirit, with such a silent good nature, with such a sense of self-reliance, and with so little official machinery to control them, that even the Herr Director said:
“This is wonderful!” although he declared that he would suffocate in that throng, and the Frau Directorin cried