The American Way of Life: Ideal and Reality

‘THE youth of America,’ said Oscar Wilde (with a painful disregard of grammar) ‘is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.’ The likelihood that an epigram will simultaneously hint at and obscure the truth could hardly have a better illustration. For America as it thinks of itself and as 20th century Europe thinks of it is indeed young—but largely because the 20th century has a strong inclination to think primarily in economic terms. Most American economic history—or most that matters—is unquestionably recent history. Less than two centuries have elapsed since the farmer, even in long-settled New England, found it advisable from time to time to ‘march into the wilderness in order to molest ye Indians’; ¹ further West, the modern traveller who admires the Grecian columns and elegant design of the State Capitol at Denver, let us say, or at Olympia, can scarcely avoid the impressive reflection that these modern echoes of an ancient civilization stand on ground which was all but unknown to white men at the commencement of the 19th century and was, even in 1850, scarcely distinguishable from the forest and the wilderness.