Kingdome, Power, Glory

Kingdom, Power, Glory

When have Americans, as represented by their major writers and public characters, been sufficiently the masters of their environment to live symmetrically, to possess a vital native culture?

Thoughtful commentators like Lord Bryce are no longer read ("too longwinded"). Brilliant specialists like Thomas Beer are chuckled over, then dismissed as satirists ("too clever"). Lewis Mumford steps forward, more penetrating than a Van Wyck Brooks, more coherent than a Ralph Adams Cram, far more mature, mannerly and historical than any Mencken, with a book* that is badly needed. He succinctly, brilliantly yet mellowly, summarizes U. S. culture to date.

"The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe," is his premise. The colonists were "stripped Europeans": stripped by Protestantism of humanity, by science of faith, by the Age-of-Reason of government. A lack or exaggeration of one of these three--the kingdom, the power, the glory--has characterized all but 30 years of U. S. history. The golden day of Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Whitman lasted from 1830 to 1860.

Then came the Civil War, "a white gash." Lincoln, a man of full height, was cut down. Soon after, men were describing life as "not dying." Industrialism continued the war, continued slavery. Lincoln's son headed the Pullman Co. Andrew Carnegie vowed to retire to Oxford at 30 but amassed millions instead, and wished another generation the joy he had missed in libraries. Charles Francis Adams went in for railroads. Colorless, sad Howells, despairing Mark Twain, bitter-black Ambrose Bierce were the successors of Herman Melville, whose grappling with the primeval had been tragic but sublime; of Whitman, whom Mark Twain congratulated on having lived to see the marvels of steam and electricity. "The guts were gone from idealism" and William James offered a "pragmatic aquiescence" to materialism: a philosophy of becoming, not being.

Emerson lived to see that "things are in the saddle." They have stayed there ever since.

What of the future? Mr. Mumford is not one to forget that Whitman apostrophized a locomotive, that Emerson thought a swift transatlantic liner could be as beautiful as a star, that Thoreau enjoyed wind singing on telegraph wires. But machines were only instruments, not manna or masters to these men. So he finds little health in the so-called Chicago realists of today. He sees their renowned leader, Theodore Dreiser, swallowing the drab scene "with a vast hippopotamus yawn"; engulfing, nothing more: no digestion or creation. Philosopher John Dewey he finds serviceable but juiceless, with a mode of expression "as depressing as a subway ride." William James at least had a style, the lack of which suggests an organic failing in his disciple. Philosopher Santayana preserves a sense of beauty, but is at once exotic and provincial.

Only from men whose meaning is not yet altogether clear is there great promise -- Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay -- and from the new attitudes of science: pure research and speculation; the translations, such as A. N. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, of science into full human existence.

The Significance of such a book as this might be emphasized by its "election" to one of the new monthly book clubs with their impetus-lending memberships. Sociologically it overshadows any novel that may be written this year or another, precisely as a college lecture overshadows a country school spelling bee. Indeed it was delivered in substance during a series of lectures to an international group of students at Geneva. Whatever readers its rapid, crystalline, aphoristic pages fail to drive back to the best in U. S. literature, it will furnish with at least a vivid sequence of that literature's successive ideals.

The Author. Lewis Mumford was born in Flushing, L. I., so late as 1895. He attended Manhattan universities, pursuing science and pedagogy. His contributions to a wide variety of publications culminated in an associate editorship on the Dial. Since 1920 he has edited the Sociological Review in Eng land. He acknowledges an "intellectual debt" to Professor Patrick Geddes of India and Edinburgh, whose work in synthetics (making science, especially biology and geography, serve society in town-planning, education, etc.) he began investigating and studying, by letter, in 1916. Already two Mumford books have wide fame: The Story of Utopias and Sticks and Stones (U. S. civilization understood through U. S. architecture).

THE GOLDEN DAY -- Lewis Mumford -- Boni & Liveright ($2.50).