and published radical poems, stories and drawings.
During the war the capitalists of America,
like
capitalists everywhere,
inflamed the worst chauvinist
passions. And this time it was from liberal Amer-
ican professors at the university that I heard the
counter-attack.
What was nationalism? 'What dis-
tinguished America from other countries? One pro-
fessor proved, by the Socratic method,
that nearly
every so-called American character.istic was shared
by other nations, and what was peculiarly American
was ideologically identical with anarchism,
notably
the cult of the individual.
Certainly,
the democratic dogma, which, if any-
thing was American,
was the peculiar heritage of
this country, did not stand up very well during the
war or immediately after it. Obviously,
the class-
struggle within a nation was more important
than
those general
characteristics
which marked all
people bound together by a common language, com-
mon territory and a common government.
It was at
this time that I heard Randolph Bourne say: "The
ties that bind men are not horizontal
but vertical;
they go not from land to land, but from class to
class and from craft to craft. I have more in com-
mon with a German man of letters than with an
American capitalist."
No doubt that was why the class-conscious Amer-
ican workers and the idealistic American intellectuals
who opposed the imperialist
war hailed with such
boundless enthusiasm the Russian revolution.
The Russian reactionaries said Marxism was a
German idea; the German reactionaries said it was
a French idea; the antisemites said it was a Jewish
idea. Everywhere the oppressors and their ideo-
logues said that the efforts of the proletariat
to
abolish poverty and exploitation were incompatible
with the national character.
Marxism was too ra-
tional for the mystic Slav soul, too messianic for
the rational French mind, too fantastic for the prac-
tical American mind. Yet in every country the most
awakened and progressive workers and intellectuals
found Marxism the precise answer to their eco-
nomic, social, political and cultural aims; for them it
was perfectly compatible with their national char-
acter.
The young American socialist was familiar with
these things in the early Twenties,
and took them
for granted. We stressed the international
idea above
the national idea, the universal class-war above res-
tricted local characteristics.
Indeed,
we tended to
deny national distinctions altogether,
and to divide
the world sharply into two classes which completely
transcended national
frontiers.
vVe even thought
this was Marxism.
Such abstractions were shattered when I lived and
worked in Europe after the war. I suddenly felt very
American;
yet I felt closer to the French,
Italian
and British workers than to the rich American tour-
ists. My first reading of
Main Street
in Paris filled
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
me with nostalgia; a Chaplin film in London, brought
a lump to my throat because it reminded me of New
York movie houses and the friends with whom I
used to go there. Apparently,
internationalism did
not preclude the existence of national characteristics.
There was a difference, however, between the myth-
ical national virtues which the imperialists evoked in
contrast to the vices of those nations whom they
wanted us to conquer for them, and those national
characteristics which developed as a result of en-
vironment and history. The war propaganda and the
war itself divided us from the Germans; Bach and
Hegel and Heine bound us to them. But what bound
us most of all to the masses of the German people
was the international
socialist ideal.
When you asked an educated,
i.e. bourgeois or
middle-class European in the early Twenties what
he thought of America he would tell you America
was the land of miracles. Look at its rational use
of the machine; its mass production; its scientific or-
ganization of labor. But alas, America's wealth was
not noble. Its civilization was a loud and banal me-
chanism.
Thought
and sensibility were marginal;
what was truly American was ugly. Enormous size
and sharpness of outline were the only beauty-if
you could call
it
beauty-of
which America was cap-
able. Observe Brooklyn Bridge and the skyscrapers.
But Europe owed America the wonderful new science
of the modern factory, and the full appreciation of
the engineer. America represented the tremendously
activised energy of man who no longer creates by
the sweat of his brow, but merely supervises his me-
chanical slaves. That is the meaning of "rationaliza-
tion", a splendid word, a wonderful
fulflllment of
the spirit. Out of this comes America's tremendous
optimism.
What a sublime spectacle! More than
120,000,000
people in a crusade against misery. Of
course, the details of this crusade are not always
pleasant;
the people of America are seldom "in-
teresting";
they are uneducated,
money-mad, banal.
But the great crusade against poverty cleanses all
in its fire, in its daring drive toward a new civiliza-
tion.
This mixture of admiration,
snobbishness and
envy prevailed before the crash of 19
2
9 not only
among the European elite, but also among some of
the American expatriates who fled from American
"puritanism",
dullness,
mechanism,
and material-
ism, its alleged hatred of art and the refinements of
the spirit. Julien Green, however, inverted this idea.
He found on his first visit to America that its people
were a young race, overflowing with health, buoyed
by a happy mood which repelled the novelist at first
-until
he discovered that "at the bottom of the
American soul lies a profound sadness of which
Europe has no idea." Life, Green said, appears to
the American as a tragedy. The economic crisis des-
troyed these illusions; and soon it became apparent
that many American characteristics were transfer-
