OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
283
\Tan VVyck Brooks in 1918:
How, then, can our literature be anything but impotent? It is inevitably
so, since it springs from a national mind that has been sealed against
that experience from which literature derives all its values.
-Letters and L eadership
John Dos Passos in 1937:
... The business of the day ... was to buttress property and profits with
anything usable in the debris of Christian ethics and eighteenth century
economics that cluttered the minds of college professors, and to reinforce
the sacred, already shaky edifice with the new strong girderwork of
science Herbert Spencer was throwing up for the benefit of the bosses.
-The
Big
Money
And, finally, Edmund VVilson in 1947:
My optimistic opinion is that the United States at the present time is
politically more advanced than any other part of the world.... We have
seen in the last fifty years a revival of the democratic creativeness which
presided at the birth of the Republic and flourished up through the
Civil War. This began to assert itself strongly during the first two de–
cades of this century, was stimulated by the depression that followed
the blowing-up of the Stock Market, and culminated in the New Deal.
It was accompanied by a remarkable renascence of American arts
and letters.
-Europe Without Baedeker
The American artist and intellectual no longer feels "disin–
herited" as Henry James did, or "astray," as Ezra Pound did
in
1913. \Tan VVyck Brooks himself has by now entirely repudiated the
view that "the national mind has been sealed against that experience
from which literature derives its values." John Dos Passos in 1951
would deny precisely what he affirmed in 1937. And what Edmund
Wilson wrote
in
the conclusion to his book describing a visit to post–
war Europe represents a new judgment of American civilization. It
is a judgment that would have been inconceivable twenty-five years
ago, yet it is one which seems natural to most serious writers today.
We have obviously come a long way from the earlier rejection of
America as spiritually barren, from the attacks of Mencken on the
"booboisie," and the Marxist picture of America in the thirties
as a land of capitalist reaction.
