Another characteristic of American life is its extreme mobility. People move up and down in the social scale and round about the country like bubbles in a boiling kettle. Social life everywhere here is in a constant flux. I left Wall Street, where I was in business, and a certain suburb where I then lived, fifteen years ago. To-day the personnel of “the Street” as I remember it is almost as completely changed as are the symbols on the ticker. In the suburb where I once knew everyone, at least by name, I know scarcely half a dozen households. People are forever making or losing money, arriving in new social sets, living in Pittsburgh or a mining camp one year and in Los Angeles or St. Paul the next. This has a marked effect on social independence. When a family has lived for many generations in the same place, or, as have many county families in England, for centuries, they acquire a social position almost wholly independent of their individual members at a given time. Indeed, a member is almost an accident and may be as erratic and independent as he pleases. He still remains a so-and-so of so-and-so, known to all the countryside. An[Pg 214] old hereditary title accomplishes the same result. Here and there in New England villages or in the South there are families who approximate this happy condition, but in the constant movement of the life of most Americans it is necessary for them to depend wholly upon the effect of their personalities and bank accounts. A man whose family has lived in the “big house” in a small Massachusetts town for a century or two is sufficiently “somebody” there almost to be independent; but should business require him to move to Kalamazoo he is nobody until he “shows them.” The social reputation, immunity, and freedom which long residence in one place gives without effort or thought has to be built again from the ground up, and warily, when one moves to another town where they know not Joseph. One joins the organizations in the new town, and, again, one conforms. To begin in a new place by being “different” is dangerous; to begin by being too superior, even if actually, unconsciously, and with no wish to appear so, may be fatal. Like myself, had I gone to that Jersey suburb and made a little privacy round my garden, the newcomer might be voted “high hat” and not “last long.” In assuming the “mucker pose” the gentleman and scholar does not, of course, descend as low as the “mucker”; but he does, in self-defense, for the sake of peace and quiet, for business success, and for the sake of not offending the motley crowd of all sorts whom his neighbors are apt to be in the seething, changing society everywhere today, shed enough of his own personality not to offend the average. He avoids whatever others may think “high hat” in manners or culture as he would the plague. Like Henry Adams he will find[Pg 215] himself hiding his antecedents if they happen to be better than the neighbors’.