Produced by Annie McGuire and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) THE AMERICAN CREDO A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN and H. L. MENCKEN NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF 1920 * * * * * _BY H. L. MENCKEN AND GEORGE JEAN NATHAN_ HELIOGABALUS: A BUFFOONERY _BY H. L. MENCKEN_ _BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN_ THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ANOTHER BOOK ON THE THEATRE A BOOK OF BURLESQUES MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN A BOOK WITHOUT A TITLE A BOOK OF PREFACES THE POPULAR THEATRE PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES COMEDIANS ALL * * * * * PREFACE I The superficial, no doubt, will mistake this little book for a somewhat laborious attempt at jocosity. Because, incidentally to its main purpose, it unveils occasional ideas of so inordinate an erroneousness that they verge upon the ludicrous, it will be set down a piece of spoofing, and perhaps denounced as in bad taste. But all the while that main purpose will remain clear enough to the judicious. It is, in brief, the purpose of clarifying the current exchange of rhetorical gas bombs upon the subject of American ideals and the American character, so copious, so cocksure and withal so ill-informed and inconclusive, by putting into plain propositions some of the notions that lie at the heart of those ideals and enter into the very substance of that character. "For as he thinketh in his heart," said Solomon, "so _is_ he." It is a saying, obviously, that one may easily fill with fantastic meanings, as the prevailing gabble of the mental healers, New Thoughters, efficiency engineers, professors of scientific salesmanship and other such mountebanks demonstrates, but nevertheless it is one grounded, at bottom, upon an indubitable fact. Deep down in every man there is a body of congenital attitudes, a corpus of ineradicable doctrines and ways of thinking, that determines his reactions to his ideational environment as surely as his physical activity is determined by the length of his _tibiae_ and the capacity of his lungs. These primary attitudes, in fact, constitute the essential man. It is by recognition of them that one arrives at an accurate understanding of his place and function as a member of human society; it is by a shrewd reckoning and balancing of them, one against another, that one forecasts his probable behaviour in the face of unaccustomed stimuli.