The American Credo: A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National MindMencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
General
The American Credo: A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
American wit and humor; National characteristics, American
This view, of course, is full of distortion and misunderstanding,
despite the fact that even Americans, by hearing it stated so often,
have come to allow it a good deal of soundness. The American's concept
of himself, as we have seen, is sometimes anything but accurate; in this
case he errs almost as greatly as when he venerates himself as the
prince of freemen, with gyveless wrists and flashing eyes. As for the
foreigner, what he falls into is the typically Freudian blunder of
projecting his own worst weakness into another. The fact is that it is
he, and not the native American, who is the incorrigible and
unimaginative money-grubber. He comes to the United States in search of
money, and in search of money alone, and pursuing that single purpose
without deviation he makes the mistake of assuming that the American is
at the same business, and in the same fanatical manner. From all the
complex and colourful life of the country, save only the one enterprise
of money-making, he is shut off almost hermetically, and so he concludes
that that one enterprise embraces the whole show. Here the unreliable
promptings of his sub-conscious passion are helped out by observations
that are more logical. Unfamiliar with the language, excluded from all
free social intercourse with the native, and regarded as, if actually
human at all, then at least a distinctly inferior member of the species,
he is forced into the harshest and most ill-paid labour, and so he
inevitably sees the American as a pitiless task-master and ascribes the
exploitation he is made a victim of to a fabulous exaggeration of his
own avarice.
Moreover, the greater success and higher position of the native seem to
bear out this notion. In a struggle that is free for all and to the
death, the native grabs all the shiniest stakes. _Ergo_, he must love
money even more than the immigrant. This logic we do not defend, but
there is--and out of it grows the prevailing foreign view of America and
the Americans, for the foreigner who stays at home does not derive his
ideas from the glittering, lascivious phrases of Dr. Wilson or from the
passionate idealism of such superior Americans as Otto H. Kahn, Adolph
S. Ochs, S. Stanwood Menken, Jacob H. Schiff, Marcus Loew, Henry
Morgenthau, Abram Elkus, Samuel Goldfish, Louis D. Brandeis, Julius
Rosenwald, Paul Warburg, Judge Otto Rosalsky, Adolph Zukor, the Hon.
Julius Kahn, Simon Guggenheim, Stephen S. Wise and Barney Baruch, but
from the hair-raising tales of returned "Americans," _i.e._, fellow
peasants who, having braved the dragons, have come back to the
fatherland to enjoy their booty and exhibit their wounds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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