America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  I strongly suspect that our moral and spiritual disintegration grows out of our lack of experience with plenty. . . . [We] are also poisoned with things. Having many things seems to create a desire for more things, more clothes, houses, automobiles. Think of the pure horror of our Christmases when our children tear open package after package and, when the floor is heaped with wrappings and presents, say, “Is that all?”

  Crèvecoeur saw the wild man, his drunkenness and idleness, as being replaced by the settlers, who brought hard work, rules, and a sense of purpose to the frontier. Steinbeck envisioned a similar evolution in our nation, beginning with a biological necessity, the will to survive: “Every pursuit, no matter what its stated end, had as its foundation purpose, survival, growth, and renewal.” But after our survival would seem to be assured, we will lose our will to go on if we do not have faith and a sense of a larger purpose:

  It is probable that here is where morals—integrity, ethics, even charity—have gone. The rules allowed us to survive, to live together and to increase. But if our will to survive is weakened, if our love of life and our memories of a gallant past and faith in a shining future are removed—what need is there for morals or for rules? Even they become a danger. . . . We have succeeded in what our fathers prayed for and it is our success that is destroying us.

  He wrote to Harry Guggenheim in January 1966: “Today I have spent the time correcting galley proofs on my new book. And it’s a better book than I thought. It should raise some smoke. There’s an argument in every sentence, or at least there will be if anyone reads it.”

  Foreword

  IN TEXT and pictures,2 this is a book of opinions, unashamed and individual. For centuries America and the Americans have been the target for opinions—Asian, African, and European—only these opinions have been called criticism, observation, or, God help us, evaluation. Unfortunately, Americans have allowed these foreign opinions the value set on them by their authors. For our own part, we have denounced, scolded, celebrated, and lied about facets and bits and pieces of our own country and countrymen; but I know of no native work of inspection of our whole nation and its citizens by a blowed-in-the-glass American, another opinion.

  So long as our evaluators indulged in simple misconceptions and discourtesies, the game was harmless and sometimes interesting. But when, after 1918, systems arose which required a bête noire to balance their homegrown bête blanche, America as a powerful nation and a successful system became the natural patsy for those governments which were not doing so well. Since those same governments had closed their frontiers to their own people, they were free to make any generalizations they wished without the disadvantage of having to base them on observation.

  This essay is not an attempt to answer or refute the sausage-like propaganda which is ground out in our disfavor. It cannot even pretend to be objective truth. Of course it is opinion, conjecture, and speculation. What else could it be? But at least it is informed by America, and inspired by curiosity, impatience, some anger, and a passionate love of America and the Americans. For I believe that out of the whole body of our past, out of our differences, our quarrels, our many interests and directions, something has emerged that is itself unique in the world: America—complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.

  If the text is opinionated, so are the pictures. The camera may record exactly, but it can set down only what its operator sees, and he sees what he wants to see—what he loves and hates and pities and is proud of. So that the pictures in this book, taken by photographers whose ancestral origins cover the whole world, whose backgrounds and experiences are as diversified as their styles and methods and camera techniques, are also opinions—American opinions. None of these pictures could have been taken anywhere but in America. A European, an African, or an Asian will not find in them an America that he has seen or would see here. But if he is open and sensitive he may learn of what our country is like to us, what we feel about it: our shame in its failures, our pride in its successes, our wonder at its size and diversity, and, above all, our passionate devotion to it—to all of it, the land, the idea, and the mystique.

  I know of course that every country has its parallel. No foreigner can know and feel about England as an Englishman does, with his two thousand years in depth. I have seen a Pole kiss the earth of his homeland on returning, and a Dane shyly caress with his hand a ruddy iron stanchion on a Copenhagen dock. It is not that Americans are different in the quality of their feeling; but this feeling has rarely been set down about our whole country.

  E Pluribus Unum

  OUR LAND is of every kind geologically and climatically, and our people are of every kind also—of every race, of every ethnic category—and yet our land is one nation, and our people are Americans. Mottoes have a way of being compounded of wishes and dreams. The motto of the United States, “E Pluribus Unum,” is a fact. This is the strange and almost unbelievable truth; and even stranger is the fact that the unit America has come into being in slightly over four hundred years—almost exactly the same amount of time as that during which England was occupied by the Roman legions.

  It is customary (indeed, at high-school graduations it is a requirement) for speakers to refer to America as a “precious inheritance”—our heritage, a gift proffered like a sandwich wrapped in plastic on a plastic tray. Our ancestors, so it is implied, gathered to the invitation of a golden land and accepted the sacrament of milk and honey. This is not so.

  In the beginning, we crept, scuttled, escaped, were driven out of the safe and settled corners of the earth to the fringes of a strange and hostile wilderness, a nameless and hostile continent. Some rulers granted large sections of unmapped territory, in places they did not own or even know, as cheap gifts to favorites or to potential enemies for the purpose of getting rid of them. Many others were sent here as a punishment for penal offenses. Far from welcoming us, this continent resisted us. The Indigenes fought to the best of their ability to hold on to a land they thought was theirs. The rocky soils fought back, and the bewildering forests, and the deserts. Diseases, unknown and therefore incurable, decimated the early comers, and in their energy of restlessness they fought one another. This land was no gift. The firstlings worked for it, fought for it, and died for it. They stole and cheated and double-crossed for it, and when they had taken a little piece, the way a fierce-hearted man ropes a wild mustang, they had then to gentle it and smooth it and make it habitable at all. Once they had a foothold, they had to defend their holdings against new waves of the restless and ferocious and hungry.

  America did not exist. Four centuries of work, of bloodshed, of loneliness and fear created this land. We built America and the process made us Americans—a new breed, rooted in all races, stained and tinted with all colors, a seeming ethnic anarchy. Then in a little, little time, we became more alike than we were different—a new society; not great, but fitted by our very faults for greatness, E Pluribus Unum.

  The whole thing is crazy. Every single man in our emerging country was out for himself against all others—for his safety, his profit, his future. He had little care for the land; he ripped it, raped it, and in some cases destroyed it. He cut and burned the forests, fired and plowed the plains, dredged the beautiful rivers for gold, leaving a pebbled devastation. When his family grew up about him he set it against all other families. When communities arose, each one defended itself against other communities. The provinces which became states were each one a suspicious unit, with jealously held borders and duties, tolls, and penalties against strangers. The surges of the new restless, needy, and strong—grudgingly brought in for purposes of hard labor and cheap wages—were resisted, resented, and accepted only when a new and different wave came in. Consider how the Germans clotted for self-defense until the Irish took the resented place; how the Irish became “Americans” against the Poles, the Slavs against the Italians. On the West Coast the Chinese ceased to be enemies only when the Japanese ar
rived, and they in the face of the invasions of Hindus, Filipinos, and Mexicans. Nor were the dislikes saved exclusively for foreigners. When dust and economics rooted up the poor dirt farmers of Oklahoma and pushed them westward, they were met with perhaps even more suspicion and resentment than the other waves.

  All this has been true, and yet in one or two, certainly not more than three generations, each ethnic group has clicked into place in the union without losing the pluribus. When we read the lineup of a University of Notre Dame football team, called the “Fighting Irish,” we do not find it ridiculous that the names are Polish, Slovak, Italian, or Fiji, for that matter. They are the Fighting Irish.

  How all these fragments of the peoples of the world who settled America became one people is not only a mystery but quite contrary to their original wishes and intentions. The first European settlers on the eastern shores of America not only did not want to merge with other peoples but made sure by their regulations and their defenses that they did not. The Pilgrim Fathers who landed in Massachusetts turned their guns on anyone, English or otherwise, who was not exactly like themselves. The Virginia and Carolina planters, with royal grants of land, wanted slaves and indentured servants, not free and dangerous elements; but in many cases their only sources of supply were the prisons of England, so that they got their dangerous elements anyway. Every wavelet of early settlers either went to remote and distance-protected areas or set up defenses against future waves. The poor Irish, fleeing from the potato famine, in the face of North American hostility foregathered with the Irish, the Jews with the Jews. On the West Coast the Chinese formed their Chinese communities. Every large city had its national areas, usually known as “Irishtown,” “Chinatown,” “Germantown,” “Little Italy,” “Polacktown.” The newcomers went to where the languages and customs were their own, and each community in its turn defended itself against the inroads of other nationalities.

  Some groups abandoned or were forced away from the cities and took up their positions in the inexhaustible wilderness. In the Kentucky mountains to this day there are people all of a sort who still speak Elizabethan English. The Mormons, heckled, murdered, and driven from the East, made the terrible trek to Utah and formed their society around the Great Salt Lake. In California there were communities of Russians; in eastern Oregon the Basques took their language, their sheep, and their white sheep dogs to the inaccessible mountains. On the West Coast there were communities of Cornishmen, speaking only Cornish. These isolated groups went to places as nearly like their homeland as they could find, and tried to maintain the old customs and the old life. In the centers, synagogues sprang up, and onion-topped Russian Orthodox churches. Since California was Spanish and then Mexican, therefore Catholic, the schools were parochial; Protestants arriving from the East had to send their sons to Hawaii for a Protestant education. Colonies of Germans settled in Texas and around the Great Lakes, and tried to keep their identities, their cooking, and their language.

  From the first we have treated our minorities abominably, the way the old boys do the new kids in school. All that was required to release this mechanism of oppression and sadism was that the newcomers be meek, poor, weak in numbers, and unprotected—although it helped if their skin, hair, eyes were different and if they spoke some language other than English or worshiped in some church other than Protestant. The Pilgrim Fathers took out after the Catholics, and both clobbered the Jews. The Irish had their turn running the gantlet, and after them the Germans, the Poles, the Slovaks, the Italians, the Hindus, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Filipinos, the Mexicans. To all these people we gave disparaging names: Micks, Sheenies, Krauts, Dagos, Wops, Rag-heads, Yellowbellies, and so forth. The turn against each group continued until it became sound, solvent, self-defensive, and economically anonymous—whereupon each group joined the older boys and charged down on the newest ones. It occurs to me that this very cruelty toward newcomers might go far to explain the speed with which the ethnic and national strangers merged with the “Americans.” Having suffered, one would have thought they might have pity on the newer come, but they did not; they couldn’t wait to join the majority and indulge in the accepted upper-caste practice of rumbling some newer group.

  It is possible that the first colonist on these shores, as soon as he got the seaweed out of his shoes, turned and shouted toward the old country, “No more, now—that’s enough!” The extraordinary ferocity with which each colony resisted newcomers lasted until finally the immigration laws slowed the river of strangers to a stream and then to a drip. Then we had come full turn, and had arrived at a curious and ridiculous position: the very men who were most influential in getting the restrictive immigration laws passed were forced to advocate the admission of new cheap labor, and in some cases to admit it illegally. In fact it can almost be said of us that if we didn’t have patsies we’d have to invent them.

  In earliest times, vulnerability consisted in strangeness, weakness, and poverty; but in the twentieth century a new thing came into being, probably because we had attracted every kind of stranger, except perhaps Eskimos and Australian bushmen. Once the saturation point was reached, minorities began to exert an influence simply as minorities. Perhaps communications, publicity, access to pictures, radio, and print had something to do with this; but there was a further factor involved. As each minority became solvent it ceased to be a target and became a market, and you do not run down someone to whom you hope to sell something. Minorities, sensing their power, began to use it, and to a large extent this was a good thing; but there were losses, of culture, and just pure amusement, which is plain unfortunate. Today, one cannot tell a Jewish joke in public, although the Jews have created some of the funniest stories we know.

  With our history, every law of probability forecast a country made up of tight islands of ethnic groups held together by a common language and by the humility heaped on them by their neighbors. Even settlers from the same nation should have divided up according to language and custom, just as Welshmen keep separate from Lancashiremen, or Scots from men of Somerset or Kent. What happened is one of the strange quirks of human nature—but perhaps it is a perfectly natural direction that was taken, since no child can long endure his parents. It seemed to happen by instinct. In spite of all the pressure the old people could bring to bear, the children of each ethnic group denied their background and their ancestral language. Despite the anger, the contempt, the jealousy, the self-imposed ghettos and segregation, something was loose in this land called America. Its people were Americans. The new generations wanted to be Americans more than they wanted to be Poles or Germans or Hungarians or Italians or British. They wanted this and they did it. America was not planned; it became. Plans made for it fell apart, were forgotten. From being a polyglot nation, Americans became the worst linguists in the world.

  There is no question in my mind that places in America mark their natives not only in their speech patterns but physically—in build, in stance, in conformation. Climate may have something to do with this, as well as food supply and techniques of living; in any case, it seems to be true that people living close together tend to look alike. Why not? If a man and his dog become the same in appearance, why not a man and his neighbor?

  Each of us can detect a stranger, a strange accent. Once I prided myself on being able to tell where a man or woman came from after hearing him speak. But we do not think that we ourselves are so marked. Some years ago when I was living with the migrant people from the Southwest, it was my pride that I could tell an Oklahoman from a man from Arkansas, and either from one from another area. The Oklahoman spoke a regional dialect, it is true; but there were other signs, such as posture, facial structure, way of walking. Once, when I was smugly indulging my ability, a tall, rangy Okie boy said to me, “You’re a Californian.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked with some surprise.

  “You look like a Californian,” he said; and I had not been aware that Californians had a look.

  I have
lived and traveled in foreign countries where my bloodlines of Scottish-Irish, English, and German are common. Let us say that my shoes and hats were made in England, my clothing in Italy cut from British cloth, my shirts and ties in France or Italy, my raincoat in Scotland. In addition, I have a parrot tongue, and quickly and unconsciously pick up the accent, speech mannerisms, and idioms of the people among whom I live. My face has the features, good or bad, of my ancestry. My eyes are northern blue, my hair before it whitened was that no-color which is described as brown. My cheeks are florid, with the tiny vesicles showing through, so characteristic of the Scottish and the North Irish. But in spite of all this, I have never been taken for a European. Any sensitive European knows instantly that I am an American. The Okie boy I mentioned did not remotely resemble me; his dark eyes, shining black hair, high cheekbones, and dark skin all spoke of his Cherokee blood. But if this boy should walk through any city in Europe, he too would instantly be picked out as an American. Somewhere there is an American look. I don’t know what it is, and foreigners cannot describe it; but it is there.

  The American look is not limited to people of Caucasian ancestry. In northern California, where I grew up, there was a large Japanese population, many of whom I knew well. The father and mother would be short, square, wide in the hip, and bowlegged, their heads round, the skin quite dark, the eyes almond with that fullness of the upper lid which is called Oriental. How does it happen, then, that their children and grandchildren are as much as a foot to eighteen inches taller than their parents, that their hips are narrow, their legs long and straight, the skin lighter, and the eyes, while still recognizable as Oriental, much less almond in shape and the fleshy upper lid much less pronounced? Furthermore, their heads are mostly long instead of round. This happens through no intermixture of other blood. It is easy to say that a change of diet has accomplished this change, but that cannot be the only factor; and it is interesting that when one of these Nisei go to Japan they are spotted immediately as Americans. These boys and girls are pure-blooded Japanese—and yet they are pure Americans.