The American Mind

Extract

The foreign visitor is commonly warned that New York is not America, and the meaning of the statement is clear. But it is not very helpful. A more relevant observation surely is that New York is very American. To go from New York to Fort Wayne, Indiana, is not to go to another country, or even to meet something different: the difference is only in size and degree. Neither in New York nor Pittsburgh, Boston or San Francisco, Cincinnati or Seattle is the foreigner moved to make comparisons of americanism; in the ‘old’ South and New Mexico ‘regionalism’ is still very marked; but in only a few, a very few, places—Sante Fé, for example, or, I suppose, old New Orleans— does he ask rhetorically, ‘Am I really in the United States?’ It is one of the most astounding things about this astounding country —its unity and uniformity.

The area of the United States is three million square miles. New York is as far from the Californian Redwoods as London is from the Urals, the distance from Galveston to the Canadian border is about the distance from Athens to the North Cape. Some 140 million souls live in this area, originating in every nation of Europe (there were still thirteen million foreign-born American citizens in 1930), and with of course a big African clement. And yet they are ‘We, the people of the United States’ as much as the homogeneous two-and-a-half million of 1776. Neither differences of national origin nor geographical and climatic differences—and they are very great—have produced the deep diversities one would expect: the ‘melting-pot’ melted—and then remade.