Observing America: The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890–1950

5 Main Street America: G. K. Chesterton and the Culture of the United States in the 1920s

5 Main Street America G. K. Chesterton and the Culture of the United States in the 1920s G. K. Chesterton framed the decade of the 1920s by making two trips to the United States, both of which inspired books. Because Chesterton stood as Wells’s ideological antagonist, it is not surprising that his view of America was substantially at odds with that of Wells. Though the 1920s marked a contrast to the progressive era that had shaped Wells’s thinking on America, Chesterton’s essential arguments about the United States would probably have been much the same no matter when he embarked on his transatlantic travels. Chesterton brought to bear on America his distinctive radical right-wing views and his penetrating powers of observation, and the result was commentary that is at once iconoclastic, subtle, and witty. The America that he cherished was the part that still conformed to the Jeffersonian ideal of small towns, farms, and a simple democratic citizenry. In contrast to both Stead and Wells, Chesterton emphasized that the two nations were not bound together in a common English-speaking culture but rather were distinct, separate societies. On this point he stood on common ground with his friend Hilaire Belloc and even a leftist like Rebecca West, while other Britons, such as John St. Loe Strachey, continued to champion AngloAmerican solidarity. 140 When Chesterton first came to the United States, he was already an accomplished writer and well-known personality on both sides of the Atlantic . Born in 1874 in the Kensington section of London, Gilbert Keith Chesterton entered into a prosperous, cultured middle-class world.1 His father headed the long-established family estate agency but showed more interest in literature, art, and his various hobbies. The household in which Gilbert and his younger brother, Cecil, grew up was Liberal in politics, Unitarian in religion, and properly Victorian in matters of conduct . Gilbert’s childhood was happy and carefree, but he was never more than a lackluster student at St. Paul’s School. Though his friends would eventually go up to Oxford, he remained in London and took courses at University College. The two years he spent at the university were tough ones for Chesterton: his foray into formal art training was apparently a failure, and as he tried to make the personal and intellectual transition to adulthood, he was left feeling depressed. He gained a sense of well-being once again when in 1895, after leaving the university, he found a niche in publishing, which provided him a living until 1901. Furthermore, in 1896 he met and fell in love with his future wife, Frances Blogg. At the turn of the century Chesterton’s literary career began to take off. In 1899 he was invited by the Bookman to review works about art, and in 1900 he published two volumes of verse and started to write for the radical Speaker. Chesterton gained a reputation for his tough pro-Boer stance, and by 1902 the Liberal Daily News had hired him to write a regular weekly column. Two collections of his journalism appeared in 1901 and 1902, the first of many such volumes to be published over the course of his career. So impressed, apparently, was John Morley with the sketches Chesterton had penned of various literary figures that he asked the young writer to undertake the life of Robert Browning for the prestigious “English Men of Letters” series. Chesterton’s brilliant but unconventional study of Browning appeared in 1903, and he subsequently came out with original, engaging works on Dickens (1906), Shaw (1909), and Blake (1910). Chesterton, who by 1905 had added the “Our Notebook” column of the Illustrated London News to his duties, turned into a fixture on Fleet Street—a massive, disheveled figure donning a broad-brimmed hat and black cloak and carrying a sword-stick and revolver, who could generally be found in the pubs and taverns immersed in writing or conversation. Furthermore, he became one of the most versatile literary talents of Edwardian England: besides being a G. K. Chesterton and the Culture of the United States 141 • journalist, critic, essayist, and poet, he developed into a successful writer of fiction. Chesterton published three fantasies, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), and The Ball and the Cross (1909), and by 1911 a collection of his popular Father Brown detective stories had appeared. He...