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Preface to This American World, by Edgar Ansel Mowrer
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928. Pp. xv + 254; Preface, ix-xv.
The national and racial self-consciousness of our time, with its various transformations since the war, has provided the subject-matter for a great number of books of a new sort. The literature of Bolshevism has been followed by the literature of Fascism, and neither of these subjects appears to be exhausted.
In this last qualification lies, I consider, the peculiar interest of the book. The majority of American criticisms of America, however intelligent, suffer from a preoccupation with the local aspects of the problems. And so, in another way, do most foreign criticisms. The majority of foreigners think either of Americanization as something to be welcomed and exploited, or as a plague to be quarantined; and either point of view is apt to be superficial. Mr. Mowrer goes farther. He inquires into the origin, as well as the nature, of Americanism; traces it back to Europe; and finds that what are supposed to be the specifically American qualities and vices, are merely the European qualities and vices given a new growth in a different soil. Europe, therefore, in accepting American contributions the danger of which Mr. Mowrer certainly does not palliate, has contracted a malady the
This is an idea which must have occurred to many thoughtful minds, but which has never been so fully and cogently developed as here. In order to make his point, the author is obliged first to define and criticize the qualities and defects of America. This work has been done before, though never (by an American) more clearly or better in a short space. Mr. Mowrer is a shrewd observer, and his observation is given greater force and more particular interest by the brief account of his own origins and beginnings, and the American history of his own family, which he appends to this part of the book. It is a typical case of the history of the families of “Anglo Saxon” origin which have penetrated the Middle West and the West Coast. The author is the descendant of pioneers. There is much reason in the distinction which he draws in the following passage:
Not to have the frontier in one’s blood makes emotional understanding of the United States impossible. On this account Americans divide into two groups, the older stocks and the new-comers. The latter are strong in the cities. They almost monopolize certain branches of our life, they dress, conduct themselves, talk and think like the descendants of old settlers – but they do not feel as they. That is why so much that is admirable in...