America Now

Six years home, sober, and back in print, Stearns did the audacious thing: he reran the experiment on himself. America Now (Scribner, 1938) reassembled the symposium machine of Civilization in the United States — one facet of national life per specialist essay — with thirty-six contributors this time, surveying a country deep in the Depression and a world sliding toward war.

The temperature drop is the real subject. The 1922 volume had been a prosecution; the 1938 one reads more like a stocktaking, and its editor — who had sailed away on the first book's verdict and been broken by the adventure — now found American life, or himself, considerably easier to live with. Reviewers noticed the recantation folded inside the method: same form, same editor, opposite weather.

Together the two symposia bracket the entire expatriate experiment: the argument for leaving and the terms of the return, with The Street I Know as the human middle volume. Stearns died five years later; this was his closing statement, and the quietness of it — after all that fury — is the point.

The 1922 experiment, rerun sixteen years later on the far side of a Depression: thirty-six essays, each surveying one province of American life at the end of the thirties — government, industry, labor, the press, the arts, education, religion, medicine — commissioned and framed by the same editor whose first symposium had pronounced the civilization hollow. The contributors are new, the method identical, and the change in temperature is the book's real finding.

Where Civilization prosecuted, America Now takes stock: the country is in trouble and knows it, but the wholesale verdict of 1922 — that American life starved everything worth living for — no longer holds, least of all for the editor, home from the expatriate experiment and visibly reconciled. Read the two symposia as bookends and the arc completes itself: the argument for leaving, and, sixteen years and one hard education later, the terms of staying.