Civilization in the United States

Stearns was a Harvard-educated critic in the Greenwich Village orbit, and by 1921 he'd become the loudest voice arguing that American life was starving its artists. Civilization in the United States (1922) was his great production: a symposium — 'an inquiry by thirty Americans' — where he assigned each contributor one facet of national life: politics (H. L. Mencken), the literary life (Van Wyck Brooks), the city (Lewis Mumford), poetry, music, the press, education, sex, and so on. Stearns wrote the essay on the intellectual life himself.

The collective verdict was devastating and deliberately so: America was puritan, commercial, conformist, emotionally thin — a country where material machinery ran superbly and everything that makes life worth living was suspect. Art was treated as effeminate, thinking as unprofitable. The conclusion practically wrote itself, and Stearns lived it as publicity stunt and sincere act at once: he delivered the manuscript, then sailed for France — the legend says on the Fourth of July — and the book became the semi-official manifesto of the expat exodus. Thousands of young Americans effectively read it as a boarding pass.

The bitter joke, which nobody savored more than Hemingway, is what Paris then did with the prophet: Stearns wrote almost nothing for a decade. He installed himself at the Select and handicapped horses as 'Peter Pickem' for the Paris Tribune, borrowed francs, and became the walking cautionary tale Hemingway put into The Sun Also Rises as Harvey Stone. But his third act redeems him: shipped home broke and half-blind in 1932, he dried out, reappraised, and wrote The Street I Know (1935) — a genuinely good, unsparing memoir of the whole arc — and even edited a sequel symposium, America Now (1938), in which the thirty-essay experiment was rerun with the anger considerably cooled. He died in 1943.

Thirty essays, one per province of American life: politics, the city, the press, education, business, the law, the family, sex, poetry, music, the theater, science, medicine, and on down the roster — each assigned to a specialist critic and each arriving, by its own route, at the same verdict. Mencken handles politics with a flamethrower; Van Wyck Brooks diagnoses the literary life; Lewis Mumford reads the American city as a failure of imagination; Stearns himself takes the intellectual life, the province he was about to abandon in person.

The whole is designed to be read as a single argument: that American civilization ran superb material machinery over an emotional and aesthetic void — that the preaching and the practice had split, and that art and thought were treated as unmanly luxuries. Read it now as the twenties' founding indictment, the text that turned a mood into a movement; the browsing is half the fun, since every chapter is a period expert dismantling one American institution in twenty pages.