[946] It would never occur to the naïve European to regard the psychology of the average American as particularly complicated or even sophisticated. On the contrary he is rather impressed by the simplicity and straightforwardness of American thought and manners. He likes to think of Americans as being a very active, business-like, and astonishingly efficient people, concentrated upon a single goal (viz., the yellow god), and a bit handicapped by what certain English magazines call “Americana”—something on the border-line of mild insanity, “colonials are liable to be a bit odd, don’t you know, like our South African cousins.”
[947] Thus, when I have to say something serious about Americans and their peculiar psychology, my European audience is not shocked exactly, but at all events somewhat puzzled and inclined to disapprove. What the Americans will feel about my ideas, remains to be seen.
[948] In 1909 I paid my first short visit to the United States. This was my first impression of the American people as a whole; before that I had known individuals only. I remember, when walking through the streets of Buffalo, I came across hundreds of workmen leaving a factory. The naïve European traveller I was then could not help remarking to his American companion: “I really had no idea there was such an amazing amount of Indian blood in your people.” “What,” said he, “Indian blood? I bet there is not one drop of it in this whole crowd.” I replied: “But don’t you see their faces? They are more Indian than European.” Whereupon I was informed that probably most of these workmen were of Irish, Scottish, and German extraction without a trace of Indian blood in their veins. I was puzzled and half incredulous. Subsequently I learned to see how ridiculous my hypothesis had been. Nevertheless, the impression of facial similarity remained and later years only enhanced it. As Professor Boas maintains, there are even measurable anatomical changes in many American immigrants, changes which are already noticeable in the second generation. His findings, however, have not been accepted by other authorities.
[949] I remember a New York family of German immigrants of which three of the children were born in Germany and four in America. The latter were unmistakably Americans, the first three were clearly Germans. To a keen European eye there is an indefinable yet undeniable something in the whole makeup of the born American that distinguishes him from the born European. It is not so much in the anatomical features as in the general behaviour, physical and mental. One finds it in the language, the gestures, the mentality, in the movements of the body, and in certain things even more subtle than that.
[950] When I returned from America, I was left with the peculiarly dissatisfied feeling of one who has somehow missed the point. I had to confess that I was unable “to size them up.” I only knew that a subtle difference existed between the American and the European, just as it does between the Australian and the South African. You can say many witty or clever things about that difference, and yet you miss the point somehow. But another impression also stuck in my mind. I had not noticed it at first, but it kept on coming back like all those things that have a certain importance and yet have not been understood. I was once the guest of a pretty stiff and solemn New England family of a rather terrifying respectability. It felt almost like home. (There are very conservative and highly respectable folk in Switzerland, too. We might even better the American record in this respect.) There were Negro servants waiting at table. I felt at first as if I were eating lunch in a circus and I found myself diffidently scrutinizing the dishes, looking for the imprint of those black fingers. A solemnity brooded over the meal for which I could see no reason, but I supposed it was the solemnity or serenity of great virtue or something like that which vibrated through the room. At all events nobody laughed. Everyone was just too nice and too polite. Eventually I could stand it no longer, and I began to crack jokes for better or worse. These were greeted with condescending smiles. But I could not arouse that hearty and generous American laugh which I love and admire. “Well,” I thought, “Indian blood, wooden faces, camouflaged Mongols, why not try some Chinese on them?” So I came to my last story, really a good one—and no sooner had I finished than right behind my chair an enormous avalanche of laughter broke loose. It was the Negro servant, and it was the real American laughter, that grand, unrestrained, unsophisticated laughter revealing rows of teeth, tongue, palate, everything, just a trifle exaggerated perhaps and certainly less than sixteen years old. How I loved that African brother.
[951] I admit it is a rather foolish story, all the more so as I could not then see the reason why the incident should stick in my mind. Only much later did I discover the underlying significance of this and of that other impression I had received at Buffalo.
[952] Our convictions often have a humble origin. I do not hesitate, therefore, to tell my reader exactly how my ideas about American psychology started. Those two little impressions really hold in a nutshell everything I subsequently learned in the course of twenty-five years’ work with American patients.
[953] The American laugh is most impressive. Laughing is a very important emotional expression and one learns a lot about character from a careful observation of the way people laugh. There are people who suffer from a crippled laughter. It’s just painful to see them laugh and the sound of that shrill, evil, compressed rattle almost makes you sick. America as a nation can laugh, and that means a lot. There is still a childlikeness, a soundness of emotion, an immediate rapport with your fellow being.
[954] This laughter goes hand in hand with a remarkable vivacity and a great ease of expression. Americans are great talkers. Gossip and chattering spill over into monstrously big newspapers. The talking goes on even when you are reading. The style of “good” American writing is a talking style. When it is not too flat, it is just as refreshing and exhilarating for us Europeans as your laughter. But often, alas, it is just chattering, the vibrating noise of a big ant-heap.
[955] One of the greatest advantages of the American language is its slang. I am far from sniffing at American slang, on the contrary I like it profoundly. Slang means a language in the making, a thing fully alive. Its images are not worn-out and worm-eaten metaphors, pale reflections hallowed by immemorial age, smooth, correct, and concise conventions, but figures full of life, carrying all the stamina of their earthly origin, and the incomparable flavour of local conditions peculiar to the strange and unprejudiced soil of a new country. One feels a new current of strange life in the flow of the old English language, and one wonders where it comes from. Is it the new country only? I doubt it.
[956] The way the American moves shows a strong tendency to nonchalance. When we analyse the way he walks, how he wears his hat, how he holds his cigar, how he speaks, we discover a marked nonchalance. One hears an unusual amount of unrestrained voices in the talk going on around one. There is a lack of restraint in the way people sit, sometimes at the expense of your furniture, or on Sundays you see streets punctuated with feet showing over the window-sills. There is a tendency to move with loose joints, with a minimum of innervation. In speech one notices this nonchalance in an insufficient innervation of the soft palate, which causes the nasal intonation that is so common with Americans. The swaying hip which you can observe in primitive, particularly Negro women is frequently seen in American women, and the swinging gait of the man is fairly usual.
[957] The most amazing feature of American life is its boundless publicity. Everybody has to meet everybody, and they even seem to enjoy this enormity. To a central European such as I am, this American publicity of life, the lack of distance between people, the absence of hedges or fences round the gardens, the belief in popularity, the gossip columns of the newspapers, the open doors in the houses (one can look from the street right through the sitting-room and the adjoining bedroom into the backyard and beyond), the defencelessness of the individual against the onslaught of the press, all this is more than disgusting, it is positively terrifying. You are immediately swallowed by a hot and all-engulfing wave of desirousness and emotional incontinence. You are simply reduced to a particle in the mass, with no other hope or expectation than the illusory goals of an eager and excited collectivity. You just swim for life, that’s all. You feel free—that’s the queerest thing—yet the collective movement grips you faster than any old gnarled roots in European soil would have done. Even your head gets immersed. There is a peculiar lack of restraint about the emotions of an American collectivity. You see it in the eagerness and in the hustle of everyday life, in all sorts of enthusiasms, in orgiastic sectarian outbursts, in the violence of public admiration and opprobrium. The overwhelming influence of collective emotions spreads into everything. If it were possible, everything would be done collectively, because there seems to be an astonishingly feeble resistance to collective influences. It is true that collective action is always less laborious than an individual attempt. The momentum of collective action carries much further than even concentrated individual effort, since it makes people unaware of themselves and heedless of risks. On the other hand, it easily goes too far and leads people into situations which individual deliberation would hardly ever have chosen. It has a decidedly flattening influence on people’s psychology.
[958] You see this particularly in the American sex problem as it had developed since the war. There is a marked tendency to promiscuity, which shows not only in the frequency of divorces but quite particularly in the peculiar liberation from sex prejudices in the younger generation. As an inevitable consequence the individual rapport between the sexes will suffer. An easy access never calls forth and therefore never develops the values of character, and at the same time it is a most serious obstacle to any deeper mutual understanding. Such an understanding, without which no real love can exist, is reached only by overcoming all the difficulties due to the psychological difference between the sexes. Promiscuity paralyses all these efforts by offering easy opportunities of escape. Individual rapport becomes quite superfluous. But the more a so-called unprejudiced freedom and easy promiscuity prevail, the more love becomes flat and degenerates into transitory sex interludes. The most recent developments in the field of sexual morality tend toward sexual primitivity, analogous to the instability of the moral habits of primitive peoples, where under the influence of collective emotion all sex taboos instantly disappear.
[959] All American life seems to be the life of the big settlement—real town-life. Even the smallest settlement denies itself the character of a village and tends to become a city. The town rules the whole style of living, even in the country. It seems as though everything were collective and standardized. Once on a visit to a so-called camp with so-called country life, a European friend who was travelling with me whispered to me in a quiet moment: “I bet they even have a text-book on how to camp,” and—there it was, evilly glistening in red and gold upon the shelf!
[960] The country is wonderful, nay, just divine, still with the faint perfume of unhistorical eternity in the air, and those lovely crickets not yet shy of man. They don’t know yet that they are living in America, like some Navahos. And the bullfrog talks in the night with his prehistoric booming voice. Beautiful immense nights, and days blessed with sunshine. There is real country and nobody seems to be up to it, certainly not that hustling, noisily chattering, motoring townfolk. They are not even down to it, as the Red Indians are, with whom one feels peculiarly at ease because they are obviously under the spell of their country and not on top of it. So there at last is the peace of God.
[961] I know the mother-nations of North America pretty well, but I would be completely at a loss to explain, if I relied solely on the theory of heredity, how the Americans descended from them acquired their striking peculiarities. One might suppose that some of them were the product of the old pioneer and colonist attitude. But I fail to see how the particular qualities I have mentioned have anything to do with the character of the early farmer colonist. There is a much better hypothesis to explain the peculiarities of the American temperament. It is the fact that the States are pervaded by the Negro, that most striking and suggestive figure. Some States are particularly black, a fact that may astonish the naïve European, who thinks of America as a white nation. It is not wholly white, if you please, but piebald. It cannot be helped, it just is so.
[962] What is more contagious than to live side by side with a rather primitive people? Go to Africa and see what happens. When it is so obvious that you stumble over it, you call it “going black.” But if it is not so obvious it is explained as “the sun.” In India it is always the sun. In reality it is a mitigated going black, counterbalanced by a particularly stiffnecked conventionality (with its subdivisions of righteousness and conspicuous respectability). Under the pressure of all this conventionality people simply dry up, though they make the sun responsible. It is much easier for us Europeans to be a trifle immoral, or at least a bit lax, because we do not have to maintain the moral standard against the heavy downward pull of primitive life. The inferior man has a tremendous pull because he fascinates the inferior layers of our psyche, which has lived through untold ages of similar conditions—“on revient toujours à ses premiers amours.” He reminds us—or not so much our conscious as our unconscious mind—not only of childhood but of our prehistory, which would take us back not more than about twelve hundred years so far as the Germanic races are concerned. The barbarian in us is still wonderfully strong and he yields easily to the lure of his youthful memories. Therefore he needs very definite defences. The Latin peoples being older don’t need to be so much on their guard, hence their approach to the coloured man is different.
[963] But the defences of the Germanic man reach only as far as consciousness reaches. Below the threshold of consciousness the contagion meets with little resistance. Just as the coloured man lives in your cities and even within your houses, so also he lives under your skin, subconsciously. Naturally it works both ways. Just as every Jew has a Christ complex, so every Negro has a white complex and every American a Negro complex. As a rule the coloured man would give anything to change his skin, and the white man hates to admit that he has been touched by the black.
[964] Now for the facts. What about that American laughter? What about the boundless noisy sociality? The pleasure in movement and in stunts of all sorts? The loose-jointed walk, the Negroid dancing and music? The rhythm of jazz is the same as the n’goma, the African dance. You can dance the Central African n’goma with all its jumping and rocking, its swinging shoulders and hips, to American jazz. American music is most obviously pervaded by the African rhythm and the African melody.
[965] It would be difficult not to see that the coloured man, with his primitive motility, his expressive emotionality, his childlike directness, his sense of music and rhythm, his funny and picturesque language, has infected the American “behaviour.” As any psychologist and any doctor knows, nothing is more contagious than tics, stammering, choreic movements, signs of emotion, above all laughter and peculiarities of speech. Even if your mind and heart are elsewhere, even if you don’t understand a joke in a foreign language, you can’t help smiling when everybody else smiles. Stammering can have a most infectious quality, so that you hardly can refrain from imitating it involuntarily. Melody and rhythm are most insidious, they can obsess you for days, and as to language it is most disturbing how its metaphors and different ways of pronunciation affect you, beginning with some apologetic quotation, and then because you just can’t help it.
[966] The white man is a most terrific problem to the Negro, and whenever you affect somebody so profoundly, then, in a mysterious way, something comes back from him to yourself. The Negro by his mere presence is a source of temperamental and mimetic infection, which the European can’t help noticing just as much as he sees the hopeless gap between the American and the African Negro. Racial infection is a most serious mental and moral problem where the primitive outnumbers the white man. America has this problem only in a relative degree, because the whites far outnumber the coloured. Apparently he can assimilate the primitive influence with little risk to himself. What would happen if there were a considerable increase in the coloured population is another matter.
[967] I am quite convinced that some American peculiarities can be traced back directly to the coloured man, while others result from a compensatory defence against his laxity. But they remain externals leaving the inner quick of the American character untouched, which is not the case where “going black” is concerned. Since I am not a behaviourist, I take leave to suppose that you are still very far from the real man when you observe only his behaviour. I regard behaviour as a mere husk that conceals the living substance within. Thus I can discern the white man clearly enough through his slightly Negroid mannerisms, and my question is: Is this American white man nothing but a simple white man, or is he in some way different from the European representative of the species? I believe there is a marked difference between them within as well as without. European magazines have recently published pictures of well-known Americans in Indian headdress, and some Red Indians in European costume in the opposite column, with the question: Who are the Indians?
[968] This is not just a joke. There is something in it that can hardly be denied. It may seem mysterious and unbelievable, yet it is a fact that can be observed in other countries just as well. Man can be assimilated by a country. There is an x and a y in the air and in the soil of a country, which slowly permeate and assimilate him to the type of the aboriginal inhabitant, even to the point of slightly remodelling his physical features. The verification of such facts in terms of exact measurement, overwhelmingly obvious though they sometimes are, is—I admit—exceedingly difficult. But there are many such things that elude all our means of exact scientific verification despite their obvious and indubitable character. Think of all the subtleties of expression in the eyes, gestures, and intonation. In practice everybody goes by them and no idiot could misunderstand them, yet one is faced with a most ticklish task when it comes to giving an absolutely scientific description of them. I know a man who could tell from a series of photographs of Jews of different countries with almost infallible certainty: This is a Polish, that a Cossack, and that a German Jew, and so on.
[969] Undoubtedly there are these subtle indications in man: sometimes they lurk in the lines of his face, sometimes in his gestures, his facial expression, the look in his eyes, and sometimes in his psyche, that shines forth through the transparent veil of his body. At all events it is often possible to tell in what country he was born. I know quite a number of cases where children of purely European parents were born in Eastern countries and exhibited the marks of their respective birthplaces either in the imponderabilia of their appearance or in their mental make-up or in both, and to such a degree that not only I myself but other people who were entirely ignorant of the circumstances could make the diagnosis. The foreign country somehow gets under the skin of those born in it. Certain very primitive tribes are convinced that it is not possible to usurp foreign territory, because the children born there would inherit the wrong ancestor-spirits who dwell in the trees, the rocks, and the water of that country. There seems to be some subtle truth in this primitive intuition.
[970] That would mean that the spirit of the Indian gets at the American from within and without. Indeed, there is often an astonishing likeness in the cast of the American face to that of the Red Indian, more I think in the men’s faces than in the women’s. But women are always the more conservative element in spite of their conspicuous affectation of modernity. It is a paradox certainly, yet such is human nature.
[971] The external assimilation to the peculiarities of a country is a thing one could almost expect. There is nothing astonishing in it. But the external similarity is feeble in comparison with the less visible but all the more intense influence on the mind. It is just as though the mind were an infinitely more sensitive and suggestible medium than the body. It is probable that long before the body reacts the mind has already undergone considerable changes, changes that are not obvious to the individual himself or to his immediate circle, but only to an outsider. Thus I would not expect the average American, who has not lived for some years in Europe, to realize how different his mental attitude is from the European’s, just as I would not expect the average European to be able to discern his difference from the American. That is the reason why so many things that are really characteristic of a country seem to be merely odd or ridiculous: the conditions from which they arise are either not known or not understood. They wouldn’t be odd or ridiculous if one could feel the local atmosphere to which they belong and which makes them perfectly comprehensible and logical.
[972] Almost every great country has its collective attitude, which one might call its genius or spiritus loci. Sometimes you can catch it in a formula, sometimes it is more elusive, yet nonetheless it is indescribably present as a sort of atmosphere that permeates everything, the look of the people, their speech, behaviour, clothing, smell, their interests, ideals, politics, philosophy, art, and even their religion. In a well-defined civilization with a solid historical background, such as for instance the French, you can easily discover the keynote of the French esprit: it is “la gloire,” a most marked prestige psychology in its noblest as well as its most ridiculous forms. You find it in their speech, gestures, beliefs, in the style of everything, in politics and even in science.
[973] In Germany it is the “Idea” that is impersonated by everybody. There are no ordinary human beings, you are “Herr Professor” or “Herr Geheimrat,” “Herr Oberrechnungsrat,” and even longer things than that. Sometimes the German idea is right and sometimes it is wrong, but it never ceases to be an idea whether it belongs to the highest philosophy or is merely a foolish bias. Even when you die in Germany, you don’t die in mere human misery, you die in the ideal form of “Hausbesitzersgattin” or something of the sort.
[974] England’s innermost truth and at the same time her most valuable contribution to the assets of the human family is the “gentleman,” rescued from the dusty chivalry of the early Middle Ages and now penetrating into the remotest corner of modern English life. It is an ultimate principle that never fails to carry conviction, the shining armour of the perfect knight in soul and body, and the miserable coffin of poor natural feelings.
[975] But could one “size up” other countries like Italy, Austria, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, just as easily? They are all very characteristic countries, yet their spirit is more difficult to catch. It would need not one word but at least a couple of sentences. America is also one of those countries that are not settled by one shot. European prejudice would say: Money. But only people who have no idea of what money means to Americans can think like that. Yes, if they themselves are Americans, it would be money. But America is not as simple as that. Of course there is any amount of ordinary materialism in America as everywhere else, but also a most admirable idealism which hardly finds its equal anywhere else. Money with us has still something of the magic of the old taboo, dating from the times when any money business like banking, or usury, was considered dishonest. It is still something of a forbidden pleasure in the old countries. That is why it is good form with us to hush up money matters. The American, unhampered by the burden of historical conditions, can make and spend money for what it is worth. America is peculiarly free from the spell of money, yet she makes a lot of it. How can the European understand this puzzle?
[976] America has a principle or idea or attitude, but it is surely not money. Often, when I was searching through the conscious and the unconscious mind of my American patients and pupils, I found something which I can only describe as a sort of Heroic Ideal. Your most idealistic effort is concerned with bringing out the best in every man, and when you find a good man you naturally support him and push him on, until at last he is liable to collapse from sheer exertion, success, and triumph. It is done in every family, where ambitious mothers egg their boys on with the idea that they must be heroes of some sort, or you find it in the factory, where the whole system anxiously tries to get the best man into the best place. Or again in the schools where every child is trained to be brave, courageous, efficient, and a “good sport,” a hero in short. There is no record which people will not kill themselves to break, even if it is the most appalling nonsense. The moving pictures abound with heroes of every description. American applause holds the world’s record. The “great” and “famous” man gets mobbed by enthusiastic crowds, whatever he may be “great” in; even Valentino got his full share. In Germany you are great if your titles are two yards long, in England if you are a gentleman as well, in France if you coincide with the prestige of the country. In small countries there is, as a rule, no greatness when you are alive, because things need to be small, therefore it is usually posthumous. America is perhaps the only country where “greatness” is unrestricted, because it expresses the most fundamental hopes, desires, ambitions, and convictions of the nation.
[977] I admit that to an American these things seem to be fairly natural, but not to a European. There are many Europeans who are infected by feelings of inferiority when they contact America and meet her heroic ideal. As a rule they don’t admit it, and so they boast of Europe all the louder or begin to ridicule the many things in America which are open to criticism, such as roughness, brutality and primitivity. Often they get their first and decisive shock in the custom-house, so that their appetite is ruined for the rest of the States. It is inevitable that the heroic attitude should be coupled with a sort of primitivity, because it has always been the ideal of a somewhat sporty, primitive society. And this is where the real historical spirit of the Red Man enters the game. Look at your sports! They are the toughest, the most reckless, and the most efficient in the world. The idea of mere play has almost entirely disappeared, while in other parts of the world the idea of play still prevails rather than that of professional sport. Your sport demands a training that is almost cruel and an application that is almost inhuman. Your sportsmen are gladiators, every inch of them, and the excitement of the spectators derives from ancient instincts that are akin to bloodlust. Your students go through initiations and form secret societies like the best among barbarous tribes. Secret societies of every description abound all over the country from the Ku Klux Klan to the Knights of Columbus, and their rites are analogous to any primitive mystery religion. America has resuscitated the ghosts of Spiritualism, of which she is the original home, and cures diseases by Christian Science, which has more to do with the shaman’s mental healing than with any recognizable kind of science. Moreover it is proving to be pretty effective, just as were the cures of the shaman.
[978] The old European inheritance looks rather pale beside these vigorous primitive influences. Have you ever compared the skyline of New York or any great American city with that of a pueblo like Taos? And did you see how the houses pile up to towers towards the centre? Without conscious imitation the American unconsciously fills out the spectral outline of the Red Man’s mind and temperament.
[979] There is nothing miraculous about this. It always has been so: the conqueror overcomes the old inhabitant in the body but succumbs to his spirit. Rome at the zenith of her power contained within her walls all the mystery cults of the East; yet the spirit of the humblest among them, a Jewish mystery society, transformed the greatest of all cities from top to bottom. The conqueror gets the wrong ancestor-spirits, the primitives would say: I like this picturesque way of putting it. It is pithy and expresses every conceivable implication.
[980] People rarely want to know what a thing is in itself, they want to know whether it is favourable or unfavourable, advisable or evil, as if there were indubitably good or bad things. Things are as we take them. Moreover, anything that moves is a risk. Thus a nation in the making is naturally a big risk, to itself as well as others. It is certainly not my task to play the role of a prophet or of a ridiculous adviser of nations, and moreover there is nothing to give advice about. Facts are neither favourable nor unfavourable; they are merely interesting. And the most interesting of all is that this childlike, impetuous, “naïve” America has probably the most complicated psychology of all nations.