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A Preference for France (American Legion Monthly, 1927)
This article is titled "Why I live in Paris" and I simply adore it. The piece was penned by an anonymous expatriate, a former American soldier of the Great War who went into some detail comparing life in 1920s Paris to the life he knew in America, and he is quite funny about it. He described a Paris that Hemingway, Stein and Fitzgerald didn't talk about, and since expatriates have essentially foreign souls, I posted it in this section:
"Back in America I sincerely thought that my hometown had the worst telephone system in the world. This was a colossal error. When the world's championship for bad telephone service is handed out, I nominate Paris; confident that my candidate will win. In truth, if any American Socialist wants to see how miserably his ideals work in practice, let him try to call a friend on a French telephone, and if he doesn't die of the weariness of waiting, he'll confess that French state ownership and operation are an abject failure... I am thoroughly in love with France, however, for life is more than telephones and railroad trains..."
| The British View of Religious America (Literary Digest, 1913)
Here is a short article concerning the observations of one English clergyman that appeared in a 1913 issue of THE CHRISTIAN WORLD (London) as to the unique brand of Christianity that is practiced in the United States in the early Twentieth Century:
"...Christianity in America is divided into two camps. The one is orthodox. It's orthodoxy is apt to degenerate into the senile attachment to the letter of Scripture...There is a lack of mental breadth, of intellectual enlightenment, about the members of this school which is a little disheartening to one who is in agreement with them on the central matters...The other school seems to have sacrificed almost everything which makes Christianity distinct from a temporary philosophy. It's members have the bad habit of preaching eugenics or sociology in place of the Gospel. They appear to be afraid of the great epistles and the nobler passages of the Gospels, and are apt to speak in terms which would suggest that there was nothing distinctive in Christianity which can make it an absolute and universal faith."In 1925 these two groups would go head to head in a Tennessee courtroom debating Darwin's Theory of Evolution and its place in the schoolhouse.
| American Dominance in Pop-Culture (Stage Magazine, 1939)
The editors of Stage magazine were dumbfounded when they considered that just ten years after audiences got an earful from the first sound movies, the most consistent characteristic to have been maintained throughout that decade was the box-office dominance of American movie stars, directors and writers. After naming the most prominent of 1930s U.S. movie stars the author declares with certainty that this could not have been an accident. "And the Movies: all them stories, all them fables, all them beautiful women,all them amazing children: Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Jane Withers, Jackie Searl,and the others. Even Europe in the movies is America. Even Charlie Chan is American. Even Mr. Moto is American. Even war in the movies is American, instead of neurotic. And the newsreels: the style of them,the energy and comedy of them: the imitativeness, the invention, and absurdity of them for the sake of comedy. America made these entertainers,and now, very naturally, they are making America."
| Gertrude Stein on America ('47 Magazine, 1947)
"What our most famous literary expatriate really thought of her country".
| America Vilified in the European Press (Literary Digest, 1928)
"Envy and admiration as well as ridicule and praise are found in the many articles the European press devoted to this country. Our big business astonishes them, our so-called lack of culture inspires thinly veiled contempt, while our homicide records lead some rather irascible English critics to speak of the United States as 'the Land of Liberty - for the murderer.'" Yet for all their contempt there was one thing they couldn't live without: click here to read an article about how much the Europeans loved American silent comedies.
| Americans Are A Strange People (Characteristically American, 1932)
The very funny Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1869 - 1944) diagnosed many of the character traits that make Americans what they are. Although written seventy-eight years ago, many of these observations are still true to this day:"Americans are a queer people: they can't read.
They have more schools, and better schools, and spend more money on schools and colleges than all of Europe.
But they can't read.
They print more books in one year than the French print in ten.
But they can't read.
They cover their country with 100,000 tons of Sunday newspapers every week.
But they don't read them.
They're too busy. They use them for fires and to make more paper with.
They buy eagerly thousands of new novels at two dollars each. But they only read page one...
But that's all right. The Americans don't give a damn; don't need to; never did need to.
That is their salvation."
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