Edward Alfred Steiner

“ From it can be seen church steeples peeping through the elm trees which shelter the town; the ugly stand-pipe and the tall chimney of our one big factory. At our feet lay the little artificial lake where much fishing is done, and sometimes fish are caught. As far as we could see were prosperous farms with their comfortable homes, generous barns, turreted silos, and wide meadows where calves and colts grazed.
One of our virtues, the Herr Director thought, was that we do not boast about our dead. Whatever boasting we do, and we do not boast too much, it ceases when the earth covers us. ”

“ I drew into the conspiracy dear friends, alumni of the different institutions, who knew every blade of grass on each respective campus, over which they walked proudly and reverently. To find one university tucked away in a village, another defying the grime and noise of a growing city which crowded upon it; one still retaining its air of exclusive dignity in spite of its garish surroundings, while a fourth was nearly swamped by the culture-hungry children of immigrants, yet remained triumphantly American, was new enough and startling enough to keep my guests on the heights. ”

“ I can say that in spite of the fact that my native country precipitated the conflict, I felt no thrill of patriotism when Austrian troops invaded Serbia, and frequently wonder whether I have not suffered some moral deterioration, because through all these stirring times I have remained fairly rational. I have never condoned Austria’s treatment of the Slavs, nor Germany’s invasion of Belgium; I have not gloried in their victories, but I have suffered alike for all my fellow mortals who are involved in this most disastrous conflict. I know myself always human first, and a loyal American next. ”

“ Yes, even to-day I can say with no less pride than usual that I believe in the American Spirit, in its sense of fairness and its love of justice, and while I trust that this country may be kept from so great a catastrophe as war, and I be kept from so severe a trial of my loyalty as having to choose on which side to fight, I know I would freely and unhesitatingly be on the side of my country, the United States of America. ”

“ They were mighty spirits who came to the edges of civilization and drove the wilderness farther and farther back by drawing furrows, sowing wheat, and planting trees—those men whom heat and a relentless desert could not separate from that other ocean with its Golden Gate to the sunset and the oldest world. Determining to have and to hold it till time is no more, they proceeded to unite the two oceans in holy wedlock. A task which involved another nation in hopeless scandal and bankruptcy, they completed with as little ceremony as that which prevails at a wedding before a justice of the peace. ”

“ It is amusing to find that you Americans, and you are the most American of them all—you Americans who have invented cash registers and time clocks, those symbols of unfaith in humanity, are so full of faith in your relation to big, national and international problems.
Your optimism may, after all, be due to your ignorance, coupled with the fact that you are living in a land vast and isolated, which has not quite exhausted its resources and opportunities. ”

“ I am never ashamed to take my friends into the tenement houses, except as I am ashamed that they exist at all, with their stenches and the dearly bought space with twenty-four hours of darkness and no free access of air. Of the people who live within I am never ashamed, for they are the brave ones, to whom labor is prayer, and living a sacrifice. I like best to show off the East Side of New York on Sunday, for here it is most welcomed with its respite from labor, its chance at clean clothes, its opportunity to visit and be again something more than a machine. ”

“ It was a real party, an American party, and we might have travelled long and far before I could have found anything which would have better reflected for my guests the American Spirit at its best.
If I were an artist and a sculptor I should like to portray the spirit of Chicago as one feels it in this museum. I would model a group, with its central figure that same sculptor, the finely bred American, clean and wholesome, who longs to create, not only the city beautiful, but the city human. ”

“ In common with many Americans, my guests believed that this matter of irrigation is as easy as turning water from a faucet into a basin; and that all a man has to do is to drop his seed into the ground and watch it grow. I showed them farms, desolate and forbidding, which men had to level or lift, ditch and plow and harrow; a back-breaking, often a heart-breaking task. In such an environment they built shacks which only accentuated the loneliness—where women lived and children were born, where hopes were cherished and God was worshipped. ”

“ I have already confessed how sensitive I am to criticism of anything American, no matter how just the criticism may be. So sensitive am I, that had he reflected upon the good looks of my wife, he could scarcely have hurt me more than when he reflected upon the beauty and arrangement of an American railway car.
And yet I have often wondered why our American genius seems to have exhausted itself when it evolved the present type of car, having done nothing to it except adding or taking away some of its “gingerbread.” ”

“ A shoemaker with us is as proud of his job as the Emperor is of his. He is Emperor by the grace of God, because he believes it is a God-given task to which he must be faithful, and we once had a shoemaker who called himself with equal pride, ‘Shoemaker by the grace of God.’
“This pride spiritualizes the simplest and commonest work by making every man a conscious part of the state, and he works for its glory and power. It is a glory shared by his wife and family,” and the Herr Director pulled from his pocket a German newspaper. ”

“ Even the constant inflow of new and more varied human material has not weakened us but indeed the sense of national unity has grown stronger. I have watched with joy the processes by which this alien element was becoming one with us, the fading away of animosities and inherited prejudices, and the making of a new people out of the world’s conglomerate.
The war has brought about a retardation of this process, and we shall have great cause for gratitude if no permanent damage is done to our nation’s spirit, a loss for which no possible gain in any direction could compensate. ”

“ Ten years before it was nothing except a railroad station, miles of sage-brush, rattlesnakes and prairie dogs. Now there are business blocks, embryonic sky-scrapers, a pillared post-office, a hundred-thousand-dollar hotel, a Grand Opera House, neither big enough nor good enough to boast of, numerous churches and this schoolhouse. It is not only a place in which boys and girls learn the “three R’s,” but has a finely equipped gymnasium, a chemical laboratory and a Domestic Science department. It is a center of education and recreation, not only for that town, but for the surrounding country. ”

“ It was a difficult task which I had undertaken, to convince the Herr Director that the American Spirit is different from that of the Old World, and in spite of me he insisted that we are not a bit better than other people, but only so situated that we can afford to be generous. I assured him that I preferred to boast of our fair dealing with lesser peoples than of our victorious battles, and that I am never so loyally and enthusiastically American as when I think of our being just, rather than mighty. ”

“ Nor did the Herr Director realize that all his Germanic searching and classifying, all his minute, painstaking investigation into the innermost of everything, left him where the Russian had long ago preceded him: in the holy presence of the unknowable, unsearchable wisdom of God.
The American has great reverence for results, and it is hard for him to be patient with failure. The German respects authority, and has scant respect for the individual. The Russian respects man and knows what it means to love him in his weakness, and to be humble in the presence of another’s failure. ”

“ Shamefacedly I acknowledged my country’s guilt, and the guilt which was evident on the majestic shores of the Hudson. We are wasteful, extravagant and reckless—great defects in our national spirit, and most in evidence in our treatment of nature’s beauty and wealth. We shall have to remedy that, in fact we are just beginning to do it; if not from any sense of guilt, from the same sheer necessity which makes the nations of the Old World careful of their national wealth. ”

“ I like to take my friends to the East Side of New York City. I glory in its self-respect, its brave struggle against poverty and disease, its bright children filling all the available space and asserting their childhood by playing in the busy street, defying its noisy traffic. They make of each hurdy-gurdy the center of a great festival, dancing as the elves are said to dance, because it is their nature to. ”

“ At that the Herr Director jumped excitedly from his seat, and said somewhat sneeringly, “Oh, you mean you have a place under the Sun. All nations have such a creed, but when we Germans try to realize it, you call us a menace to civilization.”
It was a tense moment in my relationship to my guests, but I ventured to say: “We have a better reason for the faith which is in us than most other nations, for we are trying to realize it without killing off other people. In fact we are trying to realize it at a greater hazard than that of being conquered by an alien enemy. ”

“ There were missionaries who came back from the ends of the earth where they had started centers of education, places of healing and temples of hope.
They listened to stirring messages from pulpit and platform, to the young dreams of minor poets who sang the lay of their class; to historians who reviewed the four college years as a great epoch closed; to prophets who predicted failure and success, and a golden day of jubilee to the whole weary world, when this particular class got back of it. ”

“ My guide for the day was the town’s chief “hustler,” the secretary of the Y. M. C. A., who is an embodiment of the American Spirit, being both body and spirit. He made a splendid foil to the Russian priest who is all soul, Russian soul and as little at home in the United States as the Czar’s double eagle would be, floating from the city’s court-house which stood in typical court-house fashion in the center of the town square.
The Y. M. C. A. secretary met us at the station, needless to say, in an automobile, as there is nothing the average American would rather do than “show off” his town. ”

“ The boasted democracy of California is threatened, not only by the presence of a large leisure class and the necessary serving if not servant class, but also by a lack of faith in humanity, without which no democracy is safe and enduring. To California has been transferred all that unfaith gendered by the advent of the negro, and if there were ever a chance to revive the institution of slavery, that state might offer some hope for its revival. ”

“ To eat one’s bread by the sweat of some ancestor’s brow, to be challenged daily by the luxury of a limousine rather than by the hardships of the prairie schooner, to have as the end and aim of one’s day the winning of a Polo match, or the making of a golf score, must ultimately bring about a decadence of spirit, even though one retains for a while litheness of body and activity of mind. ”

“ On the whole, the Herr Director liked the looks of the boys he saw, and the Frau Directorin quite fell in love with them. They were so frank, so clean looking, and what above all amazed them most, so altruistic in their outlook upon life; they looked so healthy and well groomed and were so altogether wholesome. But that boys could graduate from colleges and not have studied—that was beyond their comprehension.
The German student’s social standing and his future depend upon his “exams.” There is only one prime thing, and that is study. ”

“ As in the sky above us the architectures of the world strive to blend and fuse, making a mighty new impress; so below, these colonies to the right and colonies to the left, like the huge limbs of some ill-shapen monster, try to blend into America. ”

“ The President’s secretary seems to me a man of large calibre, kind, yet firm. A man to like and yet to fear; just the kind of person a great man needs as a buffer against his friends, and as a guard against his enemies. The atmosphere of the White House is dignified, yet not cold; democratic, yet reserved; you feel that it is a place of power.
Above everything else you have done for me I want to thank you for making it possible for me to meet President Wilson. He is not at all the type of man I expected to find. ”

“ I am sure there will be no lack of fighters if the country is in danger; but shall we be able to fight the long, exhausting battle which presupposes discipline and subordination?
The United States gives much to the individual, more, I think, than any other country; but she has not given intelligently, she has nearly pauperized us all by her beneficence, and has demanded nothing in return, nor even taught us common gratitude. ”

“ Our work is not sacred to us, for too often it is only the means to an end, and frequently a very selfish end. Because Germany has had centuries of carpenters and tinkers and shoemakers who planed boards and mended pots and shoes “by the grace of God,” and swung the hammer as if it were a sword, they are now wielding the sword as if it were a hammer. ”