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Arnold Bennett - Your United States
I loved them. Their drawing-rooms were full of old silver, and book-gossip, and Victorian ladies
apparently transported direct from the more aristocratic parts of the Five Towns, who sat behind trays
and poured out tea from the identical tea-pot that my grandmother used to keep in a green bag.
In the outer suburbs of the very largest cities I saw revulsions against the wholesale barracky
conveniences of the apartment-house, in the shape of little colonies of homes, consciously but
superficially imitating the Cambridge-Indianapolis tradition - with streets far more curvily winding than
the streets of Cambridge, and sidewalks of a strip of concrete between green turf-bands that recalled the
original sidewalks of Indianapolis and even of the rural communities around Indianapolis. Cozy homes,
each in its own garden, with its own clothes-drier, and each different from all the rest! Homes that the
speculative builder, recking not of the artistic sobriety, had determined should be picturesque at any cost
of capricious ingenuity! And not secure homes, because, though they were occupied by their owners,
their owners had not built them - had only bought them, and would sell them as casually as they had
bought. The apartment-house will probably prove stronger than these throwbacks. And yet the time will
come when even the apartment-house will be regarded as a picturesque survival. Into what novel
architecture and organization of living it will survive I should not care to prophesy, but I am convinced
that the future will be quite as interestingly human as the present is, and as the past was.
IV. SOME ORGANIZATIONS
"What strikes and frightens the backward European as much as anything in the United States is the
efficiency and fearful universality of the telephone. Just as I think of the big cities as agglomerations
pierced everywhere by elevator-shafts full of movement, so I think of them as being threaded, under
pavements and over roofs and between floors and ceilings and between walls, by millions upon millions
of live filaments that unite all the privacies of the organism - and destroy them in order to make one
immense publicity! I do not mean that Europe has failed to adopt the telephone, nor that in Europe there
are no hotels with the dreadful curse of an active telephone in every room. But I do mean that the
European telephone is a toy, and a somewhat clumsy one, compared with the inexorable seriousness of
the American telephone. Many otherwise highly civilized Europeans are as timid in addressing a
telephone as they would be in addressing a royal sovereign. The average European middle-class
householder still speaks of his telephone, if he has one, in the same falsely casual tone as the
corresponding American is liable to speak of his motor-car. It is naught - a negligible trifle - but
somehow it comes into the conversation!
"How odd!" you exclaim. And you are right. It is we Europeans who are wrong, through no particular
fault of our own.
The American is ruthlessly logical about the telephone. The only occasion on which I was in really
serious danger of being taken for a madman in the United States was when, in a Chicago hotel, I
permanently removed the receiver from the telephone in a room designed (doubtless ironically) for
slumber. The whole hotel was appalled. Half Chicago shuddered. In response to the prayer of a
deputation from the management I restored the receiver. On the horrified face of the deputation I could
read the unspoken query: "Is it conceivable that you have been in this country a month without
understanding that the United States is primarily nothing but a vast congeries of telephone-cabins?" Yes,
I yielded and admired! And I surmise that on my next visit I shall find a telephone on every table of
every restaurant that respects itself.
It is the efficiency of the telephone that makes it irresistible to a great people whose passion is to "get
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