“Nations are like people,” the US American novelist, short fiction writer and poet Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) remarked in 1926. “It takes a long, long time for one of them to grow up.” That year—that month—the United States was commemorating its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, which prompted Anderson to add:
As a nation we are still young. It has only been a hundred and fifty years. What’s that? Well, we may still be wearing short pants, but we are walking down past the clothing stores on Main Street and looking at the spring styles in long pants almost every day now. Such a job we tackled—whew!
Never mind “whew!” How about “whoa”? A “still young” nation? I have heard that one before—back in 2018, at the wedding here in Wales of an international trans student from the United States whose sister told me, probably in response to a reference of mine to the still fresh wound inflicted on democracy by the MAGA king’s first term, that her homeland was bound to make mistakes, and presumably be excused for making them, because the Republic was still so very new.
“Rubbish,” I could not bring myself to reply, it being a nuptial ceremony and all, not to mention my birthday. Otherwise, I might have interjected that my native Germany did not become a nation until nearly one hundred years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. And what excuse is there—or should there be—for a swiftly evolving Reich and erstwhile Republic messing up the course of world history, never mind at what age? Short pants or long, check for the mess inside.
“Most people,” Anderson opined, “never get beyond about twelve years of age.” If I had a nickel for each mention of that tiresome and false generalization, I guess I would still be more than nine-hundred and ninety-nine million and nine-hundred thousand dollars short of the sum the overgrown toddler occupying the White House raked in during the first half of his, to him, exceedingly profitable second term. Not that Anderson ever got to meet the tech-savvy—and thoroughly tech-dependent—twelve-year-olds of today.
“No one gets very old or very wise,” Anderson continued, talking out of his fedora, the soft felt hat now most closely associated with him as an emblem of bohemianism. As the literary critic, poet and editor Malcolm Cowley pointed out (or claimed, as I have not come across this quotation firsthand), Anderson “liked to say” that what was needed in the United States was a new class of individuals who, “at any physical cost to themselves and others agree to quit working”—to “loaf, to refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world.”
Not that Anderson had anything to say about not getting a chance to get old, whether loafing of working, or to afford doing so with dignity and in relative comfort. Talking “progress” instead of the right to slow down—at least on this occasion—he neglected to make any reference to the state of US healthcare, affordable or otherwise, which no doubt was even more desultory in 1926 than it is today. The first “modern” health insurance plan available in the US dates from 1929. A good year, that, for financial health at least.
I reckon that quite a few folks living in 1926 got “very old,” whatever what considered “very” back then. Eighty, probably. And some people did—and do—get wise. Voters, even. Some of them might get wise, eventually, to an octogenarian acting like a prepubescent reliving, in full view of the (Re)public, his terrible twos.
Not that the toddler at the helm in 2026 ever quite got past the mirror stage of development—which might begin to explain the obsession the current office holder—a Narcissus of Neo-Nazism—has with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, or any public display of his likeness.
“The great problem,” Anderson continued, “is to get intellectually and emotionally beyond twelve, well, just a bit beyond twelve.” That strikes me as the “great problem,” or one of many, the “Big Boy” representative currently occupying and wrecking the White House poses as well as confronts: his apparent inability to grow—up, that is—and his ability to hinder anyone from growing up, and regrowing a spine, meaningfully to counter the fatal consequences of his immaturity.
So consumed is the Mount Rushmore-ogling successor to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt with the forging of his legacy—a project distinct from and contrary to concerns about the future of the United States as a heterogeneous people—that he might just pull the plug on any and all potentialities conceivable, if increasingly inconceivable, as a sequel to his departure.
At no time in “modern” US history have ambitions to get “intellectually” past twelve been more maligned and impeded as they are now, in an anti-scientific age in which so-called Artificial Intelligence is promoted and installed with a vengeance to rid thinking, dreaming and otherwise creative individuals of impulses and inclinations resembling intellect or imagination so as to keep them as ignorant and inactive as suits the suits serving latter-day oligarchy.
Granted, Anderson, the author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919)—one of those texts, that, like Moby-Dick, English Lit majors aiming for a graduate degree ignore at their peril—could not have foreseen the anti-American stench emanating from a twenty-first century President defecating on the Constitution and pardoning those relieving themselves in the US Capitol. Anderson, after all, was not an author known for dystopian fiction.
That said, in Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson imagined a character who possessed the “had the trick of mastering the souls of his people”:
His mouth was like the mouth of a sensitive and very determined child. Jesse Bentley was a fanatic. He was a man born out of his time and place and for this he suffered and made others suffer. Never did he succeed in getting what he wanted out of life and he did not know what he wanted. Within a very short time after he came home to the Bentley farm he made everyone there a little afraid of him, and his wife, who should have been close to him as his mother had been, was afraid also. At the end of two weeks after his coming, old Tom Bentley made over to him the entire ownership of the place and retired into the background. Everyone retired into the background.
As the Joseph Dewey, author of In A Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age said elsewhere (not in that study, I mean), the “raging egocentricity of the Ohio landowner” (i.e., Jesse Bentley) who “refashions himself into some Old Testament patriarch while shamelessly indulging gross materialism, Anderson seems to express his generation’s bitter condemnation of [as Anderson put it] the new age “love of surfaces,” the new “religion of getting on.” Add to that the getting on through phoney religion and you are getting onto something approaching prophesy.
There is this, too, from Anderson in his 1917 poem “American Spring Song”:
Out of the mud at the river’s edge I moulded myself a god,
A grotesque little god with a twisted face,
A god for myself and my men.
Anderson’s commercially most successful novel, Dark Laughter, had been published the previous year, in 1925, but his article “Hello, Big Boy: An Inquiry into America’s Progress During One Hundred and Fifty Years,” which appeared in the July 1926 issue of Vanity Fair, is almost all sweetness and light. It opens with such self-deprecating joviality that you might well expect a soufflé instead of a survey, innocuous confection instead of incisive commentary. And that, for the most part, is what you get.
To be sure, the entire July issue of Vanity Fair was devoted to the anniversary and its celebration. As the editors remarked, the periodical
has always been interested in novels and poetry and painting and drama: in all the arts which express our age and our people. It is more interested in our age, of course, than in any other. Nobody can live in the past. Some people think they can, but such people are dead without knowing it. But that doesn’t preclude our being interested in the past, especially our own past; in looking back whence we have come, possibly for some hint of where we are going.
Being genuinely and consistently interested in all the arts and customs that make American life rich and expressive, Vanity Fair has tried to pause and make a retrospective review of what these arts and customs of ours were 150 years ago.
Among those called upon to commemorate the anniversary in the pages of the July issue were humorist Robert Benchley, drama critic Alexander Woollcott, and the aforementioned Corey Ford, who ends his remarks on the traditional celebrations of the Fourth of July by reminding his readers that
[t]here is one other way to celebrate Independence Day; and this plan is essentially so simple that it is remarkable it has not occurred to more
people before. Step into the nearest Steamship Office. Ask the man at the window for a little folded ticket lettered: “Europe.” Dash up the gang-plank at midnight on the third of July; and the tall chap in the grey tweed suit and checkered cap, leaning over the rail beside you as you wave a fond farewell to the Statue Liberty, will be none other than author of this entertaining article.
“I may not deserve to be an American,” Anderson concludes his “Inquiry” on a note of American pie humbleness, “but I’m sure glad I am one.” Sticky toffee, that. In a coy and colloquial manner more akin to sentimental O. Henry than to satirical Mark Twain, the names of both of whom he mentions in “Hello, Big Boy,” Anderson reflects on what, back then, would have seemed—and been, considering the recent achievement of women’s suffrage that is now earmarked for extinction by proponents of the “household vote”—cause for celebration. Anderson, though, makes no mention of that accomplishment, and there is no single reference to women in his article, which is full of “men” and “Fathers” emancipating themselves from “Mother England.”
“Progress,” by all means. The stock market crash of 1929 still lay a few short years ahead—and it seems that no one living in the so-called Roaring Twenties, saw coming what, in hindsight, strikes us as inevitable as a crypto-currency bubble bursting, another temperature record shattered, or the umpteenth touting of another acing of a cognitive test by a swellhead so grotesque that such a figure could not possibly have been imagined as “Presidential” with a capital P by anyone living in 1926—and that despite the widely shared view that, in the 1920s, the United States of affairs were the most the notoriously desultory and crooked since the nation’s founding. Up until then, that is.
Never mind Winesburg, Ohio. How about the “Ohio Gang” gathered around the President during the tenure of Warren G. Harding, which was cut short—mercifully, by most accounts—by death in 1923? But who remembers the Teapot Dome Scandal of the Harding administration, unresolved at the time Anderson marked the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the United States, in an age in which lawlessness is so widely regarded as a hallmark of strength in leadership?
No doubt, the term “inquiry,” which Anderson uses to label his reflection in the subtitle of his article, was intended to be facetious. Nonetheless, Anderson’s flippancy is misleading. He does have something to say about the current state of “America”—and says it:
Democracy is itself, I am quite sure, but an expression of the notion of the standardization of life. The majority is right. It is the duty of the minority to conform. What an absurdity—really. We see the absurdity very clearly in the effect upon us all of the passing of our prohibition amendment—the State more and more losing its grip on men’s imaginations, the State, as a controlling factor in lives, becoming constantly more and more ineffective.
Today, of course, it is the Supreme Court that is “losing its grip,” or, rather, extending its long arm by going straight for the throat so as to throttle the democratic process for generations to come.
“I am talking in the dark now,” Anderson interposes just as his argument is beginning to take shape, “being pretty heavy and serious. You would never guess I was in Vanity Fair. Excuse me please.” No need to apologize, even though the chosen medium of communication explains your waffling to some extent.
Carry on, I say. But Anderson retreats again into coyness:
This is the first time I ever tried to talk about such a big thing as America. I am confused and a little puffed up. I feel like a President writing a State Paper and really cannot think politically. Besides, if I were a President, I would have a secretary to do all this.
Grateful as I am for the education I received in the United States—BA, MA, PhD—I am neither confused nor puffed up when talking about a “thing” as “big” as “Big Boy.” Nor am I cheerful or sentimental, given that, today, “such a big thing as America,” democratically understood, is being systematically whittled down to the size of a pebble to be kicked out of sight of flung in the face of the presumably “radical” opposition. A quarter of a millennium is being conflated by the current administration so as to represent a few months of aberrant rule, however consequential and lastingly destructive.
The world, in turn, needs to learn what it means to honor the “independence”—as opposed to the selective isolationism and increasing expansionism—of a nation yet enmeshed in a web of interdependencies rather than humor, aid and abet its current leaders, determined as they are to end the flawed but noble experiment in democracy, the independent spirit for which the United States of America was once known.
Meanwhile, I have been so fixated on the semiquincentennial that I lost sight of another significant anniversary of an event that, quite literally, unfolded on my doorstep here in mid-Wales one hundred years ago in early July 1926: the meeting of the League of Nations at Aberystwyth.
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