Impressions of a Journey Round America

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

The fragment is probably the beginning of Engels’ proposed article on his trip to the United States (see Note 496).

We generally imagine America to be a new world—new not merely with regard to the time of its discovery, but also in all its institutions, far ahead of us olde-worlde sleepy Europeans in its scorn for everything hereditary and traditional, a world, newly built from scratch on virgin soil, by modern men on purely modern, practical, rational principles. And the Americans do their part in strengthening this view of ours. They look down with contempt on us as dubious, impractical people, enmeshed in all sorts of received prejudices, who go in fear of everything new, whereas they, THE MOST GO-AHEAD NATION, examine every new proposal for improvement simply for its practical utility and, having once recognised it as possible, introduce it immediately, indeed almost overnight. But in America everything ought to be new, rational, practical—that is, everything ought to be different from what it is with us.

I first met a large number of Americans on the steamer City of Berlin. They were mostly very nice people, ladies and gentlemen, more accessible than the English, at times somewhat blunt in their speech, but otherwise rather like the better dressed people anywhere else. What, however, set them apart was a strangely petty-bourgeois bearing—not that of the timid, uncertain German petty bourgeois, nor that of the English; a bearing which, by virtue of the great assurance with which it presented itself as if it were quite natural, showed itself to be an inherited quality. The younger ladies, in particular, left the impression of a certain naivety such as is found in Europe only in smaller towns; when striding resolutely, almost fiercely across the deck, arm in arm, or on the arm of a man, they had the very same springy gait and held down their skirts when threatened by the wind with the same demure grip as innocent young things from the country back home. They reminded me mostly of Swedish girls—they were big and robust like them, too—and I expected them to curtsey at any moment, as Swedish women do. My American fellow travellers had also received their share of the physical and intellectual clumsiness which is the universal hereditary trait of the Germanic race and had not shaken it off at all. In short, my initial impression of the Americans was by no means one of national superiority over the Europeans, by no means that of a totally new, modern national type, but on the contrary that they were people who still clung on to inherited petty-bourgeois habits which are considered outdated in Europe, that we Europeans contrast with them in this connection as the Parisians with the provincials.

When I entered my first bedroom in New York, what did I find? Furniture of the quaintest old style imaginable, chests of drawers with brass rings or hoops as handles on the drawers, such as was the fashion in the early years of the century, and in Europe are still found only in the country; alongside them, more recent styles after the English or French pattern, but even these were also dated enough and mostly in the wrong place; nothing new since the huge rocking chair, which described an arc of 240 degrees, went out of fashion again. And thus everywhere, the chairs, tables and cupboards mostly look like the heirlooms of past generations. The carriages on the New York streets have such an outdated appearance that at first glance one believes no European farm would still have in its possession a hand-cart of such a model. True, on closer observation one finds that these carriages are much improved and most expediently equipped, furnished with excellent suspension and extremely lightly built out of very strong wood; but for all these improvements the old-fashioned model remained intact. In London, right up to the early 40s, there were cabs which people boarded from the rear and where they sat on the right and the left opposite one another, as in an omnibus; since 1850 they have disappeared; yet in Boston, as far as I know the only American city where cabs are in common use, these boneshakers still flourish to this day. The American inns of today, with their luxurious furnishings and their hundreds of rooms, show in their entire AMERICAN PLAN that they have grown out of the remote farmhouses in sparsely populated areas, which even today occasionally offer travellers board and lodging for payment—I shall return to this point—and hence display peculiarities which appear to us to be not simply strange, but downright quaint. And so on.

But anyone who wishes to savour the pleasure of a journey such as one had to endure in Europe at the time of the Thirty Years’ War should head for an American mountain district and travel to the end of the last railway line and take the stagecoach further out into the wilderness. The four of us made such a trip to the Adirondacks and have seldom laughed as much as we did on the roof of that coach. An old boneshaker of an indescribable model, compared with which the famous Prussian carriages from the year dot seem the height of splendour, with seats—quite in keeping— for six to nine people up on the roof and the box, that was the conveyance. As for the road, I beg your pardon, it wasn’t a road, one could hardly even call it a path; two deeply rutted tracks in the sandy soil, uphill, downhill.