The gulf of misunderstanding

Contents

PAGE

Introduction ix

CHAPTER

Introduction

This book is neither a novel nor a didactic treatise. In it a woman and a man speak. The woman — so saya the book — ^was born and educated in Chicago, but she might just as well have been bom and educated in Buffalo, New York or Seattle. She is a woman of thia country. The man — so says the book — was born in Santiago, Chile, but he might as well have been born in Argentina, Colombia or Ecuador. He is a man of Latin America.

The man — so says the book — wrote letters 'to his wife about this country. It is of no particular importance that these letters were addressed to his wife; they might have been sent to his son, to his brother, or to one of his friends. Or he might have talked to them on the subject instead of writing; or else he might have only thought about these matters instead of writing or speaking about them. Any man who has left the environment in which he has always lived sees things other than those which he has seen before, and is guided by a new train of thought. Whether he writes, utters or keeps these thoughts to himself is of no consequence. The thoughts are there.

The woman — so says the book — is a member of the Censor's Department of the United States Government during the war. It would make no difference if she

V vL INTRODUCTION

were not. She is only a symbol, because every woman is a member of the body of censors in war-time and in time of peace, when the beliefs and moral code of her country are attacked.

The woman repudiates the way of writing — or speaking, or thinking — of the representative of another race which is in contact with hers, and she makes her protest. According to the book, she makes her protest, in writing alongside what the man has written. It would be just the same if she had spoken or merely thought about it instead of writing.

The line of thought of the man and that of the woman are not systematic. We do not think one day exclusively about one thing, and another day about one other thing, and on a third day about yet one other thing. We think every day about a thousand things. Just so did the man and the woman think on this occasion, but the book has classified and placed in one separate compartment all that the woman and the man thought about each determined subject.

Two things cannot be placed in contact without producing a reaction, a protest, a contention. Place a hot body alongside a cold body : they will contend with each other until they reach an agreement ; and when they are reconciled, if they are of the same size, the warmer body will have given some of its heat to the colder body until both have been reduced to the same temperature.

The shock of man with man, of the races with the races, is much more complex, and may occur without immediate contact between them. Communication between peoples is attained by mail, by commerce and by telegraph.

i'

INTRODUCTION vii

This book is the analysis of the shock between Latin America and Anglo-Saxon America. The man and woman who are speaking here are symbols. They may never have seen each other. It does not matter. It may be that the man never came to this country, and that he received his impressions through books, magazines or newspapers. It may be that the woman never went to South America, and that she received her impressions in the same way. It all comes to the same thing. The two continents, the two races are in close contact. There is a shock, a reaction, and this book is the analysis of this shock, of this reaction.

This book is the dialogue of the two continents, the dialogue of the two Americas. It is the report produced by the moral shock of two worlds. The author has listened to this dialogue on both slopes of the Andes and on both sides of the Mississippi; he has classified and written down the things he has heard.

The author is indebted for the translation of this book from Spanish into Enghsh to

MISS CECILIA M. BRENNAN

and MR. WILLIAM SACHS

and more especially to

MR. CHARLES EVERS

Editor of ''The South American"

who, guided by the Spanish version, revised

and polished the Enghsh text.

OR

NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA

AS SEEN BY EACH OTHER

Chapter I The Letters And Their Censor

NO sooner had tlie United States entered the European war than the necessity was seen for an official censorship of international correspondence. Accordingly, in New York, San Francisco and New Orleans, the government established offices authorized to examine every letter which left the country. After the sensational discoveries which brought to light the cable correspondence of Count von Luxburg during his stay in Buenos Aires, the order was given to use very special care with all the letters coming from or going to South America.

. Miss Mabel Jones was one of the staff charged with the duty of examining correspondence in the Spanish Department of the New York's Censor's Office. During her college course at the University of Chicago, Miss Jones had mastered the language of Cervantes; and, after graduation, she went to Spain for the purpose of continuing her studies of Latin American civilization and making original researches in the Royal Library of Madrid. In order to know well the Spanish America of to-day, she wished to dive into the history of the conquest and of the colony. A great reader, Miss Jones' interest had been quickly aroused by reading Prescott's *' Conquests of Peru and Mexico," and ©later she had systematically read any book she could get about South American life. She soon became convinced that, in making these original investigations, she was preparing herself to revise ^nd correct jnuch that passes for knowledge with respect to these countries./

The daughter of wealthy parents, this work was her pleasure, and she had the necessary means to live and travel, without being hampered by the necessity of earning her daily bread.

After finishing her studies in Madrid, she returned to the United States, where she spent a year with her family, and then undertook a long journey through Latin America. She devoted much time to seeing Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico. A few days were spent in Eio de Janeiro and short trips made into the small republics of Central America. The only Latin American country she did not visit was Paraguay.

She had now a large accumulation of notes prepared and classified for writing an intensive book on Spanish American civilization, when the European war broke out. The first chapters of her work were written when her own country declared war against Germany. She was then thirty-eight years old.

Miss Jones believed herself in duty bound to devote all her energies to help her country. If she had been able to do nothing else, she would have set about knitting woolen garments for the Red Cross, as millions of her fellow-countrywomen were doing, but, to her great satis-

THE LETTERS AND THEIB CENSOR 3

faction, the Government accepted the offer of her services in the Spanish Department of the Censor's Office in New York.

In this work she found ample field for her studies, as there passed before her, like an endless film of moving pictures, the ideas, the opinions and the different points of view of the immense number of representative South Americans that, as transient visitors or permanent residents of the United States, were carrying on a correspondence with the other America. These live, intimate documents of a throbbing reality she found far more absorbing than had ever been the crumbling archives of the Royal Library of Madrid, in spite of all its wealth of data relating to days gone by.

The reading of private letters of eminent men, which posterity has been able to bring to light, has proved, at times, to be the one technical point lacking, the. real key-note of interpretation in great historical moments. The perusal of these letters of a nameless but select multitude, which speaks without restrictions of present day life, gave access to an intimate library often denied to the historian and sociologist. Miss Jones was finding her work intensely interesting.

Purely commercial letters did not especially attract her attention. Some enigmatic notes were the object of detailed study, and often they were allowed to pass as a decoy in order later to reveal a secret. Sometimes it turned out that they were simply love letters of girls whose parents had not sanctioned the correspondence, or of married women who had adopted a species of code for clandestine communication.

One letter from a South American gentleman to his wife seemed of most unusual interest. It was a bitter criticism of men and things in the United States, a series of what Miss Jones mentally qualified as profoundly mistaken judgments. Of her own accord, and even at the risk of overstepping her duties in the Department, she determined to add to the letter, on separate sheets, a few observations on the opinions of the writer. She made copies of both the letters and of her own comments, to serve later as references for use in her books.

A few days later there came to the office another letter from the same gentleman to the same lady, and again Miss Jones thought it proper to add her comment. These letters, written in Chicago, 111., were directed to Santiago, Chile, and continued to be mailed with the utmost regularity. Although these letters criticized adversely the United States, there was no sufficient reason why they should be detained by the censorship, but Miss Jones thought that it could do no harm, and might do good to add her comments to each of them.

The Chilean gentleman and Miss Jones were unacquainted, but to her the correspondent of Chicago seemed to be a palpitating reality. It was the soul of Latin America that vibrated in his letters. She now saw in wilting what she had heard a thousand times in her long journeys. This false conception of her country had continually tormented her.

He wrote from his room in the Hotel Blackstone, facing Lake Michigan, and something indefinable clouded the view of this observer: he could not see into the depths of American life, just as his eyes could not penetrate the depths of the lake. Should he be given a diver's dress to enable him to explore the ocean of American life?

THE LETTERS AND THEIR CENSOR 5

Formerly, when she was in Buenos Aires, Rio, Santiago or Bogata, she made allowances for those who spoke in generalities of her country because they did not know it ; but here was an intelle<itual Spanish American, living in the heart of the country, who could see only through the smoked glasses of his spectacles.

She read each letter from him with avidity. Often she took up her pen to reply to him, but as quickly laid it down again. In spite of the ill-will — which bordered on hatred — with which he wrote about the United States, she could not dislike him.

''He does not understand," she said. ''How am I to make him understand ? ' ' This Chicago correspondent was for her the whole of Latin America in the heart of her country.

""We must get to understand each other," she went on thinking. "We need to understand each other in order to fulfill our historic mission." Trained to look back on the long road of history, she was also capable of looking forward, and saw in the future a Latin America of two hundred million souls, prosperous, of potential vitality, a factor as decisive in the problems of the world as her country was now. Situated between Europe and Asia, all America would have to be a moral entity to figure worthily in the great conflicts of the future. . At last the war came to an end, and the censorship was abolished. The Chilean gentleman, who had brought with him a proposition for the investment of capital in the extensive copper deposits that had been discovered on his estates, visited California and other States of the Union, where his business delayed him one year longer.

A few days before his departure for Chile, Miss Jones, who had heard that he was in New York, went to see him at his hotel in order to ask his permission to publish his letters to his wife with her comments added. He would never have allowed her to do so, if it had not been that he himself had modified largely his beliefs, owing to the opportunities he had lately enjoyed to penetrate deeper into North American life, and influenced, as he could not fail to be, by the arguments contained in Miss Jones' writings, which his wife had sent him.

' ' My first impressions were readily acquired by superficial observation," he said. ** Looking into the heart of things has taught me to understand this country better. By all means publish these letters, together with your illuminating replies, so that they may serve as a torch to others who have fallen into the same errors."

He said much more, which, as it properly belongs to the epilog of this book, will be found in the last chapter.

Chapter II Edealism

ABOUT a week had gone by during which Miss Jones read the letters to Latin America in her office at the Censor's Bureau, when the first one written by the Chilean in Chicago reached her hands. Omitting the parts relating purely to family matters, the following pages are those which particularly arrested her attention:

Chicago, III, ..,1918.

I do not know whether it is because everything in this country is so unlike Europe, especially Paris, or because I have come here without you and the little ones, but the fact is that this North American world seems to me simply horrible. I don't think it will ever be worth while to bring you here. When the war is over we shall resume our visits to Paris every winter. i What a pity it is that this war should have diverted the course of Chilean travel from Europe to this country, though doubtless a superficial mind, judging only by appearances, may find real grandeur in this purely material triumph of the United States. I have already met some Chileans who are intoxicated with enthusiasm for tills country, a disposition that may do us incalculable harm in the future. This is the country of dollars and cents. Every one here is a money-maker. Business is the God of the country. With us the first question of friends when they meet is: *'How is your family?'^ Here the usual greeting is: *'How is business?" All men here are like race-horses to which the beauty of the grand panorama past which they run means nothing. They rush along unbridled, blinded by their mad haste to reach the goal, which is — the dollar, the mere dollar, the hundred dollars, the thousa'^Ld dollars, the millions, yes, even the billions of dolla-

This is the country of quantity, not quality. It is the country of the Ingersoll one-dollar watch and of the three-hundred dollar Ford automobile.

There is here a veritable cult for speed. They have the fastest train in the world, and until lately, they used to pay a forfeit to the passengers for every minute of delay in arrival at their destination. Automobiles take the dead at full speed to the cemetery. There are express elevators which take you up ten floors in one gulp. The shoemakers have signs on their shop fronts, offering to half-sole your shoes while you wait, and tailors clean and press your clothes as quickly. At the barber's shop a customer has his hair cut, his nails trimmed and his shoes cleaned at the same time. A Frenchman wonders why Americans have not invented a machine to permit them to work with their feet while they speak over the phone.

I have read this humorous anecdote, a mere exaggeration of the reality, in one of their magazines: Two insurance salesmen happened to call at the same time on a man to get him to take out a life-policy. He objected tliat in case of his death his wife might have difficulty in collecting the insurance money. One of the salesmen told him that if he died at two o'clock ih the afternoon, his wife would receive the money at four. *'We do better than that," said the other agent; *'our offices are on the third floor of the building. A client of ours had his office on the thirteenth floor. He had the misfortune to fall out of his window to the street, and as he passed in front of our window he was handed a check for the amount of his insurance with our courteous expression of regret."

f Leisure is not understood in this country. To tell an American that we close our offices and shops at the luncheon hour would be to invite him to deafen you with his shouts of laughter. When a man is over forty he is looked down upon; he is worn out and good for nothing. In our country women try to deceive you about their age ; they want to be thought younger. Here it is the men who lie about their age, in order to keep their jobs or get new ones, because money is worth more than men.

You know the story of one of our countrymen who was drowning in the sea. Two Americans were watching him from the shore as he struggled for life. One of us, directly he caught sight of the- accident, hastened to the rescue; but one of the Americans stopped him, saying: ''No, let him alone. We have made a bet: I say he will drown, and my friend thinks he will reach the shore."

You have no idea what a world of truth there is in this anecdote. Money, money! That is first and last in this country. Cities are built solely at the call of moneyed propositions. Here in Chicago there is a service of elevated trains, carried over the streets on a hideous structure of steel, which makes their horrible streets still uglier. Why have they not made a subway like those of Paris, London and Buenos Aires, as they are immensely rich? Simply because it does not matter to them that the streets are ugly. The important thing for them is to tear through them quickly.

Chicago is beautiful in parts, Michigan Avenue, for instance, where my hotel, the best in the city, is located. But alongside such a building as the Public Library one sees gross advertisements or offensive signs that call attention to some automobile tires or some special brand of pork from the packing-houses of Armour or Swift. As I tell you, Michigan Avenue is beautiful, but in its most beautiful part it is cut off by an enormous disfiguring soap factory. A Yankee monument; it takes the place of a piece of sculpture in the Champs Elysees.

Weight, bulk and magnitude so dominate some superficial minds that they look upon a rigid sky-scraper of forty stories, built without art or grace, as a greater achievement than a Notre Dame, a Museum of Cluny, an Alhambra or a Milan Cathedral.

The fact that men are appraised here only for their money is crystallized even in their language. We say: *'Una persona tiene un millon de pesos.'' The French say; '*Quelqu'un possede un million de piastres.'' The Germans say : * ' Der Mann hat eine Million Mark. ' ' Naturally, to possess a million dollars is something accidental, like having a house or an estate; but here they say of a man : ' ' He is worth a million dollars, ' ' which means that this is his value, the public's appraisement of him. He is worth as much as the number of his dollars.

I have not yet recovered from my surprise at the campaign for the second war loan launched here some time ago, just after my arrival in Chicago. It was worth seeing. The highest men in office issued public notices such as would be published by the manager of the advertising department of some great patent-medicine factory. In the course of this campaign one day was set aside throughout the nation for the special purpose of selling bonds, and in the editorials of the ncAvspapers this day was compared with that of the Celebration of Independence. Just think of it: on that day no battle was won, no act of heroism was recorded, only money was loaned to the government at a good rate of interest.

To-day I passed by a store where they sell orthopedic goods: trusses for hernias and wooden legs and arms. In the window was a plaster copy of the Venus of Milo all disfigured by the belts to which they wished to call attention. Have you ever seen such an impertinence? The prototype of beauty, youth and health marred with belts and trusses for the deformed! It would not surprise me to come across an advertisement in which a plaster for chilblains is applied to the bare foot of some such a marble as that in which Chapu gave life to Joan of Arc. Everywhere one finds good taste sacrificed to business. They do not appear capable of arranging a window-display artistically as in Paris. I have seen shop windows piled two or three yards high with candies, nuts or button-hooks.

Their post-card views of cities are barbarously ugly and daubed with the most shrieking colors. Why can they not produce something in this line like the French ? Because good taste is not marketable. There is throughout the country an organized school of bad taste. The newspapers publish in their Sunday editions a colored section for children, in which their elders also delight. These are most irritating to persons of refinement. In our country nothing short of a revival of the Inquisition to burn these papers would suffice if any one should publish such atrocities.

The same is true of American music, which is rasping and calculated to tear the nerves. Its name describes it well: ragtime. Their national anthem is a proof of their musical poverty. Our ears, accustomed as they are to our own beautiful national anthem, or to the Marseillaise, protest indignantly against this national hymn of a hundred million people in North America.

George MacManus is a talented cartoonist who contributes to one of the Chicago daily papers. The other day his marvelous pencil created a witticism which scarcely exaggerates the theme. ''Mrs. Jiggs wants you to play again," says Mr. Jiggs to the pianist. ''It's rather late, ' ' answers the musician, ' ' I fear it will annoy your neighbors. " "Oh! That's all right. They've got a dog that howls all night."

Some one has said — in order to explain certain traits in the American character — that the Americans like to be humbugged. I think they also like to be annoyed. That is why they buy pianos for their girls. But, now and then, they get tired of it. Here is another funny dialog by the same artist: Mrs. Jiggs awakens her husband at midnight. "There is a burglar in the parlor,'^ she says. "I think he is trying to steal the piano." "I'll go dovrn and see," says her husband. "Don't do anything rash," she called after him. "Certainly not;

but you don't suppose the man can get that piano out without help, do you ? ' '

Parvenus, people who have made their money suddenly and who do not know how to use it, they pile up everywhere mountains of valuable material without art, without taste, and they brag of what it cost. They talk here, for instance, of a half million dollar production for a play whose setting cost all that money, a two million dollar building, a five million dollar hotel.

I am writing to you from my balcony which looks out upon Lake Michigan. In my conception this lake is the most beautiful bit of Chicago. But the Yankees did not make the lake, they cannot call it a billion dollar lake, and so they have spoiled its view from the city by a horrible railroad with a wide expanse of iron rails, where a belt of smoke takes the place of a splendid park.

Everything here is estimated by its value in dollars and cents, including love. Will you wonder when I tell you that a woman may prosecute a man in a court of justice if he has broken his promise to marry her? Furthermore the court estimates the amount of damage done to the sentiments of his client in so many thousand dollars; and so with a cash equivalent for her sweetheart the lady is quite resigned, nay, even happy. This occurs so often that almost any daily paper will publish a report of one of these cases of breach of promise, and frequently the women who have taken advantage of such means to make capital out of their shattered illusions are wealthy, prominent women. I do not know that such a thing has ever occurred in any part of Latin America. "What happens there in these cases is that the bride sends back to the man who was to marry her, along with his love letters, any jewels or other gifts that she may have received from him.

Money-makers and practical men, they have produced no Watt or Papin to discover the force of water's expansion into steam, but they have had a Fulton, who T applied it to industrial ends. Science is not studied here for its own sake, but for the sake of money. To invent an automatic button to hold in place the collar of a shirt gives better money returns than to discover the laws of the circulation of the blood, and consequently here they give themselves to the task of inventing the automatic button that shall keep in place the shirt collar.

Their superficial and almost always futile literary magazines fill three-fourths of their pages with "ads." The newspapers do the same. In their first page they boast every day of the number of columns of advertising published by them. A French newspaper, like Le Matin could not survive here. And we, unhappily, are aping in our country the Yankee papers.

A materialistic people, a people whose only thought is of money, who dream of money, who exploit beauty, who make of religion a trade — later I will tell you of Billy Sunday and other exploiters of religion — a metalized nation which does not scruple to coin love, will not hesitate to trade in justice, honor, truth and all the most sacred of the Old World ideals, standards that European civilization has always kept apart from the consideration of dollars and cents.

You must not be misled by the frequent news in the papers regarding some endowments or philanthropic gifts. This is "advertising;" it brings more money, it is a sound investment. Here is an item published the other day in one of their papers. I must borrow from their own humor to illustrate my statements. Of course, it is intended for a joke, but do not forget that American jests are a reflection of reality. A man, making his last will and testament, leaves five thousand dollars to each of his servants who have been with him for more than ten years. *'But we have no servants who have stayed so long as that, ' ' objects his wife. ' ' Never mind, ' ' replies the philanthropist, *'it will look well in the papers."

With the most affectionate greetings to all, and a thousand kisses

from your adoring husband,

Miss Jones read this letter through twice. Should she let it go forward, or should she detain it as harmful propaganda to her country? Finally she made up her mind to leave it on her desk until the following day.

That night, at home, she sat for hours writing a letter addressed to the same lady who would receive that other letter now lying at her office. She wrote unceasingly, except, when rising from her seat, she consulted a volume on the shelves of her library.

This is what she wrote and sent off next day inclosed with the letter which a woman in a far distant land was doubtless anxiously expecting from her husband.

Something that never has happened before in my country has now come to pass ; our government has been compelled to appoint persons wliose task it is to violate the private correspondence to foreign countries. It has fallen to my lot to read what your husband has written you, and I must confess that what he says about my country astonishes me greatly. The letter is not one that must be intercepted by the censorship, but I venture to think that neither you nor your husband will take it amiss if I make some comment upon the impressions he has conveyed to you. I am ready to believe that he writes in all good faith, and in the same spirit I take the liberty to correct some of his mistaken deductions. Pardon me, then, this intrusion into your intimate correspondence, of which I am guilty, impelled thereto by an irresistible sense of justice.

I do not think that my country can truthfully be accused of materialism, or that it worships no other God than the dollar. I am convinced, on the contrary, that ■my native land is the most idealistic in all the world, and that your husband has lacked both time and opportunity to make the searching investigation required to warrant so dogmatic a statement.