What were the American morals in 1929? How are they different from today?

G. K. Chesterton, in his essay “On American Morals” examines the “very real American virtues” from a Britain’s point of view.

His first observation of moral failure in America comes from the idealistic essay by a “highbrowed and cultured critic”, Miss Avis D. Carlson, on the welter of weakness and inconsequence of the “Crime Wave and the Charleston”. In her essay “Wanted, a Substitute for Righteousness”, Carlson infers that the standard of abstract right and wrong in America is “moribund”—at least in a section of the United States (“American”, 222).

What were these dastardly behaviors in American youth that were so evil? Carlson observed several of these such as a girl smoking a cigarette makes her of the company of the “fiends in hell”, and 2) a young man who continues to drink fermented liquor, after others have ceased, must be “evil”. Wow, it didn’t take much at that time to be considered a degenerate. Were young people in Britain smoking and drinking at this time? Or just in America? Who set these unreasonable standards? Carlson believed that these “perfectly obvious” behaviors were taught in the home and in social and sentimental accidents and associations.

In response to Carlson’s judgements, Chesterton defends America’s rising generation who were being judged by the recent culture of Puritanism. The idealism of America was to set a standard by which England must transform herself; and that the fire of that idealism seemed both to begin and end in smoke (225). He admitted to having “the habit” of smoking, himself, and could not imagine how it could relate to morality or immorality. “Nobody who has an abstract standard of right and wrong can possibly think it wrong to smoke a cigar” (226). The man who is silly enough, he continues, to say, when offered a cigarette, “I have no vices,” may be reminded of the Italian Cardinal who claimed that “It is not a vice, or doubtless you would have it” (227).

Chesterton looks back at the early history of Old America where certain habits were not suitable to the “old log cabin or the old home-town”. For example, he observed, at that time, a man could not chop wood for the log hut while smoking nor could he make dividends for the Big Boss while smoking. Therefore, a smoke had a smell as of something sinful. [Chesterton addressed the second vice of “drinking” in his next essay, “On Prohibition”].

Chesterton concluded his essay with the quarrel in question, ventured by Miss Carlson. He stated that this quarrel did not arise from the “Yankee Puritans” having too much morality, but from their having too little. It did not arise from their drawing too hard and fast a line of distinction between right and wrong, but from their line being much too loose and indistinct (228).

“May I be allowed to hope that they (Puritans) will succeed in drawing a rather more logical line between bad men and good men?” It is this sort of formless fanaticism that is the great danger of the American temperament (229)”.

Work Cited G. K. Chesterton. Generally Speaking. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1929