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THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
THE
Exposition of Ideas
BY
BAXTER HATHAWAY
Department of English, Cornell University
AND
JOHN MOORE
Department of English, Montana State University
D. C. HEATH AND COMPANY
Boston
Copyright, 1948, by D. C. Heath and Company
No part of the material covered by this
copyright may be reproduced in any form
without written permission of the pub
lisher.
Printed in the United States of America
BOSTON CHICAGO NEW YORK
ATLANTA DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO LONDON
Those who have handled sciences have been either
men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of
experiment are like the ant; they only collect and
use: the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cob
webs out of their own substance. But the bee takes
a middle course; it gathers its material from the flow
ers of the garden and of the field, but transforms
and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this
is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies
solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does
it take the matter which it gathers from natural his
tory and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the
memory whole, as it finds it; but lays it up in the un
derstanding altered and digested.
From FRANCIS BACON S Novum Organum
Preface
FROM all sides we are deluged with words: in newspaper articles,
radio broadcasts, lectures, and advertisements, on billboards, in maga
zines, in the speech of friends. Words swarm upon us and fuse with our
thoughts as they have done in no other period in history. The tech
niques of influencing men by suggestion and by appeals to the emotions
of fear, pride, and ambition and to mass prejudices have never been
more fully employed than they are today. In the midst of this flood of
words the college student tries to keep his attention fixed on the words
that communicate honest thought, on the words by which sincere men
and women attempt to bring order out of chaos and make valid com
ments about the shifting patterns of experience. At least this is what
the ideal college student should attempt to do. His main object is learn
ing, and learning necessarily involves contact with reputable thoughts of
others as they are expressed in words. He does not want his instructors
to fool him by the use of the irrational methods of the advertiser or the
propaganda devices of the demagogue. His interest, for the present at
least, is in words that make sense, that is, words that can be tied down to
the realities they name.
In turn, the college student must learn how to use words so that
they will make sense, for he must express his thoughts about his own
experiences so that others will understand what he means. His natural
instinct is to imitate the models that he finds on all sides, to cast his
thought into the molds established by his predecessors and contem
poraries. His problem is to choose the form best suited to the ideas he
wants to express.
x PREFACE
Within the limits of honest thought there are many kinds of prose,
and one of the major requirements in learning to write well is to
understand the nature of thought and the prose structures that cor
respond to the several kinds of thinking. The intention of a writer
should determine the structure of his writing. Knowledge of sound
structure is one of the goals toward which every writer should aim.
If we are concerned with sense, we are not concerned with words
as detached entities, nor with writing problems as devices for decorat
ing the substance of thought. The thought itself is of prime importance
and must determine the words used to communicate it adequately.
Clever writing which divorces words from thought may temporarily
tickle the reader s fancy, but the writer who falls into the habit of
striving for temporary effect is going in the wrong direction if he
wishes to learn to write well.
It is with the expression of ideas which he has thought out for him
self that the writer faces the full problem of organization. When he
duplicates the ideas of another writer, his attention is really upon the
words rather than upon the ideas they represent and much of his
work has thus been done for him by another. Even in writing an
account of a process or a description of a mechanism, the student
writer is relying upon the thought and the organization of another on
the inventor of the process or mechanism. For this reason this book
avoids discussion of the kinds of prose that go by the names of
"Exposition of a Process" or "Exposition of a Mechanism" and limits
itself to original perception and thought.
The student is asked to work with the expression and substantiation
of ideas, and, more particularly, with the kind of ideas that can be
substantiated. He must not generalize wildly nor use words without
regard for the communicable meanings that the words should carry.
The standards used in this book for distinguishing among different
kinds of thinking and writing are: (1) the subjectivity or objectivity
of data, and (2) the level of particularity or generality, that is, con-
creteness or abstractness, of statements based upon data. By analyzing
writing in terms of these standards, the student can come to know
better what ideas are and what makes them sound or unsound.
An understanding of the differences between levels of generalization
is important. A generalization is a statement not about individuals
doing particular things about classes of things. The statement "My
PREFACE xi
brother fed his dogs at six o clock this evening" is a relatively concrete
statement. It concerns one person doing a certain thing at a certain
time. The statement "He is fond of pets" is more general since it is
not limited to one particular time or to one particular pet. The state
ment "Human beings like pets" is far more general. The best test for
the level of generalization of any statement is to ask how many particu
lar actions or perceptions it comprises. Before accepting a general state
ment, we might ask ourselves how many separate experiences the writer
must have had to be absolutely certain of the truth of his conclusion.
When a writer wishes to make statements which the reader can
recognize as valid, he must speak from concrete experiences that have
a bearing upon the point he is making. As readers, we cannot be sure
that we are dealing with sense unless we can translate the general
izations made by the writer into concrete experiences and test them
against these experiences. If a writer tells us that "Politicians are a heart
less race of men with no care for the well-being of society" we test the
truth of his statement by referring it to politicians we know. We must
beware of the generalization based upon little or no concrete ex
perience.
It is true that by inference we can often make certain sound general
izations about large classes of things upon the basis of experience of
a few instances only. When a biologist has explored the anatomy of a
few lobsters and has found similar intestinal tracts in all of them, we
do not ask that he examine the intestinal tracts of all lobsters before
drawing conclusions about them. Here, however, the reasoning in
volved is partly deductive; that is, it is based upon larger general
izations already accepted. We already believe that lobsters are animals
and that other animals have intestinal tracts. Likewise, we have learned
to rely up to a point on the constancy of nature. The experiences out
of which we generalize are, indeed, often not our own; provided that
we have faith in the reliability of the statements others make about
their experiences, we accept them and can base our conclusions upon
them as well as upon our own experiences.
But something is seriously wrong when adult minds readily accept
generalizations that come fully manufactured in the form of whisper
ings from the world about us, when they trust these generalizations
without inquiring into the experiences upon which they are based or
into the trustworthiness of the person doing the generalizing. Often
xii PREFACE
no set of concrete experiences does in reality exist, and usually the
identity of the original generalizer is unknown. The generalization is
merely a "fairyland" statement, a part of a world of words that does
not correspond to real life experiences. Writing that contains unchecked
generalizations of this kind is likely to be bad writing or worse,
dangerous writing. It is not aimed at truth. By its aid, groups in society
continue to believe what they want to believe, ignoring the real world.
Many well-intentioned writers commit errors of faulty generalization
by writing on subjects about which common sense should tell them
that they lack a sufficient fund of concrete experiences. The high school
orator who knows just what the Security Council of the UN should do
about, say, Yugoslavia is usually making this error. Without having
been to Yugoslavia, without knowing much about the economic con
ditions there or how they affect individual men, women, and children,
without knowing who controls those economic conditions, without un
derstanding the emotions of the people or the causes of those emotions,
often without even reading carefully firsthand accounts of reporters
on the scene, he somehow feels capable of solving Yugoslavia s prob
lems by applying a few elementary principles of political science
learned in the classroom. Perhaps he will find, if he attempts to get to
the bottom of politics in his own home town, that human problems are
a little more complex than he thinks.
Arriving at sound generalizations is, then, a difficult task. Neverthe
less, sound ideas are manufactured by human beings essentially like
ourselves. How do they do it? First, they turn to matters about which
they know something, matters with which they have had experience. Or,
if they have not had a sufficent number of experiences relating to their
idea, they devise means of having more. Finally, they use methods of
observation and thought which should carry a reasonable degree of
reliability. The average student is capable of following these procedures.
This book does not, for the most part, contain the sort of essay,
full of high level generalizations, which is often put before the college
student of composition as a model to imitate. True, most of us should
read, during the years when we are coming to maturity, the writings
of men of wide learning and deep insight, of men who face the difficult
questions of the significance of life on our planet. But if we hope to
arrive at that same point of experience and wisdom, we should serve
an apprenticeship nearer the base of the pyramid. The selections in
PREFACE xiii
this book often deal with important problems, but they deal with them
in such a way that the student can see the methods by which the
authors have reached their conclusions. The student is thus able to un
derstand how to embark upon investigations that will enable him to
duplicate the models set before him.
The arrangement of the articles in the text is from the concrete to the
abstract. The first section is concenied with the reporting of concrete
fact. The student will learn how good writers have a knack of seeing
particulars accurately and clearly. The second section presents essays
that arrive informally at generalizations. The writers of these essays per
ceive related facts and draw conclusions without embarking upon the ex
tensive research necessary for scientific accuracy. The third section
presents secondary source papers typical of the kind of "library paper"
that has proved valuable in college courses. The articles in the fourth sec
tion are based on primary source materials. These articles differ from
those in the second section in that the approach to the material is more
formal. The fifth section, comprised of case histories, once more shows
clearly the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, the gen
eral and the specific, in the creation of ideas. The sixth section gives
examples of numerous kinds of organization useful in the orderly presen
tation of ideas. The seventh section, consisting of "appreciations," illus
trates human value judgments, subjective and often personal. The eighth
section, refutations, has obvious utility in providing models for student
writing. The final section, which gives an example of high level general
ization, offers the only form which the student cannot expect to dupli
cate well.
BAXTER HATHAWAY
JOHN MOORE
Contents
PREFACE IX
Section 1. OBSERVING AND REPORTING 1
WILLIAM FAULKNER: Wagon on the Road 6
FREDERIC PROKOSCH: After the Crack-Up 7
JOHN DOS PASSOS: The Camera Eye (14) 13
GEORGE SESSIONS PERRY: Night in the Woods 14
FRANCIS PARKMAN: The Buffalo 17
HENRY DAVID THOREAU: Ice 22
FAIRFAX DOWNEY: The Last Days of St. Pierre 24
Sample Theme Subjects 34
Section 2. INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 35
LOUIS ADAMIC: Thirty Million New Americans 38
LOVELL THOMPSON: How Serious Are the Comics 56
MRS. TROLLOPE: An Englishwoman in Ohio 63
BERGEN EVANS: I Pick Em Up 70
w. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS: The Negro Scientist 76
BRUCE BLIVEN: Westchester Women 87
PHILIP RAHV: Paleface and Redskin 91
Sample Theme Subjects 96
Section 3. SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 99
A. GRENFELL PRICE: The Causes of Failure of White
Man in the Tropics 107
FRANK LUTHER MOTT: Popular Sports in America,
1850-1865 125
Sample Theme Subjects 129
xvi CONTENTS
Section 4. PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 131
GEORGE GALLUP AND SAUL FORBES RAE: Thirty Dollars
a Week 135
EDWARD JENNER: An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects
of the Variolae Vaccinae, Known by the Name
of the Cow Pox 143
MADGE M. MCKINNEY: Training for Citizenship in the
Secondary Schools of New Yor/c City 149
BERTRAM B. FOWLER: Sharecroppers of the Sea 162
PAUL FATOUT: Yarning in the Eighteen Fifties 171
Sample Theme Subjects 184
Section 5. CASE HISTORIES 187
KIMBALL YOUNG: Projection of Parental Ambitions
upon Children 191
JOHN BARTLOW MARTIN: The Ring and the Conscience 194
EDWARD A. STRECKER AND FRANCIS T. CHAMBERS, JR. : *
Psychology of Alcoholism 206
RUTH L. PORTERFIELD: Women Available 213
KIMBALL YOUNG: A Case Study of Intracommunity
Conflict 222
WELLSON WHITMAN: Three Southern Towns 226
DONALD DAVIDSON: Brother Jonathan and Cousin
Roderick 242
Sample Theme Subjects 252
Section 6. TRADITIONAL PATTERNS IN
ORGANIZATION 253
FIRST PATTERN: Enumeration
WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING: The Changing World 258
HOMER CROY: You Wouldn t Know the Old Farm Now 261
JAMES BRYCE: The Results Democratic Government
Has Given 272
SECOND PATTERN: Classification
CHARLES TODD AND ROBERT SONKIN: Ballads of the OklBS 276
JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON: On Various Kinds of Thinking 284
CONTENTS xvii
THIRD PATTERN: Component Parts
TACITUS: Germania 298
BRUCE WINTON KNIGHT: How to Round Up Cannon
Fodder 312
FOURTH PATTERN: Cause
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: Rumor 326
JULIAN HUXLEY: Mice and Men 327
FIFTH PATTERN: Concession
CLIFFORD BARRETT: Mans Moral Responsibility 342
RALPH WALDO EMERSON: The American Scholar 348
SIXTH PATTERN: Analogy
DOROTHY GRAFLY: Art Criticism for Human Beings 352
WILSON FOLLETT: Are Children Vegetables? 354
HAMILTON BASSO: Italian Notebook: 1938 356
PAUL PARKER: The Iconography of Advertising Art 359
SEVENTH PATTERN: Comparison
JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS: Jefferson and Hamilton Today 367
ALDOUS HUXLEY: America and Europe 378
Sample Theme Subjects 387
Section 7. APPRECIATIONS 389
JAMES HUNEKER: Night and Its Melancholy Mysteries:
The Nocturnes of Chopin 393
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET: The "Conquistador" of
Archibald MacLeish 395
E. B. WHITE: Once More to the Lake 399
Sample Theme Subjects 406
Section 8. REFUTATIONS 409
THOMAS PAINE: The French Revolution 412
THEODORE DREISER: If Man Is Free, So Is All Matter 423
MAX WYLIE: Washboard Weepers 431
Sample Theme Subjects 439
Section 9. HIGH LEVEL GENERALIZATIONS 441
EDWARD M. MILLER: A Westerner Views the U.S.A. 444
THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
1. OBSERVING AND REPORTING
Observing and Reporting
A LTIIOUGH it is possible to reason logically upon false assump-
jLjL tions, the ideas and conclusions which are the result of a thought
process are only as sound as the facts which set that process in motion.
If the facts are not to be trusted, the conclusions drawn from them are
not to be trusted. Therefore, the first principle of sound thinking and
good writing is accuracy of observation.
Unfortunately, habit is one of the most dangerous enemies of ac
curacy of observation, for we often look at things without seeing them
at all. When we look at familiar objects what we see is determined
largely by what we expect to see. It is true that if these commonplace
things have undergone a sudden change since we last saw them, we
are jarred out of our mental lethargy and look at them afresh. If the
change is gradual, however, we fail to notice it.
Sometimes we accept a formula for an object or situation without
troubling to check it against our own original observation. For example,
the society around us tells us that a girl coming home from a dance is
always "starry-eyed." For years students have written in themes that
girls coming home from dances are starry-eyed. Perhaps we can legiti
mately ask if they really are. Are all of them starry-eyed? Is the ob
server really looking at them as individuals or is he merely taking for
granted that they look like that because the stereotype tells him so?
A writer whose work contains such stereotypes may be called de
ductive minded. He applies to each situation a neat set of reactions
and ready-made formulas without bothering to check them against
the actual facts. The inductive minded writer, on the other hand, is
4 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
constantly aware of the changeability of the world around him. He
knows that no two objects or situations, however familiar, are exactly
alike and that no set of principles can be applied, untested, truthfully
more than once. He looks directly at the situation he wishes to de
scribe or evaluate and reports what he sees as accurately as he can.
The deductive minded person has the simpler time of it but he is not
the better writer.
Stereotyped writing is not good writing. The writer bores his reader
because he does not tell him anything new. He is not looking at the
world through his own eyes and consequently has little to say that is
worth the saying. Stereotyped thinking, upon which such writing is
based, is more dangerous. In this kind of thinking the writer arrives
at judgments that are based upon stereotypes upon preconceived no
tions of what, for example, any individual in a class is like. The rich
woman is arrogant and selfish; the Negro janitor is lazy, light-hearted,
and irrepressibly fond of singing; the old professor is lovable but absent-
minded and pedantic. Judgments about individuals based upon such
stereotypes can cause trouble because often they are not based upon
reality. We do not see at all what is in front of us. Instead we see, as
if in a mirror, the picture that is already in our minds. Too often we
do not know how the picture got into our minds in the first place, but
when we analyze our reactions we realize that we did not consciously
put it there. Instead, we absorbed it from the people around us; they
absorbed it from others; and on and on the chain goes.
Writing and thinking both come hard when the writer cannot see
for himself. Observing is his first step toward having ideas of his own
that are worth communicating. The nonobserver usually tries to hide
the poverty of his observing by writing about something with which
he can have had few contacts; he frequently denies the possibility
of originality of thought and expression because he supposes that every
body else borrows ideas just as he does. He forgets that men make ideas
by looking at the world around them and telling what they see there.
The observer who looks for himself soon finds plenty of ideas in his
head. Because he has built up for himself a mass of material of his own
about which he can say something, he no longer belongs to the class
of student writers who have nothing to say. Most of us need to orient
ourselves by looking at the world around us. It is the dulling force of
habit that leads us to believe that the world is brighter and more ex-
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 5
citing somewhere else. Brightness and excitement are made by the
minds of men who see meaning in what they touch upon.
All reporting, even of simple sense perceptions, reflects somewhat
the individual doing the perceiving. It is impossible to be entirely ob
jective. For purposes of discussion, however, we may say that a writer
is being objective when he describes sensations as they are immediately
apparent to his five senses. As soon as he makes a judgment or describes
the train of thought started in his own mind by these sensations his
reporting becomes subjective.
The selections that follow present the kind of writing in which few
judgments are made. The writers are coming to few conclusions; prin
cipally they are looking at the world and telling what they see there.
They are presenting scenes, attempting to communicate to the reader
concrete experiences. As will be noted elsewhere in this book, one of
the best ways to create good writing of any kind is to keep vivid this
sense of concrete experience. The student should begin here observing
how the writers of these passages obtain their effects.
The observations presented in this section fall into two main cate
gories. The first, of which the selections from Faulkner, Prokosch, Dos
Passos, and to a lesser extent Perry are examples, exhibits considerable
subjectivity. The things and events described are seen through the eyes
of a particular observer and colored by his state of mind. The second
kind the group comprised by Parkman, Thoreau, and Fairfax Downey
represents greater objectivity. These writers distinguish more clearly
what is outside themselves from what is inside.
Paradoxically, objective reporting is the more sophisticated or arti
ficial of the two kinds of observation. The child divides a perception
into its subjective and objective parts less readily than an adult does.
For many special purposes the growing child gradually learns to make
the distinction. The adult writer must sometimes relearn the art of
infusing objective reporting with the subjective at those times when
it is desirable to do so. It must be remembered, however, that in many
kinds of writing newspaper writing, for instance any admixture of
the subjective is undesirable.
THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
WAGON ON THE ROAD*
By William Faulkner
1. THE WAGON mounts the hill toward her. She passed it about a
mile back down the road. It was standing beside the road, the
mules asleep in the traces and their heads pointed in the direction
in which she walked. She saw it and she saw the two men squatting
beside a barn beyond the fence. She looked at the wagon and the
men once: a single glance all-embracing, swift, innocent and pro
found. She did not stop; very likely the men beyond the fence had
not seen her even look at the wagon or at them. Neither did she
look back. She went on out of sight, walking slowly, the shoes un
laced about her ankles, until she reached the top of the hill a mile
beyond. Then she sat down on the ditchbank, with her feet in the
shallow ditch, and removed the shoes. After a while she began to
hear the wagon. She heard it for some time. Then it came into sight,
mounting the hill.
2. The sharp and brittle crack and clatter of its weathered and un-
greased wood and metal is slow and terrific: a series of dry slug
gish reports carrying for a half mile across the hot still pinewiney
silence of the August afternoon. Though the mules plod in a steady
and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does riot seem to progress. It
seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and for
ever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the
mild red string of road. So much is this so that in the watching of
it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like
the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes be
tween darkness and day, like already measured thread being re
wound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial
and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it
seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though
it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape.
* From Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner. Reprinted by courtesy
of Random House, Inc.
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 7
ANALYSIS
1. At first reading this selection may well appear to be the simple, perceptive re
porting of a static scene. Is it really that? , t , , , A< ,
a. What is the difference between the scene reported in the first paragraph^ and
that in the second? t ^
b. From whose point of view is the whole scene seen and heard and felt?
2. Consider particularly the use of verbs in this selection.
a. What do you notice about the time element as indicated by the verb tenses?
What are the significant changes and why are they made?
b. Has the problem of time any bearing on the larger one of perception, of re
porting what one sees?
3. a. Is the girl who appears in the first paragraph still the central person in the
second?
b. Is she experiencing the thoughts and sensations recorded in the second par
agraph?
4. Are there any evidences of subjective reporting in this selection? If so, what
are they?
5. Is there any point to this selection, any generalization which the reporting leads
up to? Or is the writer presenting a scene for its own sake?
6. a. What words or phrases in this passage have precise, literal applications?
What ones do not?
b. List the figures of speech in this passage.
c. Which of the following phrases are used literally? Which are used figura
tively?
"The sharp and brittle crack and clatter"
"Dry sluggish reports"
"Hot still pinewiney silence"
"Mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis"
"Like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road"
"Like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool"
"As though it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape"
d. Do figurative expressions aid in making the reporting more subjective?
e. If some other person were looking at this scene might his perceptions be dif
ferent from the ones given here?
/. How important are figures of speech in the communication of the exact "feel
ing" of a perception?
THE CRACK-UP*
By Frederic Prokosch
i. THE CLOUDS parted, the sun appeared once more. In less than a
minute all the moisture seemed to have been sucked back out of
* From The Asiatics (1935), by Frederic Prokosch. Published by Doubleday
and Company, Inc.
8 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
the earth. The wet glimmer faded from the rocks, the grasses grew
sere and mottled again.
2. And it was hot. Unbearably so for a few minutes, until the air
grew dry and light again. Even after the sky had become solidly
blue once more, some faint oppression remained hanging in the air.
High overhead I saw three hawks circling. I could see their shad
ows in the hollow declivity at my side, twisting and turning like
strange creatures under water.
3. I sat down on the brown gravel. Alone in the middle of enormous
Asia. But, thought I, this isn t solitude; this isn t real loneliness at
all. The whole sun-stricken country seemed alive, each pebble
shone with vitality.
4. I walked toward a small mound not far from the plane. I didn t
want to be near the plane itself. It terrified me. It looked like a
great clumsy bird shattered upon the rocks, its tiny head folded
forward, nothing left to it at all, dead and hollow with fright.
5. I felt very thirsty. I stood upon the hillock and looked all around.
To the north, the haze of the hills and the remote forests; to the
south, the glistening salty stretches; to the east, endless brown
earth; to the west, endless brown earth. Below me on my right a
serpentine path ran through the mounds and the boulders. It was
a dried-up river bed, cracked with the spring sunlight, shimmering
like copper dust.
6. I walked down toward the tufted shore. Everything was dry. Not
a drop.
7. But then I saw in a dark hollow a little red gleam. Yes, there
among the shadows of the rocks a few drops of water were still
waiting. Waiting to be sucked into earth and air until nothing was
left.
8. I lay down flat and leaned over the little red pond. The water
smelled like corroded lead. I drank, and I could feel it gliding all
the way down into my belly like a slim warm snake. I looked at the
water again and I could see tiny red animalcules floating in its
hairy recesses. I began to feel sick again.
9. I started to rise, but a delicate weariness tugged at me and held
me back. So I turned back and lay down upon the smooth brown
river dust and closed my eyes.
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 9
10. Physical uneasiness can instill odd thoughts into the mind
thoughts frilled up in all their elaborateness, in all the bizarre in
tuitive fullness of a dream. I thought for a few seconds that I was
dying, was on the very verge of death, was almost dead. "Are you
afraid of death?" I could hear the old countess whimpering through
the perfumed curtains: "What do you think of death? When do
you want to die?" Dimly I could hear her voice continuing. "Think
about death/ she whispered, "think of these thousands of creatures,
here in Teheran, here in Persia, here in Asia. Moving across the
sand, living in mud, crawling through the alleys of the dark neg
lected cities, dying in the reeds beside a river without a name, liv
ing and dying with nothing, not even a scrap of paper to state that
they existed; dying and living, living and dying, the two processes
growing faster and faster as our world grows older and staler,
now almost as indistinguishable as the colors in a revolving wheel.
Where s the one? Where s the other? Here s a living one that s
dead, here s a dead one still alive, a living one s dead life slowly
dying, a dead one s living death slowly dying. What can you make
of it? Anything? Anything at all?"
11. I was feverish, of course. This is what I thought that for a brief
while I actually had died, that for a few seconds I was dead, had
entered the darkness, was experiencing the first throbs of a dis
solution about to spread inside me as at the sound of a gong. And
then, there was a confusion of signals. Something went wrong at
the switches, some misunderstanding occurred, some slight error
on the control boards. By the merest accident I slipped back into
life. I was alive.
12. But everything exists forever, nothing ever vanishes completely.
Each second goes off into space and is held there forever, traveling
and spreading with unalterable speed, the sight of it now reaching
Betelgeuse on an unbelievable arrow of light, the tiniest ray of it
now filtering through the circles around Saturn. Somewhere now
is flashing the sight of Hannibal crossing the Alps, of Xerxes passing
into Asia Minor, of the first apeman rising out of the green twi
light of the swamps. And somewhere, I thought, I am still dead.
At some point in space a million miles away a flash of light is now
carrying me outward caught in the momentary state of death. And
10 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
now ten thousand miles farther. And now still farther. Somewhere
I am still dead, thought I, and 111 carry the thought of that with
me for the rest of my life.
13. I opened my eyes. It was growing dark already. A mile away
across the waste I could see the plane leaning upon the rocks like
a huge moth, wings brittle in death. Now I felt really and pro
foundly alone. It was a new thing; I could never have imagined it.
It was as if I were wearing a mask, or were made out of wax, or
were growing scales instead of skin. My body was beginning to feel
unreal. The fading light on the dead stalks two feet away might as
well have been the gleam of a star in the deep heaven.
14. I turned and looked at the dry river bed. High above it, passing
slowly through the gathering dusk, I could see faint shapes passing
westward. The shapes of the newly dead. A regular caravan of
them. There they were, the dim astonished spirits moving out of
their old life. To hell, or to heaven? There was no telling. Some
looked stiff and virtuous, others limp and degenerate. Some appeared
to be overwhelmed with delight, others bleak with detestation.
Most of them surprised me; they were people of a kind whose
existence I should never have suspected. People who had spent
their life in some sort of hiding. But now they had to move into
the open; they couldn t hide any longer: women with their hair
shaved, hands clasped in prayer; others without eyes, horribly fat,
the capitalists of the spirit; others dead of starvation, with faces
like lamps in a forsaken alleyway; others hideously, exhaustingly
insane; a few with faces made wonderfully expressive by lust, re
vealing every possible variety of degradation and decay; the un
employed ones, dead without hope, eyes not knowing where to
look for mercy and mouths wide open in a voiceless, grief -stricken
shriek of accusation; several quite rigid with solitude, men like
dried trees, arms raised in supplication cripples and suicides;
those dead in battle, lips pressed together with a sudden devastat
ing understanding, eyes bleeding; four or five with eyes exquisitely
tender there were the protected ones, the stupid ones, the lucky
flowerlike ones whom life hadn t touched; and finally the children,
with hard malicious eyes and bodies beautiful as ferns. More and
more of them, more and more thickly they seemed to pass, now
like a herd of dark slender animals, now like a great funnel of fog
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 11
swiftly expanding. Then they grew hazy. The sky grew darker.
Soon they would be gone, soon it would all be over, none would be
left. None at all, nothing, not a trace.
15. When I opened my eyes again the sky was dark, the land was
hidden in a strange flickering shadow. Firelight. And high above
me, the usual stars. Then I felt my body moving gently, and when
I looked again I saw that I was lying on a couch and that a dark
bare-chested man was gently massaging me.
16. When he saw that I was awake he stopped and looked at me
questioningly. He murmured in a rich low voice something that I
couldn t understand. I stared blankly. He murmured something
else. Still I didn t answer. Then he said, in a broken almost in
comprehensible accent, "Perhaps Englishman, speaking English?"
17. I nodded. He looked pleased.
18. I raised my head and glanced around. I was lying on a rug out
side a tent, and beside this tent stood another tent, and beyond this
a third one, large and elaborate. I could see slender tree trunks
shining in the firelight, and lying on the grass in front of the fire
four great spotted dogs, jowls resting between their paws.
19. "Very sick," said the big brown man, "very sick." He shook his
head sadly. "But better now, much better." He nodded his head.
I breathed deeply. "Did you find me?" I asked him.
He looked puzzled for a moment. Then he smiled and nodded
again.
"And you brought me here?"
He thought for a moment. "No, camel brought you here."
I pointed at the tents. "Your home?"
20. He smiled again, a great white-toothed rich-lipped smile. Sweat
was dripping from his bearded chin and his eyebrows. "No, not
home." He nodded toward the largest of the tents. "Prince Ghura-
guzlu he go hunting here."
21. I could see naked, sweating boys passing back and forth in front
of the fire, carrying pots and dishes in and out of the tent. A fierce-
eyed old man in a huge white turban was squatting beside the fire,
stirring and stirring away in a big black bowl.
22. "Do you serve Prince Ghuraguzlu?" said I. He nodded. "What is
your name?"
23. He looked embarrassed. "Rama Singh," he replied, gazing down-
12 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
ward. His eyelids shone like satin, his lashes cast long slanting
shadows on his cheek bones.
24. He must have brought me several miles, thought I. We were in
the hills, the earth smelled rich and mossy, the larch trees were
rustling in the hot night wind.
25. Presently Rama Singh rose and walked into the big tent. A min
ute or two later he reappeared. He leaned over me. "Feeling bet
ter?"
I nodded.
"Prince Ghuraguzlu desiring to see you."
26. He put his strong male-smelling arm under me and helped me
to my feet. Then he led me slowly into the tent.
ANALYSIS
1. Make an outline of this selection.
a. What are the main divisions of your outline?
b. Are they based on chronological sequence? On the distinction between hallu
cination and sanity?
2. a. When you are trying to describe the sensations you have had in an hallu
cination or a dream can you express your experiences in the same way that you
would if you were describing a real-life situation?
b. To which of the five senses do you refer most in describing a dream?
c. If you can trace the component parts of your dream back to experiences you
have had in real life, do you find that your memory of these real experiences
is more or less vivid than your memory of the dream? How do the elements
of your description compare with those in this passage?
3. a. At what point does the first part of this selection end?
b. Has the observation up to this point been primarily objective or primarily
subjective?
c. Might any observer be expected to note precisely the same objects and to
have the same feelings about them?
d. Is it clear at all times which of the observations given here are objective and
which are colored by the narrator s feelings?
4. List the metaphors and similes used in this selection. Compare these figures of
speech with those used in the Faulkner selection.
5. Underline the particular words and phrases that indicate to the reader the tran
sitions from observation of the external world to observation of the world of the
narrator s mind.
6. Note that during his hallucination the narrator is expressing many generaliza
tions that would normally be made only after much observation. Some of these
generalizations are translated into concrete form, as when he sees people repre
senting problems of morality rather than the problems themselves.
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 13
a. How does this reporting of sensation and perception differ from the report
ing in the first part?
7. a. Are more figures of speech in the part concerned with the narrator s mental
wanderings than in the more objective parts?
b. Are the figures from the first part similar to those in the second? How do
they differ?
THE CAMERA EYE (14)*
By John Dos Passos
i. SUNDAY NIGHTS when we had fishballs and baked beans and Mr.
Garfield read to us in a very beautiful reading voice and every
body was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop because he
was reading The Man without a Country and it was a very ter
rible story and Aaron Burr had been a very dangerous man and
this poor young man had said "Damn the United States; I never
hope to hear her name again" and it was a very terrible thing to say
and the grayhaired judge was so kind and good and the judge
sentenced me and they took me far away to foreign lands on a
frigate and the officers were kind and good and spoke in kind
grave very sorry reading voices like Mr. Garfield and everything
was very kind and grave and very sorry and frigates and the blue
Mediterranean and islands and when I was dead I began to cry
and I was afraid the other boys would see I had tears in my eyes
2. American shouldn t cry he should look kind and grave and very
sorry when they wrapped me in the stars and stripes and brought
me home on a frigate to be buried I was so sorry I never remem
bered whether they brought me home or buried me at sea but
anyway I was wrapped in Old Glory
ANALYSIS
1. Compare this selection with the one by Frederic Prokosch.
a. How are they alike? How do they differ?
b. Are the similarities and differences determined by the kind of reporting or
observing in each?
2. How much of this selection deals with concrete material? How much of it
does not?
* From The 42nd Parallel ( 1930), by John Dos Passos. Published by Houghton
Mifflin Company. Reprinted by permission of the author.
14 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
Is there any evidence in the organization or the writing in this passage to in
dicate a "point," a judgment that the author is making? If so, what is the na
ture of the judgment?
Examine the words Dos Passos uses here and comment on their effectiveness in
aiding or obscuring the land of reporting and observing the author is doing.
NIGHT IN THE WOODS*
By George Sessions Perry
1. LATER, there being two axes and Harmie having a cold, Sam went
with Mamma to cut some wood and was beaten at it and proud of
Mamma. Then, near dark, the wind lay and Sam ate a couple of
sweet potatoes, called the dogs, and went to the woods.
2. Now he was a tall man striding through the naked woods, which
were clothed only with falling night, to hunt down the furred ani
mals; following Zoonie and the cur, who were busily reading and
editing the tangle of trails on the woods floor, disregarding the field-
mice and rabbit trails, the bird tracks and those of the domestic
stock that had wandered here, and the faint, lingering traces of
squirrel musk.
3. The dogs were transfigured. They were no longer winners after
buttermilk or fire heat, were no longer slinkers or sluggards, but
were roaming the dark woods with the strange dignity of things
doing what they were born to do, of things afire with mastery and
fierce intention.
4. Now Zoonie was chipping the brittle night to pieces with his
small, fast, sharp bark, and Sam knew an animal was marooned in
the night there above the little dog. It proved to be a possum, and as
Sam climbed the blackjack tree, armored as it was with toothed
bark, he was full of the hot flush of the chase and the haunting
minor dissonance of sympathy that goes out to a thing that is
alone and is doomed and that knows it.
5. Sam could not push it out on the ground because the dogs would
slash it and ruin the fur. So with a stick and the light he toyed
with the beast until it began to play dead. Once it began the pre
tense, Sam knew it would continue that all night.
* From Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry. Copyright 1941
by George Sessions Perry. Reprinted by arrangement with The Viking Press,
N. Y.
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 15
6. Soon he climbed down the tree with it, holding onto its hairless
tail, and fought off the dogs, though the cur was so fierce in his
determination to get his teeth into the possum that Sam was for
a moment afraid of him. Even so, Sam pretended not to be, and
beat him away with a heavy stick.
7. When the dogs were launched again and Sam had walked
two hundred yards, he heard a rattling in the leaves nearby and
went to it. Suddenly the light fell on a skunk, all shining and black
in the radiance of the lantern, perfectly confident that whatever
manner of creature was approaching, that creature would know
what would happen to him if he came any closer.
8. As Sam set the lantern down, the skunk, with thrilling poise,
turned his stern to Sam and eyed him critically over his shoulder,
sure of his weapon.
9. Sam was afraid that the slight but abrupt noise of cocking the
gun would startle the skunk and launch him on his offensive of
chemical warfare. But Sam also knew that in any conflict the
worst thing of all is to be afraid. Firmly his right thumb drew back
the hammer which would drive home the firing pin. At the re
sultant clicking sound, which seemed sharp and loud in the tense
silence, a tremor ran over the skunk. Then through the notch in
the rear sight and just above the lump of darkness which was the
front sight, Sam could see the skunk s left eye, bright and calm.
Slowly, so as not to spoil the aim, Sam s trigger finger closed, and
in a single instant the skunk was a dead thing.
10. Where a moment ago it had been all loveliness and calm cer
tain threat, it was now a lump of meat to be denuded with great
care, to be robbed of its shining coat and left in nakedness to
freeze and thaw and rot.
11. And now the dogs were barking somewhere off in the night, far
ahead, to be reached before the quarry should run through the
intermeshing treetops and escape. Sam picked up his things and
began running to them.
12. When Sam came in next morning just at dawn, having taken a
sight on the north star which was the only one he knew defi
nitely, since the two stars that form the front of the cup of the
Big Dipper point outward toward it he had the hides of seven pos
sums, one skunk, one coon and one ring-tail, and an amount of
16 . THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
respect for Mamma s yellow cur that was Mamma-big. In the first
place, to tree a ring-tail is not a sorry dog s job, and the coon, which
had made his final stand on a log in the middle of a creek, had
fought that yellow dog magnificently and shrewdly, had half
drowned him several times. But the yellow dog had never yielded an
inch, oblivious of everything except his driving desire to fight and
kill, while Zoonie attacked from the rear, until Sam had been able
to shoot the coon.
13. There had also been some pretense made at a fox race when
the dogs happened on one, but he was out of their class when it
came to speed and soon convinced them.
14. Now Sam was coming into the yard and the kids ran to meet
him and he let them take his burdens. Mamma, who was standing
in the kitchen door, said come tank up on breakfast and then get
some sleep and she d wake him up later for a big roast-possum
dinner. Sam had brought home four, it being out of the question
to carry more, and Mamma said she d just roast them all and use
the left-overs for sandwich meat for the kids.
15. After breakfast he got out of his clothes and went to bed, falling
almost immediately into that exotic, delicious daytime sleep that
waits for those who have hunted hard, who have not slept through,
but lived through, the raw violence of the night.
ANALYSIS
1. Study the author s methods of describing feelings and large, complicated per
ceptions.
a. Mark off the outstanding descriptions.
b. Rewrite four of these descriptions and try to give the same meaning in terms
of precise detail, rather than through figurative language.
a. a. Point out the passages where the author has carefully put in details; for ex
ample, "the skunk s left eye* instead of simply "the skunk s eye"; "Firmly his
right thumb drew back the hammer which would drive home the firing pin."
b. Rewrite these sentences by using summary phrases; for example, "He cocked
the gun."
c. How important are the details to the effectiveness of the whole selection?
3. Note where the detailed account of the night s actions breaks off and the sum
mary begins. Note also that the author describes in some detail two or three
other adventures in the middle of the summary.
a. Why did he not proceed to these before starting to summarize?
b. What would the effect have been if he had described in detail all the events
of the night?
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 17
4. Note that two incidents are described in detail in the first part of the selection:
the killing of the possum and the killing of the skunk.
a. How many paragraphs are devoted to the possum incident? How many to
the skunk?
b. Would one paragraph have been sufficient for each of these incidents?
c. What is gained or lost by treating these incidents so fully?
5. a. How many major divisions can you find in the entire selection? Or to ask
the same question in another way: the paragraphs can be reduced to what
number without undue violence to customary principles of paragraphing?
b. Why has the author made many more paragraphs than this minimum
number?
6. To what extent is the paragraphing based upon logical divisions of thought?
To what extent upon chronological divisions?
7. Is this selection primarily subjective or objective reporting? Defend your de
cision.
THE BUFFALO*
By Francis Parkman
i. THE GROUND was none of the best for a race, and grew worse
continually as we proceeded; indeed, it soon became desperately
bad, consisting of abrupt hills and deep hollows, cut by frequent
ravines not easy to pass. At length, a mile in advance, we saw a
band of bulls. Some were scattered grazing over a green declivity,
while the rest were crowded together in the wide hollow below.
Making a circuit, to keep out of sight, we rode towards them, until
we ascended a hill, within a furlong of them, beyond which noth
ing intervened that could possibly screen us from their view. We
dismounted behind the ridge, just out of sight, drew our saddle-
girths, examined our pistols, and mounting again, rode over the
hill, and descended at a canter towards them, bending close to our
horses necks. Instantly they took the alarm: those on the hill de
scended, those below gathered into a mass, and the whole got
into motion, shouldering each other along at a clumsy gallop. We
followed, spurring our horses to full speed; and as the herd rushed,
crowding and trampling in terror through an opening in the hills,
we were close at their heels, half suffocated by the clouds of dust.
But as we drew near, their alarm and speed increased; our horses,
being new to the work, showed signs of the utmost fear, bounding
* From The Oregon Trail (1920), by Francis Parkman. Published by Little,
Brown and Company.
18 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
violently aside as we approached, and refusing to enter among the
herd. The buffalo now broke into several small bodies, scampering
over the hills in different directions, and I lost sight of Shaw;
neither of us knew where the other had gone. Old Pontiac ran like
a frantic elephant up hill and down hill, his ponderous hoofs
striking the prairie like sledge hammers. He showed a curious mix
ture of eagerness and terror, straining to overtake the panic-stricken
herd, but constantly recoiling in dismay as we drew near. The fugi
tives, indeed, offered no very attractive spectacle, with their
shaggy manes and the tattered remnants of their last winter s hair
covering their backs in irregular shreds and patches, and flying
off in the wind as they ran. At length I urged my horse close behind
a bull, and after trying in vain, by blows and spurring, to bring
him alongside, I fired from this disadvantageous position. At the
report Pontiac swerved so much that I was again thrown a little
behind the game. The bullet, entering too much in the rear, failed
to disable; for a buffalo requires to be shot at particular points, or
he will certainly escape. The herd ran up a hill, and I followed in
pursuit. As Pontiac rushed headlong down on the other side, I saw
Shaw and Henry descending the hollow on the right, at a leisurely
gallop; and in front, the buffalo were just disappearing behind the
crest of the next hill, their short tails erect, and their hoofs twin
kling through a cloud of dust.
At that moment I heard Shaw and Henry shouting to me; but
the muscles of a stronger arm than mine could not have checked
at once the furious course of Pontiac, whose mouth was as insensi
ble as leather. Added to this, I rode him that morning with a snaf
fle, having the day before, for the benefit of my other horse, un
buckled from my bridle the curb which I commonly used. A
stronger and hardier brute never trod the prairie; but the novel
sight of the buffalo filled him with terror, and when at full speed
he was almost incontrollable. Gaining the top of the ridge, I saw
nothing of the buffalo; they had all vanished amid the intricacies of
the hills and hollows. Reloading my pistols, in the best way I could,
I galloped on until I saw them again scuttling along at the base
of the hill, their panic somewhat abated. Down went old Pontiac
among them, scattering them to the right and left; and then we
had another long chase. About a dozen bulls were before us, scour-
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 19
ing over the hills, rushing down the declivities with tremendous
weight and impetuosity, and then laboring with a weary gallop
upward. Still Pontiac, in spite of spurring and beating, would not
close with them. One bull at length fell a little behind the rest,
and by a dint of much effort, I urged my horse within six or eight
yards of his side. His back was darkened with sweat: he was
panting heavily, while his tongue lolled out a foot from his jaws.
Gradually I came up abreast of him, urging Pontiac with leg and
rein nearer to his side, when suddenly he did what buffalo in such
circumstances will always do: he slackened his gallop, and turn
ing towards us, with an aspect of mingled rage and distress, low
ered his huge, shaggy head for a charge. Pontiac, with a snort,
leaped aside in terror, nearly throwing me to the ground, as I was
wholly unprepared for such an evolution. I raised my pistol in a
passion to strike him on the head, but thinking better of it, fired
the bullet after the bull, who had resumed his flight; then drew
rein, and determined to rejoin my companions. It was high time.
The breath blew hard from Pontiac s nostrils, and the sweat rolled
in big drops down his sides; I myself felt as if drenched in warm
water. Pledging myself to take my revenge at a future opportunity,
I looked about for some indications to show me where I was, and
what course I ought to pursue; I might as well have looked for
landmarks in the midst of the ocean. How many miles I had run
or in what direction, I had no idea; and around me the prairie was
rolling in steep swells and pitches, without a single distinctive fea
ture to guide me. I had a little compass hung at my neck; and ig
norant that the Platte at this point diverged considerably from its
easterly course, I thought that by keeping to the northward I
should certainly reach it. So I turned and rode about two hours in
that direction. The prairie changed as I advanced, softening away
into easier undulations, but nothing like the Platte appeared, nor
any sign of a human being: the same wild endless expanse lay
around me still; and to all appearance I was as far from my object
as ever. I began now to think myself in danger of being lost, and
reining in my horse, summoned the scanty share of woodcraft that
I possessed ( if that term is applicable upon the prairie ) to extricate
me. It occurred to me that the buffalo might prove my best guides.
I soon found one of the paths made by them in their passage to
20 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
the river: it ran nearly at right angles to my course; but turning
my horse s head in the direction it indicated, his freer gait and
erected ears assured me that I was right.
3. But in the meantime my ride had been by no means a solitary
one. The face of the country was dotted far and wide with count
less hundreds of buffalo. They trooped along in files and columns,
bulls, cows, and calves, on the green faces of the declivities in front.
They scrambled away over the hills to the right and left; and far
off, the pale blue swells in the extreme distance were clotted with
innumerable specks. Sometimes I surprised shaggy old bulls graz
ing alone, or sleeping behind the ridges I ascended. They would
leap up at my approach, stare stupidly at me through their tangled
manes, and then gallop heavily away. The antelope were very
numerous; and as they are always bold when in the neighborhood
of buffalo, they would approach to look at me, gaze intently with
their great round eyes, then suddenly leap aside, and stretch
lightly away over the prairie, as swiftly as a race horse. Squalid,
ruffianlike wolves sneaked through the hollows and sandy ravines.
Several times I passed through villages of prairie dogs, who sat,
each at the mouth of his burrow, holding his paws before him in
a supplicating attitude, and yelping away most vehemently, whisk
ing his little tail with every squeaking cry he uttered. Prairie dogs
are not fastidious in their choice of companions; various long,
checkered snakes were sunning themselves in the midst of the
village, and demure little gray owls, with a large white ring
around each eye, were perched side by side with the rightful in
habitants. The prairie teemed with life. Again and again I looked
toward the crowded hillsides, and was sure I saw horsemen; and
riding near, with a mixture of hope and dread, for Indians were
abroad, I found them transformed into a group of buffalo. There
was nothing in human shape amid all this vast congregation of
brute forms.
4. When I turned down the buffalo path, the prairie seemed changed:
only a wolf or two glided by at intervals, like conscious felons, never
looking to the right or left. Being now free from anxiety, I was at
leisure to observe minutely the objects around me; and here, for the
first time, I noticed insects wholly different from any of the varieties
found farther to the eastward. Gaudy butterflies fluttered about my
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 21
horse s head; strangely formed beetles, glittering with metallic luster,
were crawling upon plants that I had never seen before; multitudes
of lizards, too, were darting like lightning over the sand.
5. I had run to a great distance from the river. It cost me a long ride
on the buffalo path, before I saw, from the ridge of a sandhill, the
pale surface of the Platte glistening in the midst of its desert val
ley, and the faint outline of the hills beyond waving along the sky.
From where I stood, not a tree nor a bush nor a living thing was
visible throughout the whole extent of the sun-scorched landscape.
In half an hour I came upon the trail, not far from the river; and
seeing that the party had not yet passed, I turned eastward to meet
them, old Pontiac s long swinging trot again assuring me that I was
right in doing so. Having been slightly ill on leaving camp in the
morning, six or seven hours of rough riding had fatigued me ex
tremely. I soon stopped, therefore, flung my saddle on the ground,
and with my head resting on it and my horse s trail-rope tied loosely
to my arm, lay waiting the arrival of the party, speculating mean
while on the extent of the injuries Pontiac had received. At length
the white wagon coverings rose from the verge of the plain. By a
singular coincidence, almost at the same moment two horsemen ap
peared coming down from the hills. They were Shaw and Henry,
who had searched for me a while in the morning, but well knowing
the futility of the attempt in such a broken country, had placed
themselves on the top of the highest hill they could find, and picket
ing their horses near them, as a signal to me, had lain down and
fallen asleep. The stray cattle had been recovered, as the emigrants
told us, about noon. Before sunset, we pushed forward eight miles
farther.
ANALYSIS
1. a. How does this selection compare with the two preceding as to the subjec
tivity of the reporting?
b. At what points do the writer s feelings color his perceptions?
c. Does this subjectivity affect the tone of the selection as a whole?
2. Does the fact that the author is taking part in the action described affect the
nature of the reporting of the action?
3. The paragraphs are long here. Could they be broken into smaller paragraphs
without change of wording?
a. Examine especially Paragraph 2 in this connection. Note that the order is
almost entirely chronological.
22 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
b. In what respect do Paragraphs 3 and 4 violate the strict chronological
pattern?
4. In Paragraphs 3 and 4 Parkman is generalizing upon perceptions. He is not de
scribing each perception as it comes to him, but is making general statements
about groups of perceptions. His generalizations are, however, so close to single
perceptions here that we would call the passage highly concrete.
a. Examine these two paragraphs closely to see exactly what is meant here.
5. What metaphors and similes can you find in this selection?
ICE*
By Henry David Thoreau
i. THE POND had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest
and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general
freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being
hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that
ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can
lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on
the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only
two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the
water is necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows
in the sand where some creature has traveled about and doubled on
its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of caddis worms
made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased
it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are
deep and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of
most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to
study it. If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you
find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to
be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are con
tinually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet compara
tively solid and dark, that is, you see .the water through it. These
bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter,
very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them
through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square
inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong perpendic
ular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex up
ward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles
* FiomWdden (1854).
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 23
one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these within
the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I some
times used to cast in stones to try the strength of the ice, and those
which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very
large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I came
to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those
large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had
formed, as I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake.
But as the last two days had been very warm, like an Indian sum
mer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green color
of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and
though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air
bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together,
and lost their regularity; they were no longer one directly over an
other, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlap
ping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The
beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom.
Being curious to know what position my great bubbles occupied
with regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing a middling
sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formed
around and under the bubble, so that it was included between the
two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper,
and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge,
a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and I was sur
prised to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with
great regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of
five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there
between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch
thick; and in many places the small bubbles in this partition had
burst out downward, and probably there was no ice at all under the
largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. I inferred that the in
finite number of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the
under surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each,
in its degree, had operated like a burning glass on the ice beneath
to melt and rot it. These are the little air guns which contribute to
make the ice crack and whoop.
24 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
ANALYSIS
1. Is Thoreau s report of Walden Pond in winter subjective reporting or objective
reporting? What evidence can you find in support of your opinion?
2. a. What order does Thoreau follow in examining the ice?
b. Does he follow some clearly marked path from general or over-all picture to
one that is more minute?
c. Does he merely assemble details that seem to him to be significant; or does
he allow the picture of the pond to grow on the reader through the accumula
tion of the details?
3. a. Is Thoreau trying to make a "point" or "points" in this selection?
b. If so, what is the relation between his points and the details of observation
that he makes?
4. Study the words used here the adjectives, the verbs, the images.
a. To what extent does word choice indicate objective or subjective reporting?
5. a. What is the function of time in this selection?
b. How does it help the kind of reporting Thoreau is doing here?
6. Thoreau wrote this passage as one long paragraph.
a. Into how many main parts can this paragraph be divided?
b. Mark off the places where one subdivision ends and the next begins.
c. Which of these divisions receives the fullest treatment?
7. Note the places where Thoreau attempts to give precise measurements for ice
and bubbles.
a. Does this accuracy influence perceptibly the effect of the piece on the reader?
LAST DAYS OF ST. PIERRE*
By Fairfax Downey
THE PLANTER
1. How GRACIOUSLY had fortune smiled on Fernand Clerc! Little past
the age of forty, in this year of 1902, he was the leading planter of
the fair island of Martinique. Sugar from his broad cane fields, mo
lasses, and mellow rum had made him a man of wealth, a millionaire.
All his enterprises prospered.
2. Were the West Indies, for all their beauty and their bounty, some
times powerless to prevent a sense of exile, an ache of homesickness
in the heart of a citizen of the Republic? Then there again fate had
* From Disaster Fighters, copyright, 1938, by Fairfax Downey. Courtesy of
G. P. Putnam s Sons.
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 25
been kind to Fernand Clerc. Elected a member of the Chamber of
Deputies, it was periodically his duty and his pleasure to embark
and sail home to attend its sessions home to France, to Paris.
3. Able, respected, good-looking, blessed with a charming wife and
children, M. Clerc found life good indeed. With energy undepleted
by the tropics, he rode through the island visiting his properties. Tall
and thick grew the cane stalks of his plantation at Vive on the slopes
of Mont Pelee. Mont Pelee Naked Mountain well named when
lava erupting from its cone had stripped it bare of its verdure. But
that was long ago. Not since 1851 had its subterranean fires flared up
and then but insignificantly. Peaceful now, its crater held the lovely
Lake of Palms, whose wooded shores were a favorite picnic spot
for parties from St. Pierre and Fort-de-France. Who need fear tow
ering Mont Pelee, once mighty, now mild, an extinct volcano?
4. Yet this spring M. Clerc and all Martinique received a rude shock.
The mountain was not dead, it seemed. White vapors veiled her
summit, and by May second she had overlaid her green mantle with
a gown of gray cinders. Pelee muttered and fumed like an angry
woman told her day was long past. Black smoke poured forth, il
lumined at night by jets of flame and flashes of lightning. The gray
ish snow of cinders covered the countryside, and the milky waters
of the Riviere Blanche altered into a muddy and menacing torrent.
5. Nor was Pelee uttering only empty threats. On May fifth, M. Clerc
at Vive beheld a cloud rolling from the mountain down the valley.
Sparing his own acres, the cloud and the stream of smoking lava
which it masked, enveloped the Guerin sugar factory, burying its
owner, his wife overseer, and twenty-five workmen and domestics.
6. Dismayed by this tragedy, M. Clerc and many others moved from
the slopes into St. Pierre. The city was crowded, its population of
twenty-five thousand swollen to forty thousand, and the throngs that
filled the market and the cafes or strolled through the gorgeously
luxuriant Jardin des Plantes lent an air of added animation, of al
most hectic gaiety. When M. Clerc professed alarm at the behavior
of Pelee to his friends, he was answered with shrugs of shoulders.
Danger? On the slopes perhaps, but scarcely here in St. Pierre down
by the sea.
7. Thunderous, scintillant, Mont Pelee staged a magnificent display
of natural fireworks on the night of May seventh. Whites and Negroes
26 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
stared up at it, fascinated. Some were frightened but more took a
childlike joy in the vivid spectacle. It was as if the old volcano were
celebrating the advent of tomorrow s fete day.
8. M. Fernand Clerc did not sleep well that night. He breakfasted
early in the household where he and his family were guests and again
expressed his apprehensions to the large group of friends and rela
tives gathered at the table. Politely and deferentially for one does
not jeer a personage and man of proven courage they heard him
out, hiding their scepticism.
9. The voice of the planter halted in midsentence; and he half rose,
his eyes fixed on the barorr^eter. Its needle was actually fluttering!
10. M. Clerc pushed back his chair abruptly and commanded his car
riage at once. A meaning look to his wife and four children, and
they hastened to make ready. Their hosts and the rest followed them
to the door. Non, merci, none would join their exodus. An revoir. A
demain.
11. From the balcony of their home, the American Consul, Thomas
Prentis, and his wife waved to the Clerc family driving by. "Stop,"
the planter ordered and the carriage pulled up. Best come along,
the planter urged. His American friends thanked him. There was
no danger, they laughed, and waved again to the carriage disappear
ing in gray dust as racing hoofs and wheels sped it out of the city
of St. Pierre.
THE GOVERNOR
12. Governor Mouttet, ruling Martinique for the Republic of France,
glared up at rebellious Mont P^lee. This peste of a volcano was de
ranging the island. There had been no such crisis since its captures
by the English, who always relinquished it again to France, or the
days when the slaves revolted. A great pity that circumstances be
yond his control should damage the prosperous record of his ad
ministration, the Governor reflected.
13. That miserable mountain was disrupting commerce. Its rumblings
drowned out the band concerts in the Savane. Its pyrotechnics dis
tracted glances which might far better have dwelt admiringly on the
proverbial beauty of the women of Martinique. . . . Now attention
was diverted to a cruder work of Nature, a sputtering volcano. Par-
bleu! It was enough to scandalize any true Frenchman.
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 27
14. Governor Mouttet sighed and pored over the reports laid before
him. He had appointed a commission to study the eruption and get
at the bottom of I affaire Pelee, but meanwhile alarm was spreading.
People were fleeing the countryside and thronging into St. Pierre,
deserting that city for Fort-de-France, planning even to leave the
island. Steamship passage was in heavy demand. The Roraima, due
May eighth, was booked solid out of St. Pierre, one said. This would
never do. Steps must be taken to prevent a panic which would scat
ter fugitives throughout Martinique or drain a colony of France of
its inhabitants.
15. A detachment of troops was despatched by the Governor to St.
Pierre to preserve order and halt the exodus. His Excellency, no man
to send others where he himself would not venture, followed with
Mme. Mouttet and took up residence in that city. Certainly his pres
ence must serve to calm these unreasoning, exaggerated fears. He
circulated among the populace, speaking soothing words. Mes en-
fants, the Governor avowed, Mont Pelee rumbling away there is only
snoring soundly in deep slumber. Be tranquil.
36. Yet, on the ominous night of May seventh, as spurts of flame
painted the heavens, the Governor privately confessed to inward
qualms. What if the mountain should really rouse? Might it not then
cast the mortals at its feet into a sleep deeper than its own had been,
a sleep from which they would never awaken?
THE CHIEF OFFICER
17. Ellery S. Scott, chief officer of the Quebec Line steamship Rora
ima, stood on the bridge with Captain Muggah as the vessel bore
down on Martinique. A column of smoke over the horizon traced
down to the 4500-foot summit of Mont Pelee. So the old volcano was
acting up! Curiosity on the bridge ran high as anchor was dropped
in the St. Pierre roadstead about six o clock on the morning of May
eighth. But all seemed well ashore. The streets, twisting and climb
ing between the bright-colored houses, were filled with crowds in
gay holiday attire.
18. Promptly the agents came aboard. The volcano? But certainly it
was erupting and causing inconvenience. But there was no danger,
regardless of the opinion of that Italian skipper yesterday who had
said that had he seen Vesuvius looking like Pelee, he would have de-
28 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
parted from Naples as fast as he was going to leave St. Pierre. Al
though the authorities refused him clearance and threatened penal
ties, he had sailed in haste, with only half his cargo.
19. By the way, the agents continued, the passenger list was to be
considerably augmented: sixty first-class anxious to leave St. Pierre.
Here they were boarding now with bag and baggage. Could they be
humored, and the Roraima sail for St. Lucia at once, returning to
discharge its Martinique cargo? the agents inquired of Captain
Muggah.
20. Chief Officer Scott, ordered below to inspect the stowage, thought
of his boy in the forecastle. A good lad this eldest son of his. Used
to say he d have a ship of his own some day and keep on his father
as first mate. No, his father planned a better career than the sea for
him. The boy was slated to go to college and be a lawyer. This
would be his last voyage.
21. Stowed shipshape and proper as Scott knew he would find it, the
cargo plainly could not be shifted without a good deal of difficulty.
The Martinique consignment lay above that for St. Lucia, and it
would be a heavy task to discharge at the latter port first. Scott so
reported.
22. The agents hesitated briefly. To be sure, sixty first-class passengers
were to be obliged if possible but ah, well, let them wait a little
longer. The Roraima would sail as soon as the upper layer of cargo
was landed.
23. Ship s bells tolled the passing hours. Pelee yonder growled hoarsely
and belched black smoke. A little before eight, Chief Officer Scott
apprehensively turned his binoculars on the summit.
THE PRISONER
24. It was dark in the underground dungeon of the St. Pierre prison,
but thin rays of light filtered through the grated opening in the
upper part of the cell door. Enough so that Auguste Ciparis could
tell when it was night and when it was day.
25. Not that it mattered much unless a man desired to count the days
until he should be free. What good was that? One could not hurry
them by. Therefore Auguste stolidly endured them with the long
patience of Africa. The judge had declared him a criminal and
caused him to be locked up here. Thus it was settled and nothing
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 29
was to be done. Yet it was hard, this being shut out of life up there
in the gay city hard when one was only twenty-five and strong
and lusty.
26. Auguste slept and dozed all he could. Pele*e was rumbling away in
the distance each day the jailer bringing him food and water
seemed more excited about it but the noise, reaching the sub
terranean cell only as faint thunder, failed to keep the Negro
awake. . . .
27. Glimmerings of the dawn of May eighth filtered through the grat
ing into the cell, and Auguste stirred into wakefulness. This being a
fete day, imprisonment was less tolerable. What merriment his
friends would be making up there in the squares of St. Pierrel He
could imagine the sidelong glances and the swaying hips of the mu
latto girls he might have been meeting today. Auguste stared sul
lenly at the cell door. At least the jailer might have been on time
with his breakfast.
28. The patch of light in the grating winked out into blackness. Ail
Ai! All of a sudden it was night again.
II
29. On the morning of May eighth, 1902, the clocks of St. Pierre ticked
on toward ten minutes of eight when they would stop forever.
Against a background of bright sunshine, a huge column of vapor
rose from the cone of Mont Pel6e.
30. A salvo of reports as from heavy artillery. Then, choked by lava
boiled to white heat by fires in the depths of the earth, Pelee with a
terrific explosion blew its head off.
31. Like a colossal Roman candle it shot out streaks of flame and fiery
globes. A pall of black smoke rose thousands of feet in the air, dark
ening the heavens. Silhouetted by a red, infernal glare, Pelee flung
aloft viscid masses which rained incandescent ashes on land and sea.
32. Then, jagged and brilliant as the lightning flashes, a fissure opened
in the flank of the mountain toward St. Pierre. Out of it issued an
immense cloud which rushed with unbelievable rapidity down on
the doomed city and the villages of Carbet and Le Precheur.
33. In three minutes that searing, suffocating cloud enveloped them,
and forty thousand people died!
34. Fernand Clerc, the planter, watched from Mont Parnasse, one
30 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
mile east of St. Pierre, where he had so recently breakfasted.
Shrouded in such darkness as only the inmost depths of a cavern af
ford, he reached out for the wife and children he could not see and
gathered them in blessed safety into his arms. But the relatives, the
many friends he had left so short a while ago, the American consul
and his wife, who had waved him a gay goodbye them he would
never see alive again. . . .
35. In that vast brazier which was St. Pierre, Governor Mouttet may
have lived the instant long enough to realize that Pelee had in truth
awakened and that eternal sleep was his lot and his wife s and that
of all those whose flight he had discouraged. . . .
36. Down in that deep dungeon cell of his Auguste Ciparis blinked in
the swift-fallen night. Through the grating blew a current of burn
ing air, scorching his flesh. He leaped, writhing in agony and scream
ing for help. No one answered.
37. Leaving a blazing city in its wake, the death cloud from the vol
cano rolled over the docks, and the sea, hissing and seething, shrank
back before it. Aboard the Roraima, Chief Officer Scott lowered his
glasses precipitately from Pelee. One look at that cloud bearing down
like a whirlwind and he snatched a tarpaulin from a ventilator and
pulled it over him. The ship rolled to port, almost on her beam ends,
then back to starboard. Her funnels and other superstructure and
most of her small boats were swept off by the mighty blast laden
with scalding ashes and stone dust. Badly scorched, Scott emerged
from his refuge to catch a glimpse of the British steamer Roddam
plunging by toward the open sea, her deck a smoking shambles. Of
the other sixteen vessels which had been anchored in the roadstead
there was no sign.
38. Staggering toward the twisted iron wreckage of the bridge, the
Chief Officer beheld the swaying figure of Captain Muggah. From
the hideous, blackened mask that had been his face a voice croaked:
39. "All hands! Heave up the anchor!"
40. All hands! Only Scott, two engineers, and a few members of the
black gang who had been below responded. In vain Scott scanned
the group for his son. He never saw the lad again.
41. The anchor could not be unshackled. "Save the women and chil
dren," the captain ordered. During attempts to lower a boat, the
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 31
captain disappeared. Later he was pulled out of the water in a dy
ing condition.
42. Now the Roraima was afire fore and aft. Amid the shrieks and
groans of dying passengers, Scott and three more able-bodied men
fought the flames, helped by a few others whose hands, burned raw,
made it torture to touch anything. Between dousing the fire with
bucketfuls from the sea, Scott tried to give drinks of fresh water to
those who begged pitifully for it, though their seared, swollen throats
would not let them swallow a drop. Tongues lolling, they dragged
themselves along the deck, following him like dogs.
43. When the French cruiser Suchet steamed up to the rescue, the
only survivors among the passengers were a little girl and her nurse.
Twenty-eight out of a crew of forty-seven were dead.
44. The eyes of all aboard the Suchet turned toward shore. There at
the foot of a broad, bare pathway, paved by death and destruction
down the slope of Mont Pelee, lay the utter ruins of the city of
St. Pierre.
Ill
45. Not until the afternoon of May eighth did the devastation of St.
Pierre cool sufficiently to allow rescuers from Fort-de-France to
enter. They could find none to rescue except one woman who died
soon after she was taken from a cellar.
46. "St. Pierre, that city this morning alive, full of human souls, is no
more!" Vicar-General Parel wrote his Bishop. "It lies consumed be
fore us, in its winding sheet of smoke and cinders, silent and des
olate, a city of the dead. We strain our eyes for fleeing inhabitants,
for men returning to bury their lost ones. We see no one! There is
no living being left in this desert of desolation, framed in a terrify
ing solitude. In the background, when the cloud of smoke and cin
ders breaks away, the mountain and its slopes, once so green, stand
forth like an Alpine landscape. They look as if they were covered
with a heavy cloak of snow, and through the thickened atmosphere
rays of pale sunshine, wan, and unknown to our latitudes, illumine
this scene with a light that seems to belong to the other side of the
grave."
47. Indeed St. Pierre might have been an ancient town, destroyed in
32 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
some half-forgotten cataclysm and recently partly excavated an
other Pompeii and Herculaneum. Cinders, which had buried its
streets six feet deep in a few minutes, were as the dust of centuries.
Here was the same swift extinction Vesuvius had wrought.
48. Here was no slow flow of lava. That cloud disgorged by Pel6e
was a superheated hurricane issuing from the depths of the earth at
a speed of ninety miles an hour. Such was the strength of the blast,
it killed by concussion and by toppling walls on its victims. The fall
of the fourteen-foot metal statue of Notre Dame de la Garde Our
Lady of Safety symbolized the dreadful fact that tens of thousands
never had a fighting chance for their lives.
49. But chiefly the death cloud slew with its lethal content of hot
steam and dust. So swiftly did it pass that its heat did not always
burn all of the light tropical clothing from its prey, but once it was
inhaled into the lungs that was the end. Some had run a few
frantic steps; then dropped, hands clutched over nose and mouth.
Encrusted by cementlike ashes, corpses lay fixed in the contorted
postures of their last struggle, replicas of the dead of Vesuvius pre
served in the Naples museum. Fire had charred others or incinerated
them to a heap of bones. A horrible spectacle was presented by
bodies whose skulls and abdomens had been burst by heat and gases.
50. People who had been indoors when the cloud descended perished
where they stood or sat, but the hand of death had marked most of
them less cruelly. They seemed almost still alive, as each shattered
building disclosed its denouement. There a girl lay prone, her arms
about the feet of an image of the Virgin. A man bent with his head
thrust into a basin from which the water had evaporated. A family
was gathered around a restaurant table. A child held a doll in her
arms; when the doll was touched, it crumbled away except for its
china eyes. A clerk sat at his desk, one hand supporting his chin, the
other grasping a pen. A baker crouched in the fire pit under his
oven. In one room of a home a blonde girl in her bathrobe leaned
back in a rocking chair. Behind her stood a Negro servant who ap
parently had been combing the girl s hair. Another servant had
crawled under a sofa. Not far away lay the body of a white woman,
beautiful as a Greek statue, and like many an antique statue
headless.
51. Mutilated or almost unmarred, shriveled in last agony or seeming
OBSERVING AND REPORTING 33
only to have dropped into a peaceful sleep, lay the legions of the
dead. After the finding of the dying woman in a cellar, the devasta
tion was searched in vain for survivors.
52. Then four days after the catastrophe, two Negroes walking through
the wreckage turned gray as they heard faint cries for help issuing
from the depths of the earth.
53. "Who s that?" they shouted when they could speak. "Where are
you?"
54. Up floated the feeble voice: "I m down here in the dungeon of
the jail. Help! Save me! Get me out!"
55. They dug down through the debris, broke open the dungeon door,
and released Auguste Ciparis, the Negro criminal.
56. Some days later, George Kennan and August F. Jaccaci, American
journalists arriving to cover the disaster, located Ciparis in a village
in the country. They secured medical attention for hfe severe burns,
poorly cared for as yet, and obtained and authenticated his story.
When the scorching air penetrated his cell that day, he smelled his
own body burning but breathed as little as possible during the mo
ment the intense heat lasted. Ignorant of what had occurred, not
realizing that he was buried alive, he slowly starved for four days in
his tomb of a cell. His scant supply of water was soon gone. Only
echoes answered his shouts for help. When at last he was heard and
freed, Ciparis, given a drink of water, managed with some assistance
to walk six kilometers to Morne Rouge.
57. One who lived where forty thousand died! History records no
escape more marvelous.
ANALYSIS
1. a. Examine carefully the divisions of this selection and try to determine why
the author organized his material in this way.
b. What effect on die whole pattern of the reporting does the account of dif
ferent individuals and their actions have?
2. a. Why did the author choose the particular persons he did?
b. Is his choice intended to be representative?
c. Is it intended to cover, by specific and typical instances, what might have
been covered by a more generalized reporting?
3. a. Is there any evidence in the passage that the author was present and that
he is therefore giving an eye-witness account of the disaster?
b. What changes in organization and approach seem to indicate that the ma
terial here has been gained through other than first-hand sources?
34 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
4. Can you find any places in this selection which might be classified as subjective
reporting?
SAMPLE THEME SUBJECTS
An Indian stick game
An evening spent at a wake
A native village in New Guinea
The last day of fishing on the Blackfoot
Old men watching an excavation
A sorority tea
Hayrakers
A family of immigrants
A race-track tout in action
Children buying candy
Women in a hat shop
Men on the production line
A game of bridge in the afternoon
On the subway
Circus people
A library reading room
Sensations on regaining consciousness
Sensations in a dentist s chair
Gloomy Sunday
Homesickness
These are subjects that do not involve generalizations. In handling them,
simply present a scene that would correspond to action shots taken by a
movie camera. If more than one paper is written here, make one objective
and one subjective.
2. INFORMAL INDUCTIONS
Informal Inductions
AT THIS POINT we begin to concern ourselves with making gen
eralizations and arriving at conclusions. When we generalize, we
have in mind not one situation but many situations that are related in
some way. We think of many situations having certain elements in com
mon, and we arrive at conclusions we consider true about these elements.
Consider, for instance, the article "I Pick Em Up" on page 70. The
writer is in the habit of picking up hitchhikers. He is not writing about
one experience only; he has had many. He is trying to express his gen
eral attitude toward picking up hitchhikers. Again, W. E. 13. DuBois,
in "The Negro Scientist," is acquainted with the life stories of several
Negro scientists. By examining somewhat closely the case of each, he
attempts to determine whether or not Negroes can become competent
scientists. This process of arriving at conclusions about a class of peo
ple, objects, or ideas is what logicians call induction.
Suppose you notice that your neighbor s Siamese cat has a kink in
its tail. At first you assume that the kink is merely a peculiarity of the
single animal. Perhaps it has had an accident. But later on you come
across another Siamese cat with a kink in its tail. Your interest now
aroused, you check on other Siamese cats and find that each has a
similar kink. You have by now become thoroughly convinced that
Siamese cats as a class have kinks in their tails. In arriving at a conclu
sion about the class of animals, you are making a generalization or in
duction.
An informal induction is one in which the writer does not endeavor
seriously to make a thorough study of all the members in the class
about which he is writing; or, as the case often is, does not set up any
38 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
research machinery by which he can reasonably expect to arrive at
a demonstration that should satisfy every reader. Although the line
between informal and formal inductions l is sometimes hard to draw,
the distinction can be made practically by using the writer s method
of approach to his material as a measuring stick. If he has noticed
somewhat at random or from his chance experiences with his subject
some related phenomena and has drawn conclusions from them, the
result is informal induction. It is not implied here that informal in
ductions are inferior products; some of the ideas that govern our
lives were arrived at informally. The formal induction, however, is an
investigative job. The writer of such a piece outlines his problem and
determines what he needs to do to arrive at sound conclusions; he
devises methods for gathering his material and maintains scientific or
objective control of it.
In writing articles that carry informal inductions, the student should
turn to his own experiences. He should go not to the unusual experi
ences he has had but to the ones that recur constantly. There is a
knack to the discovery of subjects for these papers but mastery of it
is not at all difficult, and when the student has achieved his mastery
he should no longer have trouble in finding subjects to write about.
The key to the knack lies in the act of turning away from the unusual
to the usual as subject matter, in the act of turning away from the one
striking experience to the little experiences which do not amount to
much individually, but which taken together amount to an idea of
more significance than strange happenings or violent accidents can
ever give.
THIRTY MILLION NEW AMERICANS
Louis Adamic
i. WITHIN its population of slightly less than one hundred and
thirty million, the United States has today over thirty million citi
zens the overwhelming majority of them young citizens who
are the American-born children of immigrant parents of various
1 For formal inductions see Section IV, Primary Source Papers.
* From My America ( 1938), by Louis Adamic. Published by Harper and Broth
ers. Copyright, 1938, by Louis Adamic.
INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 39
nationalities: German, Italian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Cro
atian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Jewish, Russian, Carpatho-Russian,
Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Swedish,
Danish, Dutch, French, Flemish, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian,
Armenian, Syrian, Lett, Albanian, Greek, Turkish, and, of course,
English, Scotch, and Irish. The country as a whole is but dimly
cognizant of this fact arid its implications which, in my opinion,
are of fundamental and urgent importance in America s contem
porary social and cultural scene. It should perhaps particularly in
terest those Americans who consider themselves of the old Anglo-
Saxon stock: for here is a tremendous new element what will it
do to the old stock? to the country? how will it affect the de
velopment of civilization arid culture, of racial types on this conti
nent?
2. These questions had vaguely interested and perturbed me al
ready in the late 1920 s and the earliest 1930 s, but I did not really
go into them till 1934. I have told that in the spring of that year
I went on a lecture tour. It took me to the great industrial centers
of New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan,
Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, where the population
is preponderantly "foreign." Actually, however, my trip was not
so much a series of speaking engagements as an attempt a device
to get some clear idea, if possible, of this immense mass of so-
called "second-generation" citizens, numerically predominant in
some of the most important cities and towns, whom I choose to
designate the New Americans. I spoke, or rather tried to speak,
more or less on the subject of this chapter, to about fifty audi
ences of anywhere from one hundred to twenty-five hundred men
and women and young people, in big towns like Pittsburgh, Cleve
land, Akron, Detroit, Chicago, South Bend, Milwaukee, St. Paul,
and Duluth, and smaller communities like McKeesport, Canons-
burg, Ambridge, Farrell, Sharon, and Strabane, Pennsylvania; Lo-
rain, Ohio; Flint, Michigan; and Hibbing and Eveleth, Minnesota.
Some of my audiences were almost wholly "foreign," others mixed
"foreign" and old-stock American. At the time I knew very little
about the subject; I merely sensed its importance; and, to keep go
ing for an hour or so, I discussed things more or less akin to it
and at the end, admitting my ignorance, invited my listeners to
40 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
get up and say anything they liked in relation to my remarks.
Those who were too diffident to talk in a crowd, I asked to speak
to me after the lecture or call me at the hotel or write me a letter.
Many of them, both old-stock Americans and New Americans, re
sponded to this invitation. Some of them then asked me to their
homes. Others wrote me long letters. And the result was that be
fore my tour was half over I began to think that these New Ameri
cans twenty-six million of them in 1930 and increasing at the
rate of perhaps more than a million a year constituted one of the
greatest and most basic problems in this country; in some respects,
greater and more basic perhaps than, say, the problem of un
employment, and almost as urgent.
3. This problem has existed, in nearly the same proportions that it
exists today, for a long time, but few people have shown eagerness
and ability to deal with it in a broad, fundamental way, or even
to discuss it. Much attention most of it, as already suggested, ill-
focused has been paid to the problem of the foreign-born; but
not to that of their children, the American-born seconcT generation.
There is no acute or intelligent appreciation of it. Very little is
being done about it; and the longer it is neglected the worse it
will become, both for the New Americans and in the long run for
America as a whole.
4. In this chapter it is not my ambition to present the problem in
all its details, ramifications, significances, for it is a vastly compli
cated one and different in every locality and in every racial group;
and, frankly, I still have a great deal to learn about it. My purpose
here is merely to give as strong and broad a general suggestion
as I can of its character and what I think might be done concern
ing it.
5. The chief and most important fact (the only one I shall stress
here) about the New Americans is that all too many of them are
oppressed by feelings of inferiority in relation to their fellow-citi
zens of older stock, to the main stream of American life, and to
the problem of life as a whole; which, of course, is bad for them
as individuals, but, since there are so many of them and their
number is still rapidly increasing, even worse for the country.
6. These feelings of inferiority are to some degree extensions of
their parents feelings of inferiority as immigrants in a country so
INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 41
drastically different from their native lands. The fathers and
mothers of these millions of New Americans were naturally at a
disadvantage even in the most friendly surroundings, and the sur
roundings were seldom wholly and continually friendly. As for
eigners, in many cases not speaking the English language, they
occupied inferior positions in the country s social, economic, and
political life. Most of them were workers, performing, by and large,
the meanest tasks and receiving meager wages. All too often in one
form or another, they bumped up against racial or general anti-
immigrant prejudice. Old-stock American workers looked askance
at them. When work slackened, they were laid off, as I suggest in
the first chapter of this section, before native employees. Many of
them lived in the worst districts of their cities and towns, and were
called Hunkies or Bohunks, Squareheads, Dagoes or Wops, Polacks
or Litvaks, Sheenies or Kikes. They were frequently and unavoid
ably discriminated against. And in the face of all this, they in
evitably felt, as individuals and as members of their immigrant
groups, somewhat inferior in their relation to America and to other
people here, and their tendency was to segregate themselves and
mingle as much as possible only with their own nationals. And, just
as inevitable, that feeling and that tendency were extended to the
children, these New Americans, who shared their parents lives and
experiences, and who too were (and still are) called Hunkies and
Dagoes by children of Anglo-Saxon origin, and whose names
names like Zamblaoskas, Krmpotich, and Wojiezkowski were (and
are) subjects for jokes on the part of ignorant teachers, at which
the whole school laughed.
7. But in this respect the majority of New Americans, as individuals,
are in an even more unfortunate and uncomfortable position than
were (or still are) their immigrant parents. The latter, even if
they were uneducated peasants or laborers, living here on the
lowest social-economic levels, had in them a consciousness, or at
least a powerful instinctive feeling, of some kind of racial or cul
tural background. They knew who they were. They remembered
their native lands. They were Italians or Croatians, Finns or Slo
venians; and that meant something to them. Many came from coun
tries which culturally and perhaps in some other respects were
superior to the United States, which as a new country had not
42 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
yet had time to develop along those lines; and when oppressed by
feelings of inferiority induced by their circumstances in America,
could take partial refuge in their racial and cultural backgrounds.
Some of the better educated ones, who did not have merely in
stinctive feelings about the culture and history of their old coun
tries, but were also intellectually conscious of their heritage, could
even look clown upon America and consider themselves superior to
old-time Americans, thus counterbalancing or compensating them
selves as persons from time to time for the unpleasant feelings
about their immigrant status in the New World. This was unhealthy
socially in the long run, for it was not reaching out toward an
understanding with America, real or basic, but it did help indi
vidual immigrants to stand up as men and women.
8. Unlike their parents, who are (or were) aware not only of their
European background but of having made the transition from
Europe to America and gained a foothold here, most New Amer
icans have no consciousness or instinctive feeling of any racial or
cultural background, of their being part of any sort of continuity in
human or historic experience. Some of them seem almost as if
they had dropped off Mars and, during the drop, forgotten all
about Mars. I know this to be so; I talked to scores and scores
of them in more than a dozen different cities and towns, not only
during that tour in 1934, but on several occasions and in various
connections since then. In the majority of cases, the immigrant
parents uneducated working people or peasants from the vari
ous European countries were too inarticulate to tell their sons
and daughters who they (the parents) really were, and thus trans
mit to them some feeling or knowledge of their background.
9. The average Slavic peasant, for instance, who came to this coun
try during the last twenty or thirty years in nine chances out of
ten is unable to inform his children adequately who he is, what
his old country is like, what his background (which, ipso facto, is
his children s background) consists of. He tells his numerous sons
and daughters that he is a Pole, a Croatian, a Slovak, a Slovenian;
but that is about all. The children do not know what that really
means. The man acts as if he were proud of being what he is,
at least in the privacy of his home; for his instincts and his memo-
lies of the old country occasionally make him act that way. To
INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 43
his children, however, who are growing up under anything but
the best influences of American life and who do not know that
behind their father s pride is a rich and vital past, he very often
seems not a little ridiculous, certainly not worthy of their respect.
To them he is just a Hunky or Polack, a "working stiff," a poor,
pathetic creature constantly at somebody s mercy and repeatedly
stepped upon, and as such not much according to American stand
ards standards which they pick up in the movies and from
other powerful agencies in American life. Often they are half
ashamed of him. The immigrant mother frequently finds herself
in the same situation. There is a mutual lack of understanding;
the children as they grow older have begun to grasp at superficial
and obvious American realities, and sink themselves in America
as far as they can by adopting the easiest, most obvious ways of
the country of their birth. And the results arc unsatisfactory fam
ily life, personal tragedies of all sorts, maladjustments, social per
versities.
10. It is not unusual for boys and girls in their late or even their
middle teens to break away from the homes of their immigrant
parents, and eventually to repudiate entirely their origin and to
Anglicize their Polish, Croatian, Finnish, or Lithuanian names,
which old-time Americans find so difficult to pronounce and so
amusing. But that, of course, does not solve their problem. In most
instances it only makes it worse, though as a rule they do not
realize that. I met New Americans of this type; they were invari
ably hollow, absurd, objectionable persons.
11. However, the situation of many of those who do not break with
their parents, change their "foreign" names, and wholly repudiate
their origin is but little better than of those who do. They were
born here and legally, technically, are citizens of the United States;
but few even in the most fortunate homes have any strong
feeling that they belong here and are part of this country. For, by
and large, the education which is inflicted on them in public
schools and high schools and in parochial schools, or in colleges,
fails to make them Anglo-Saxon Americans or to give them any
vital and lasting appreciation of the American heritage, while their
Anglo-Saxon schoolmates, purposeful ly-by-accident stumbling over
their feet and calling them Hunkies and Dagoes, and their teachers,
44 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
making fun of their names, increase their feeling that they are not
indigenous Americans, but outsiders who are more or less tol
erated. Their instincts, if they have any, are at cross-purposes.
They are bewildered persons, constantly oppressed, as I have said,
by feelings of inferiority. Their personalities are faint, lopsided,
out of focus.
12. These feelings of inferiority manifest themselves variously. Some
of the New Americans turn themselves inside out and become
chauvinistically patriotic; only their chauvinism has no basis in
any vital feeling. It is insecure, empty, mere lip-service, intended
only to impress the dominant Anglo-Saxon element, with which
they have to cope; and hence worse for the development of their
own characters than chauvinism that has some basis in convic
tion or feeling in racial or national background. And where there
is any sincerity in this sort of "patriotism" it is based solely on
shallow materialistic concepts, which they have picked up in school
and elsewhere. "This is the greatest country . . . we have the big
gest buildings . . . the best ice cream . . . more automobiles,
more bathtubs than all the rest of the world," etc. Without realiz
ing it, these New Americans are ready for any sort of shallow,
ignorant nationalist or fascist movement which will not directly
attack the new racial strains in America s population; and thou
sands of them perhaps would have no great trouble in bringing
themselves to deny their parents, pose as old-stock Americans, and
serve even a movement which would terrorize the immigrants and
their children as the Hitler movement in Germany terrorized the
Jews.
13. Other New Americans turn their inferiority inside out in another
way. They become loud and tough, sometimes actively anti-social.
But let me hasten to repeat that this last group is not so numerous as
generally imagined by those who occasionally glance at crime and
the juvenile-delinquency statistics, or who read the headlines. The
surprising thing to me is that there is not more delinquency among
the New Americans. And I should add too that the chauvinists
mentioned above are not very numerous either. These categories
together include less than five per cent of the New Americans.
14. The majority of the grownup New Americans just hang back
from the main stream of life in this country, forming a tremendous
INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 45
mass of neutral, politically lifeless citizenry; while their younger,
fellow New Americans, boys and girls in their teens (about twelve
million of them), now in 1938 attending public and parochial
schools and high schools, show dangerous signs of becoming the
same kind of neutral, unstirring citizens unless something is done
about it. There is among them little aggressiveness, little spirit of
any sort. Most of them merely hope to get along, to get by, some
how. Without a vital sense of background, perennially oppressed
by the feeling that they are outsiders and thus inferior, they will
live outside the main stream of America s national life. This is
especially true of groups which linguistically and culturally are
farthest removed from the Anglo-Saxon, and still more of groups
which, besides being unrelated to the Anglo-Saxon, are (or till
lately have been) suppressed or subject nationalities in Europe.
15. And these widespread personal inferiority feelings are producing
in large sections of this New American element actual inferiority in
character, mind, and physique. There is no doubt, by and large,
in bodily and personal qualities many of the immigrants children
do not favorably compare with their parents. They cannot look one
in the eye. They are shy. They stutter and stammer. If an old-
stock American, or anyone of some standing, is due to come to
their house, they fuss and fret with their parents. They force their
peasant mothers to go to the hairdresser, to put on American ladies
dresses and high-heeled shoes which often make the mothers in
congruous figures. Then, when the visitor arrives, they tremble
at what the old lady or old man might say, or that he might mis
pronounce English words even worse than usually. Their limp
handshakes gave me creepy feelings all the way from New York
to the Iron Range in Minnesota. Those handshakes symbolized
for me the distressing tendency on the part of this vast and grow
ing section of America s population toward characterlessness, lack
of force and spirit, and other inferior personal qualities.
16. From whatever angle one looks at it, this is a serious matter for
the New Americans as individuals and for America. Thirty million
or even fifteen or twenty million, a probable number to which
most or all of my generalizations here are directly applicable
are a lot of people, and this "second generation" will be (many
already are) the fathers and mothers of the third generation, and
46 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
it is not impossible that in two or three decades half of the popu
lation of the United States will be of these new cultural and na
tional strains.
17. What then should be done what can be done about it?
18. In going about the country in 1934, and subsequently, I met
several New Americans of whom most of the things I say above
are not true. None of them was totally free of personal inferiority
feelings (in fact, I find that even very few old-stock Americans
are entirely free of them), but they were, nevertheless, fine-look
ing young men and women, boys and girls, keen and alert, ar
ticulate, ambitious, personally charming. Some were still in high
school, one or two in college, and doing well as students; in fact,
rather better than old-stock American students. Three or four of
the boys were locally prominent football and baseball players. 1
Their handshakes were firm and they looked me in the eye. A few
had a lively sense of humor which they could apply to themselves.
Their laughter had a healthy ring. They knew something of what
was going on in the country, in the world. Some of them", although
still very young, seemed to know what they wanted from life.
Two or three had literary ambitions. One told me he would try
to get into politics "in a big way," by which I understood that
the United States Senate was not beyond his gaze; and his name
was Wojciezkowski. Another, attending the University of Pitts
burgh, thought he would get a job in a steel mill and become a
labor leader. In a bleak iron town in Minnesota I met a pretty
girl of Slovenian parentage who was the best student in her school,
had a vivid personality, and seemed entirely normal in all her atti
tudes. And so on, and so on. They impressed me as real, solid per
sons who would be an asset to any country.
19. Nearly all of them, in their childhood and later, had been un
pleasantly affected by their parents humiliating experiences as
immigrants and industrial workers, and had had disagreeable ex
periences of their own which touched them vitally. They had been
called Hunkies, Polacks, Litvaks, Dagoes. Many of them had had
1 Athletes with "foreign" names, as generally known, are not unusual. But
most of them, in high schools and colleges as well as in more or less profes
sional sports, are New Americans who are exceptional in the sense as stated in
this and the ensuing few paragraphs.
INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 47
(and were still having) difficulties with their names. A young
man of Lithuanian parentage in Pittsburgh, and attending the
university there, who was attractive, "clean cut" in the best Ameri
can sense, but whose surname was Lamblagoskas, told me that
when he was a young boy in McKeesport the teacher had been
too lazy or too indifferent to take the trouble to pronounce his
name, so she had called him only Johnnie, while all the other
children in class had both a first name and a surname. Then the
two-name children had begun to call him "J ust Johnnie" or "John
nie the Litvak," which annoyed him very much. As in hundreds
of thousands of similar instances, this, in conjunction with other
experiences of that nature, produced in him an acute inferiority
complex which oppressed him for years "until," as he put it, "I
sort of worked myself out of it."
20. A young man of Slavic origin, whose surname also was difficult
for Anglo-Saxon tongues, told me that in his boyhood he had
suffered a great deal because old-stock American boys called him
"Sneeze-it," because in school one day the teacher had said that
his name could not be pronounced but thought that perhaps she
could sneeze it. "But now," he said to me, "things like that don t
bother me very much."
21. Others in this category with whom I came in contact had had
and were still having inevitably, let me repeat other troubles
on account of being immigrants children; but these troubles were
not seriously affecting them, were not preventing them from de
veloping into balanced, strong and healthy, charming human be
ings.
22. Why? There are at least two explanations. One is that most of
them lived, during at least part of their lives, in comparatively
favorable economic circumstances, and their parents managed to
give them some schooling in addition to the legal requirement,
which helped them more or less to work themselves out of their
various second-generation complexes. The other explanation (prob
ably not unrelated to, but I think more important than, the first)
is that, in all cases without exception which came to my atten
tion, their fathers and mothers were wise and articulate enough to
convey to them something of their backgrounds in the old countries;
tell them what it meant to be a Finn, a Slovenian, a Serbian, a
48 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
Croatian, a Slovak, a Czech, a Pole, or a Lithuanian, and inspire
in them some respect for that meaning; make them conscious of
their backgrounds and heritage, give them some sense of con
tinuity, some feeling of their being part of America, in which im
migrants like themselves played an important role part of some
thing bigger and better than the bleak, utterly depressing existence
led by them and their neighbors in the grimy steel mill and iron and
coal mining towns where they lived.
23. During my 1934 trip and later I met, as I say, scores of these
New Americans. Among them were some of the most attractive
people I have encountered anywhere. Some of these I already have
mentioned. Another was a girl born and still living in Cleveland
whose father and mother were Slovenians; and there is no doubt
in my mind that much of her charm issued from the fact that she
was keenly conscious of her parents native land and culture. Two
years before they had taken her on a visit to Slovenia, and she
had discovered a tiny country which is physically as lovely as
anything she had seen in America, with an old, mellotv culture,
a rich folklore, a considerable modern literature, and interesting
folkways behind which there are centuries of wisdom and a long,
unbroken chain of experience on the part of a quiet, peace-loving
little nation that has lived there for a thousand years.
24. Still another of these exceptional New Americans was a young
six-footer of Finnish parentage on the Iron Range in Minnesota.
He had never been to Finland, but knew a good deal about the
basic cultural qualities of that country from his mother s word-
pictures of it. He also had a fluent command of the Finnish lan
guage which did not interfere with indeed, enriched his Eng
lish. He knew dozens of Finnish folk ballads and lyrics and sang
them well, and had read and reread in the original the great Fin
nish epic poem "The Kalevala." He was quietly proud of his peo
ple s achievements on the Iron Range both in the mines and on
the land, and thought that Minnesota was his country. Despite
the bleakness of the region, and the hard life led there by most
of the people, especially the Finns, he loved the Iron Range. His
people had worked and suffered there for decades and converted
great parts of it into farming country, although before they came
nobody had thought it could ever be made suitable for anything.
INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 49
25. In short, he was conscious of his background; he had a sense of
continuity, of being part of a great human experience, which was
part of the still greater American adventure. Largely, I think, in
consequence of this, a strength of character was discernible in his
every move and utterance.
26. I could give several more such cases of exceptional New Ameri
cans, but that would be, in the main, repeating what I tell of the
girl in Cleveland and the boy in Minnesota. All of them repre
senting, however, but a small minority were conscious and, in
a greater or lesser degree, proud of their racial groups back
ground in the old countries, and some also of their racial groups
background and history in this country. They had a sense of con
tinuity, a feeling of being a part of something. And they, I think,
are the answer to the question: What should be done about the
problem sketched in this chapter?
27. The answer is that the New Americans, whose inarticulate and
otherwise inadequate through no fault of their own parents
have been unable to give them much along these lines, should be
helped to acquire a knowledge of, and pride in, their own herit
age and makeup; and this help should come, in very large part,
from already established and functioning social and cultural in
stitutions and agencies schools, libraries, settlement and com
munity houses, newspapers, lecture forums, and so on in co
operation with a central organization which should be formed for
the purpose of devising ways to disseminate information about
the several racial or national groups represented among the thirty
million "second generation" citizens, of studying the problem and
working out programs of action for its gradual solution or ameliora
tion, from the point of view of honest, intelligent concern for the
country s future.
28. By now it is obvious to many people interested in the problem
that it is impossible and, what is more, undesirable to make the
offspring of Lithuanians or Serbians into Anglo-Saxons; that the
aim should be rather to help them become real men and women
on the pattern of their own natural cultures. There should be recog
nition of the fact that America is not purely an Anglo-Saxon
country; if only by virtue of numbers, it is also something else.
A new conception of America is necessary. There is no doubt that
50 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS
in the few places where no attempts have been made by "patri
otic" old-time Americans to force immigrants children into the
old-stock American mold as, for instance, in the Bohemian com
munities in Nebraska and Texas, where Bohemians already are in
the fourth generation; in the little city of Hamtramck near Detroit,
where the public school system consistently encourages the large
Polish group there to keep its individuality; in O. E. Rolvaag s
Norwegian settlements in the northwest; in some of the foreign
"colonies" in New York City, notably the Ukrainian one on the
Lower East Side; or in several small Polish, Italian, and Finnish
rural communities in New England, upstate New York, and else
wherethe development of character, mentality, and physique in
the New American element has been vastly more felicitous than
where such attempts have been made.
29. Social and cultural institutions and agencies in various cities and
towns where the problem stares them all in the face wherever
they turn already are beginning to do things to help New Ameri
cans develop more or less on the pattern of their backgrounds.
To give a few examples: in Cleveland the excellent public li
brary organization, with its scores of branch libraries, has begun
to help the New Americans to learn something about themselves,
their parents native lands and their national groups* history in
this country, particularly in Cleveland. All three of the big news
papers there have special reporters covering the "foreign sections"
of the city, and print feature articles about the various foreign
groups contribution to the growth and development of Cleveland.
Public school and high school teachers in Cleveland, as in one or
two other cities, whose classes are anywhere from forty to eighty
per cent "foreign," are becoming eagerly interested in "second-
generation problems" which face them in the form of
