Hence [a man] is never so inadequate as when he is universal; he is never so limited as when he generalizes.

In contrast to the sentiment above, quoted from G. K. Chesterton’s What I Saw in America, Chesterton himself was never so inadequate as when he specialized. His great gift was for recognizing the universal principles – when it came to the simple facts before him, whether of history or politics, he was frequently wildly mistaken. As a thinker, he was far-sighted.

Chesterton wrote What I Saw in America in 1922, in the aftermath of a lecture tour to America. He’s almost apologetic about doing so – every Englishman who visits the United States, he says, is expected to write such a book, and he doesn’t want to disappoint his audience – though he’s not sure he has anything of great importance to say.

And, to some extent, I’d agree with that judgment. What I Saw in America is (in my view) one of Chesterton’s most dismal works, marred by his utter blindness (except in certain areas) to the signs of the times.

At the beginning, however, he does himself proud by penning a line that has become proverbial: “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.” There are those who take issue with that idea, but I still think it’s mostly true. He chuckles over the entrance form he had to fill out at Customs, where he had to swear he was not an anarchist or plotting the overthrow of the country. Such questions seemed bizarre to an Englishman, but he goes on to dig deeper and points out that America is likely to have a Turk applying to immigrate, something improbable in England. (Those were different times indeed!)

He waxes lyrical on the subject of America’s millions of wooden houses. Wooden houses were a rarity in England, but he saw them as a product of American expansion and upward social mobility.

He is, of course, offended by the Prohibition laws. He is confident (and his experience bears it out) that those laws only apply to the poor. He blames that situation, as is his wont, on the great capitalists – who are, of course, the Jews. (Interestingly, he blames both capitalism and communism on the Jews. I get the sense that because he attributes such power and genius to them, he cannot imagine how anyone could call him antisemitic.)

The book seemed long to me, and full of misconceptions. However, he redeems himself with an excellent final chapter describing how it required Christianity, not any doctrine of evolutionary human progress, to end slavery: “There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”

Chesterton is never dull, but he can be annoying. There was a lot of annoyance involved in reading What I Saw in America. But there were rewards as well.