It was exactly one hundred years ago, January 10, 1921, that G.K. Chesterton first set foot on the American continent. His much anticipated arrival from England was a very big event. The press swarmed around him, as he stepped off the boat in New York to begin a four month lecture-tour. He said he had come “to lose my impressions of America.”
He made some striking observations of our country: one, we have an obsession with health that makes us miserable; two, our government doesn’t represent us; three, our journalists don’t tell the truth. As I say, striking.
He gave over 50 speeches in over 30 cities, all to sold-out, standing-room-only audiences, and he was always the headline when he came into town.
He famously quipped upon first seeing the lights on Broadway: “It would be very beautiful if only one couldn’t read.” He later said New York reminded him of hell, adding, “Pleasantly, of course.”
Overall he found the American people warm and welcoming. But he found all the bars closed and Americans very unhappy about it, yet feeling helpless to do anything to change the law that had closed them. The nation-wide law was, after all, based on concern for people’s health. We now refer to that law as Prohibition. Chesterton said that during his entire time in America he never found one person who spoke in favor of Prohibition. A century later bars are again closed, but liquor stores have been deemed more essential than churches.
In his recurring lecture, “The Perils of Health,” he argued that we think too much about health, and it has become morbid. Health fads, like all other fads, are hysterical, that is, both funny and manic. He quoted a comic song from the English stage that mocks the ludicrousness of certain sweeping health and safety regulations:
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He noted that we have abandoned the knowledge that comes from straightforward common sense in favor of “long-winded pseudo-scientific evasion.” He criticized those who spoke with great authority but vast stupidity, and one of the prime examples he gave – amazingly – was the scientific and political discussion about race. A century ago.
The ignorance of the education was especially evident in journalism, with newspapers doing a great deal to spread ignorance. “Being a journalist myself, I have talked and written all sorts of nonsense.” But his criticism of the press is that they tell deliberate lies with malice aforethought.
While “The Ignorance of the Educated” was a blast at the authorities who misrepresent the past (and the present), another ongoing lecture, “Shall We Abolish the Inevitable?”, was a blast against the authorities about the future. The former put too much faith in the Missing Link, the latter in the Superman. He urged people to be more skeptical about the historians and scientists – and theologians – who were fatalists. He rejected the doomsayers as much as the scientific utopians. Both were enemies of free will, which Chesterton defended above all. He said no two people in history did more harm than John Calvin and Karl Marx.
100th Anniversary of G.K. Chesterton’s first visit to America