Harold Edmund Stearns
Harold Edmund Stearns was known as a prolific critic, journalist, editor and essayist during the 1920's and 1930's. He was a member of the American expatriate group in Paris along with other notable exiles such as Ernest Hemingway, Elliot Paul, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Glenway Wescott, John Dos Passos and Robert Coates. It was also Stearns who encouraged New York publisher Horace Liveright to publish Hemingway's In Our Time. For many chroniclers of the era, Stearns was the quintessential expatriate - a symbol of the 'exile' period in American literature.
However, Stearns was also referred to by his intimates as a "picturesque ruin" for what he had left behind him in America was "the broken promise of a brilliant career—essays in The New Republic, editorship of The Dial, and his famous iconoclastic symposium 'Civilization in the United States'."
Eventually, Stearns fell victim to alcohol and gambling whilst attempting to forge a career in Paris. His perpetual lack of funds and habit of borrowing money from friends made him quite infamous; so much so, that Ernest Hemingway used him as a model for the indigent Harvey Stone in his novel The Sun Also Rises.
In 1932 he returned to New York, his passage paid for by charity and friends. He went on to publish two reappraisals of the United States, Rediscovering America (1934) and America, a Reappraisal (1937), a complete volte-face from his earlier symposium.
“We are homeless enough in this world under the best of circumstances without going to any special effort to test our capacity to be more so.”
“The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in the individual – faith that he can be persuaded by rational means to beliefs compatible with social good.”
“Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.”
“When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate?”
“Our morality system has become a mechanical device for protecting us against ourselves; it is the handiwork of terror.”