Transcriber's Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.
What's What
in
America
BY
Eugene V. Brewster
EDITOR OF
Motion Picture Magazine, Motion Picture
Classic and Shadowland
The Wm. G. Hewitt Press
61-67 Navy Street
Brooklyn, N. Y.
COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY
EUGENE V. BREWSTER
THE WILLIAM G. HEWITT PRESS, 61-67 NAVY STREET, BROOKLYN, N. Y.
Preface
America is a heterogeneous conglomeration of humans comprising ahomogeneity. They are all alike, yet they are unalike. All corners ofthe earth have contributed in the making, yet the one hundred millionshave all been blended together into the huge melting pot and we callthem Americans. They were attracted to "the land of the free" and remainhere because no other country offers such prizes and such liberty. Allare engaged in a wild scramble for fame and fortune, yet they are sadlydisorganized. While they have their labor unions, churches, colleges,societies, and cults galore, and while they have their governments(city, county, state and national), and while the more successful ones(capitalists) have their organizations (trusts, monopolies and bankinginstitutions), there is no organization of the whole. Nobody seems totake into account the tremendously important fact that all men and allindustries are now interdependent, and that therefore they must all beorganized into one organization.
One of the most marvellous things in America is the fact that we are sounorganized that at any [Pg 2]moment the whole nation may be tied up andbound hand and foot by strikes. Any morning we may wake up and find thenation paralized. Labor is becoming so organized that all industries areat its mercy. The cost of living continues to rise, and we are powerlessto prevent profiteers from monopolizing our products and making pricesto suit themselves. We have no way to make people work if they don'twant to, even if we starve. Under our present laws we cannot preventstrikes and walk-outs, even if we perish. There is nothing to prevent afew men from cornering the market on all commodities and paralizing thenation's industries.
And yet there is a remedy, and a simple one.
Free thought reigns supreme in America, and the national mind andcharacter have been moulded in a remarkably liberal manner.
A nation that embraces a multitude of believers in such theories asphrenology, Christian Science, osteopathy, astrology, spiritism, etc.,and which adopts these and other fads as religions, must indeed be anover-credulous if not a fanatical one. Some of these isms and ologieshave been dissected and analyzed in the following pages, and theselittle essays have been inserted parenthetically, as it were. They tendto prove that Barnum was right when he said, "The American public lovesto be humbugged."
Here in America, not so many years ago, we were burning people at thestake and punishing innocent persons for witchcraft. Still later some ofour best people were holding converse with departed spirits who wereotherwise busying themselves with [Pg 3]upsetting tabl