In Washington I met a new kind of American, a type that has sprung up
suddenly like an evil toadstool. It is a fungous disease that spreads.
Some hangs from old American stock, some dangles from recent plantings,
all of it is snobbish and offensive. It wears foreign clothes and
affects foreign ways, sometimes even foreign accents. It chops and
mumbles its words like English servants who speak their language badly.
Some of this is acquired at fashionable finishing schools or from
foreign secretaries and servants. These new Americans try to appear
superior and distinctive by scorning all things American. They want
English chintzes in their homes, French brocades and Italian silks and
do not even know that some of these very textiles from America have won
prizes in Europe since 1912. An American manufacturer told me he has to
stamp his cretonne "English style print" to sell it in this country.


This new species of American apes royalty. It goes in for crests. It
may have made its money in gum shoes or chewing tobacco, but it hires a
genealogist to dig up a shield. Fine, if you are entitled to a crest.
But fake genealogists will cook up a coat for the price.

There are crests on the motor-cars, crests on the stationery, on the
silver, the toilet articles--there are sometimes even crests on the
servants' buttons and on linen and underclothes!

Fake crests are the first step down, and like all lies they lead to
other lies. The next step is ancestors.

Selling and painting ancestors is another business which thrives around
New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. And the public swallows it.
They swallow each other's ancestors. Even old families take these new