America makes the world think of wealth and power, but it also makes the world think of childish behavior. A certain juvenile tendency cuts across political categories. On the left, for example, when Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election, some of his supporters apparently believed they would no longer have to pay rent. It’s as if they expected Santa Claus to come racing in on his sled during a snowstorm and give them all that they had wanted for Christmas.
On the right, after America bombed the Iranian nuclear facilities in June, Trump posted a short video on his Truth Social account showing B-2 stealth bombers in action—to the tune of the 1980s hit song “Bomb Iran.” “Not very Presidential,” one European critic said. In another case, after the “No Kings” protests, Trump posted a video of himself flying a make-believe jet, wearing a make-believe crown, and bombing protestors with, to use the juvenile term, make-believe “poop.” If Mamdani’s supporters seem infantile, the President himself talks like a child.
Given how precocious, even jaded, many American children are, one might say the country’s children are like adults, and its adults are like children. This perversion of nature might not matter if it afflicted any other country. Despite Trump’s antics, though, America remains the leader of the free world and still responsible for world order. Serious and well-informed people shiver.
Yet foreign observers, some of them great writers, show us that such childish behavior has been characteristically American for a long time. In 1931, in his memoir A Private Universe, French novelist André Maurois said of America: “America is a precocious child, whose boldness and dexterity have made one forget its age. She is like one of those adolescent heirs to a great fortune, to whom the elders grudgingly grant a place in the family councils. She holds a majority of the Human Race company stock, but her youthfulness is terrifying.” Maurois wrote this more teasingly and lovingly than in anger or fear. Americans were simply fun to watch, in the same way it is fun to watch children get excited when they open up their Christmas presents or catalogue their Halloween candy.
Apparently frivolous holiday analogies point toward a deeper insight. Serious people often ascribe pernicious motives to Americans pushing their new products on other countries. They call it America’s way of gloating, or of undermining another country’s local industries, paving the way for colonization or the spread of soft power. They forget the simplest and most straightforward explanation: as on Christmas morning, Americans are simply children excited by their new toys and eager to share them with others. The English novelist John Buchan, best known for his spy thrillers, writing in his 1940 memoir Memory Hold the Door, said of the Americans, “They rejoice in showing their marvels with the gusto of children exhibiting their toys to a stranger, an innocent desire, without any unfriendly gloating, to make others partakers in their satisfaction.” What looks like bullying can actually be a form of generosity.
As for the candy analogy, Americans have always enjoyed the childlike pleasure of taking the measure of things. Rather than say, “That new stadium is a big stadium,” Americans will boast, “That new stadium is a big stadium that can seat 50,000 people!” Rather than say, “Spend time with someone to make a friend,” they will declare, as in one recent WSJ article, “It takes at least 200 hours” to make a friend.
The English novelist G.K. Chesterton wrote in What I Saw in America that the American, “quite apart from any love of money, has a great love of measurement. He will mention the exact size or weight of things, in a way that appears to us [the British] as irrelevant.” Put slightly differently, Americans exude the spirit of children who feverishly catalogue their Halloween treats by number, color, or flavor. They find the urge to measure, classify, and estimate everything pleasurable and satisfying. “There is something about this precision [that] corresponds to the passionate particularity with which a boy will distinguish the uniforms of regiments, the rigs of ships, or even the colors of tram tickets,” Chesterton wrote.
Complaining about America’s childishness leads nowhere, and worry over the matter unnecessarily breeds more worry. Such complaining deprives one of being able to laugh. Besides, childishness is an immutable characteristic of America, one that expresses itself in a variety of forms, with each form, in turn, sometimes an immutable characteristic of its own. For example, Europeans who encountered American GIs in the Second World War were astonished by how young they seemed, always chewing bubble gum and reading comic books. As for the first observation, Americans have long been observed to be a chewing people. Russian humorists Ilf and Petrov wrote in the 1930s, “They chew gum, candy, the ends of cigars; their jaws are always moving, clicking, and snapping.” As for the American love of comic books, these same authors said this about Hollywood movies (“pictures”), which were little more than glorified comic books: “All these pictures are below the level of human dignity. It seems to us that it is degrading for a human being to look at such pictures. They are designed for birds’ brains.”
To this day, Americans chew gum and candy while watching senseless movies, and do so for years on end. We are a chewing people and a senseless people as well as a childish people, it seems! And yet those GIs did the necessary on D-Day and in the battles that followed, liberating Western Europe and saving the Free World. Apparently, American childishness, although an embarrassment to some, is no great hindrance when it comes to accomplishing the really important things.
Any interpretation of American childishness depends on the initial position one takes. As litigants, we can always be pleading against ourselves; we can always find serious reasons to criticize some of the inane behavior of our citizens and leaders. But we can also plead for ourselves, and find reasons to smile and shake our heads when confronted with the buffoonery, if we decide to take that road.
I have often noticed that it is through habit and somewhat through politeness that people complain about American childishness. Yet when reading the great novelists, we don’t have to imagine ourselves putting up with the childishness, or enduring it, as with a toothache. We can just grin and say: “Oh, well, that’s America.” This will have no effect on the childish behavior itself, but we will feel better for it.
This post is an installment of American Crazy, a series of posts devoted to literary depictions of American national character.
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