Americans in troubled times

 In times when the country is deeply troubled, it helps to read of earlier times, when the country was deeply troubled too.

E.B. White described an air raid drill about 1950. The atom bomb was new and real, and so 8 million New Yorkers took cover. The staff of The New Yorker was to descend from the 19^th floor to the 10^th, although no one knew why the 10^th was safer. One took precautions without thinking about why one was any better than another.

A mathematically inclined person would think it was a descent of nine floors, but it was eight. There was no 13^th floor.

White thought that was the problem: Scientists had delved into the atom before the rest of society was ready to “look the number 13 square in the face.” He wrote:

 

The papers reported that millions of dollars in manpower were lost by the quiescence of eight million persons. For fifteen minutes wealth ran down the drain. This, like the missing thirteenth floor, was a mathematical enigma that stops us cold. What happened, exactly? Who lost what? How can anyone say for sure that millions of dollars were lost? Probably the dollars, like the people, were not lost — just deeply troubled.

 

One on one, Americans are thoughtful, reasonable people. Get them in a group, and they are not. The larger the group, the less reasonable Americans are likely to be. A seminar tests sanity. A townhall meeting goes beyond the frontiers.

Consider Americans as a whole, as a society, and you must resort to stretched metaphors and colorful slang.

It’s somehow comforting to realize that Americans have been like that since before I was born.

• E.B. White’s essay “Air Raid Drill” originally appeared in The New Yorker and was collected in The Second Tree from the Corner; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951. I found it in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 552-4.