“Interim America” is Rosenstock-Huessy’s name for the American order during the period between 1890-1940. This is an “interim” because it is not a stable order, but a transition between the old and the new. This interim period is ordered by the suburb, the factory, the highway, and the loss of a sense of sin. He describes interim America thus: “The Interim America of 1890 to 1942 saw the Church recede into the suburbs. The ministry, thereupon, disintegrated into humanitarians, social works, pacifists. The individual cannot be blamed. Social conditions made the Churches unreal. They no longer stood at the center of the cross of a man’s life, but stood on the side of private leisure.”
Suburban life, ERH argues, is “unreal because it shuns pain and conflict.” Suburbs are racially, socially, economically uniform, and thus the suburb does not have the social tensions characteristic of most social organizations. The suburb also excludes the basic transitions of life – birth and death – pushing both off into clinical settings. No one is born, or dies, in the suburbs. Birth is the on place where “we ever experience the law of creation,” the law that creation comes through travail. Suburbanites are never allowed to learn this truth. Suburban life is “prudent, kind, barren,” and has a “mentality” instead of a “soul”: “Mentality is what is left of the soul when you subtract the crucifying experiences that bear fruit in more energetic and vital human relationships. Mentality knows nothing of jubilant joy and black despair, of yelling and cursing, moaning and groaning, shouting and dancing and weeping and singing.” As a result, suburban speech becomes mere “verbiage”: “Its mentality emasculates the Word.” Speech cannot be effective and real unless it arises from the Cross, and suburbanites deliberately eliminate the Cross.
The paradox of suburban life is that it provides “too much peace” externally while giving “little peace” within. Try as they might, suburbanites cannot eliminate the cross, and because suburbia “makes it indecent to share the agonies of our souls” it “puts a burden on the individual which he is far too weak to bear.” Human beings are able to bear the cross only by uniting with each other, and “neurosis and nervous breakdown flourish in the suburb for lack of a fellowship based on the deeper urgencies and passions.” Suburban man is fearful of extremes, so he “plays safe, adopts a minimum attitude.” This is the “philosophy of adjustment, of golden mediocrity,” and it means that life has “no real excitement, no real devotion, no real fight, no real love.” This can be healed only if the heart yields “itself with singleness of purpose to its trust in the fellowship of mankind, else it will remain split and alone.” Suburban man has deliberately forgotten that “being torn is a human privilege,” and therefore cannot find his real redemption. He is in danger, as a result, of seeking totality in some political power that promises “unity, fixity, and security.” Suburbanites risk becoming Nazis.
The economic form of interim America centers on the factory, which robs work and business of inspiration. Factories treat men as another natural resource, providing physical energy to produce goods. The “man in a factory is treated virtually like an inanimate object. He is no longer a person but a function, a replaceable cog in a machine.” Workers work together, but they don’t form a unit in the way a football team or army regiment do; rather, their identity is “the identity of drops of water in an unending stream of work which is done day and night.” A factory is “not a human habitation”; it is a house for “Nature” with a capital-N, treating “man as a part of a force and as part of material” to be “laid on” and “laid off” like switches or steam. As part of Nature, a man is a Self – nothing but an atom of humanity, not a father, son, brother, husband, but only a self. Homes, by contrast, “drown self” in a myriad of roles. The combination of suburb and factory thus creates a split in the personality of a modern American: He is a family man in the suburb, but only an element of the labor force in the factory. In sum, the man in the factory is “soulless.”
In a factory system, work no longer is linked to the development of character and soul. People change jobs rapidly and repeatedly throughout a career, and so their work is never “something through which his whole personality can ripen and take shape.” Factory-economies tend to weaken loyalties across the board, as they weaken loyalties to the particular workplace. The result is that “personality is dwarfed,” as mena re isolated from one another: “Nobody can become a person in a void, but only in relations with other people.”
Perhaps the most significant criticism of the factory system is that it destroys the temporal rhythm of life. We are “obsessed with speed at all costs,” and this gives a “rootless, rhythmless quality” to our lives. Modern man is impatient, and wants to find a solution to all our problems now. ERH is not so naïve to think that the factory system can or ought to be dismantled: “I would consider it insanity to abandon ways of life which have proved efficient.” He is, however, “interested in the price of this achievement.” Instead, he issues a challenge “to find constructive ways of overcoming the sterile divorce of labor and leisure, and of mastering the sequence of changes which industrial society makes inevitable in every individual life.”
ERH says that the “special problem” of this man who lives between factory and suburb is “the fact that he is expected to speak two languages” and to live between names and namelessness: “Here is a human being who is full of names half of the time, and void of names during the other half.” Where is the unity of this man? ERH proposes to find this unity in “the rudimentary situation in which he is neither suburban nor factorial, and yet know both situations as waiting for him.” The real man who is attempting to discover his deepest identity is the man commuting between home and office, office and home. ERH finds it interesting that modern literature pays more and more attention to the commuter, and, borrowing from one such novel, suggests that the “full-sized person . . . can only be met where he feels condescension for his smaller selves.” That is to say, the commuter alone on the highway, who moves from home to office with a feeling of lowering himself, and from office to home with a feeling of lowering himself. The true soul of modern man “cannot become articulate unless it is met on the highway.” Only here is he “neither suburban nor official,” and only here is he cleansed of the “qualities which make him small.” To see the man in full, we must seem him neither reduced to a cog by the factory nor reduced to passionless prudence in the suburb.
ERH unpacks this point in part with a discussion of curses. Society today shuns cursing, but ERH sees the ability to curse as a sign of greatness of soul: “He who will not curse the shortcomings of his procession as a lawyer, a teacher, a doctor, a priest, always will have to defend it beyond the health of his soul. The doctor who defends medicine as it is today, against all outside criticism, and nowhere bands together unselfishly with those same critics, must do harm to his soul.” On the highway, between the office and hom e, t he doctor knows better; he knows something is wrong with the world, and recognizes “the hell of mere functioning.” The soul on the highway, therefore, is a soul in “search of groups where people in the world of the cosmos . . . gather so that the chaos, the darkness, and the confusion may die down within them.” Souls that gather to admit the chaos and darkness “put an end to them.” Without this, we are condemned to perpetual social chaos: “The social chaos cannot become cosmos unless man takes this chaos upon his own mind as his own mental chaos, unless he drops his mask of academic observer and his pride of mental self-sufficiency, usually called objectivity.”
Christianity addresses this situation as “essentially war in peace: it distributes the bloody sacrifices of the battlefront by an even but perpetual spread of sacrifices through the whole fabric of life.” Christianity make daily war instead of world wars, particularly a daily war against indolence. Only those who have been torn by this kind of daily sacrifice can make a future. The church of “extra ecclesia nulla salus” lost confidence in the early modern period. Instead, the church of today and tomorrow must “remember that Extra crucem nulla ecclesia: Outside the Cross, there is no Church.”
ERH anticipates the objection: Why preach the Cross in a world without sin? Sin does evaporate in a world where no actions or words are taken seriously: “The great name of sin rests on the assumption that I can act and that it matters what I say.” But now my actions are no longer mine, and my words are not important. Sin has “become collective,” as the groups to which a man belongs become sinners for him and as he and his wife “fall victim to all the drives in the community.” This “new nature of sin saps our vitality and dwarfs uys. It destroys our true nature.”
The factory and the suburb are facts, but they don’t determine the character of the future. Futures are always breaks with the past, struggles against trends. The future has to be created.
More specifically, he sees interim America as a period in which we have “seceded from our Christian era.” This is the “interim” because “people seceded from the fundamentals without putting anything in their place. Unless we recognize this interim as a secession we shall have neither the desire nor the power to return to our era.” Without this return, “we are bound to kill each other by word and deed. Our peace will depend on our common goal.” The secession was not ignorance; “We had reason to secede from the era.” The reason was that the beginning of suburb and factory made Christianity into a “mere set-up,” which “nobody can worship.” The church became old, and any future requires the church to rise again to new life.
Why does the Christian “set-up” from the past no longer work? Suburban life “makes every girl an image of the Arts, and the factory every body an image of the Sciences.” This departs from the post-Reformation concentration on Church and State. The “Christian Reform asked the members of the family to be mothers and fathers first of all, the modern stress is on boys and girls, men and women. Church and state thought of us as parents and children; the Arts and Sciences think of us as individuals.” ERH goes into some detail explaining how the Reformation and Counter-Reformation made the family into a spiritual unit and how it freed people children from following the profession of their fathers.
In our day, suburb and factory have combined to weaken the Christian household of the Reformation: “The whole realm of moral freedom, which balanced the outer realm of law, has given way to the hard laws of the industrial system. Man no longer earns his living in a private vocation but in an industrial function. The household is no longer an economic unit: the modern individual no longer ripens into a person through household responsibility; work and worship are divorced.” Labor is divorced from teaching, and the State “threatens to become an all-engulfing leviathan.” The individual formed by Protestantism is no longer viable since “its economic foundations in reality have crumbled.” Thus, the specifically post-Reformation Christian set-up has become obsolete. Secession from the Christian era was understandable under the circumstances. But, ERH asks, at what cost? The seceders “gave a horrible answer to a terrible dilemma. Granted the dilemma, they still became deserters. And they tried to make the upholstery of the suburb so thick that the rumbling of war and revolution could not be heard through the velvet curtains, the carpets and rugs of progressive education.”
Post-Reformation Christianity is over; but secession has not worked. What ERH opens is the possibility for a renewal of the Christian era, a Christian future.