The Unrest of the American Dollar
A 1880 editorial from the Seattle Intelligencer examines the nation's obsession with wealth accumulation and its hidden costs to the soul of a young nation.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
It is a stock remark that Americans love the dollar. The saying misses the point; the real point is not that Americans love money more than other people, but that they love comparatively few things beside money. We have fewer objects of serious pursuit than other Western nations have; we do not, as a rule, pursue the fine arts, or literature, or scholarship, or society with the zeal or the fruitfulness that we find in European communities. It is the exclusiveness, not the zeal, of our pursuit of money that is to be regretted. We seek money, and we find it; yet do we love it either well or intelligently enough to use it fruitfully, to keep it safely, or to bequeath it wisely? Daily, the sun rises upon the American people to see an addition of $2,300,000 to the wealth of the republic. These are figures to make a poor man expect wealth; but let us hasten to say that they do not prove us any happier, or wiser, or more estimable in the eyes of the world, than many another poorer nation is. We have been busied with necessary things; in great and admirable things, our record is still, for the most part, to be made.
“It is the exclusiveness, not the zeal, of our pursuit of money that is to be regretted.”
Writing in 1880, the author captures an early iteration of the American 'hustle culture' that dominates modern Seattle. As the city grapples with the fallout of being a global hub for immense wealth, the question of whether we are using our prosperity 'fruitfully' remains as urgent today as it was in the era of the gold rush.
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