In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

Industrialism's mood is tragic. In the early years, men's wonder gave to it the glamour of romance. Something of the delicious terror memorialized in "The Castle of Otranto" went to men's consideration of these new giants fleshed of iron and belching steam. But the monsters' bite was too hard; too dolorous was the displacement which they brought to good men's lives. These were no proper prodigies like the "Gothic," avenging merely wrongs and rescuing the noble. So the romantic mood grew swiftly dark. With the early socialists and anarchists, it took on the Doom note of prophecy. Zola made it tragic. In the muckraking days of our magazines, the tales of factory and mill were grey and ominous. They were, indeed, replicas of the infernos of our industrial towns. Laughter, like the hero-workman's little girl, languished and died in those swart caves whose breath was a blast and whose light was a sear of fire.

But as industrialism became more the usual circumstance, we began to react against it. And our reaction, having as its aim recovery, was comedic. That particular response to the grim industrial glower, which is the Comedy of Commerce, has found perfection in America. In England, the monsters' bite has been too cruel. There are no spirits left, there is no energy, for the recovering laugh. In the Latin countries, the monsters' sway is not bitter enough as yet to have provoked a systematic answer. (There are signs of it in France.) In Germany, as soon as industrialism flourished, the Teuton genius turned not to a balance of frolic or of smiles, but to an ideal compensation. The machine was drafted by neo-Hegelian argument into the soldierly service of Kultur. In America, we had no such metaphysical bent. The best we could do with our industrial tragedy was to cover it up with a surface, coruscating and comedic.