OK, Tocqueville Was Prescient--But So Specific?

Workmen demolishing a French hand laundry in the ancient quarter of Los Angeles have recently made an astonishing find: Mis placed 160 years ago, along with two blouses and a nightshirt, a thick packet of handwritten notes--further pungent, prescient insights on America as the visiting French sage Alexis De Tocqueville saw it. But obviously we didn’t realize just how prescient he was. Here, as a July 4th gift to the Nation that Tocqueville alternately admired and abhorred, some highlights from this discovery:

On Grooming:

All out of sorts today. I can do nothing with my hair after the chopping it was given in the hotel tonsorial parlor; American barbers are better named Barbarians. I am told that all men of affairs in America send for a European man who plies his trade in the hills of Beverly, and gladly pay him 500 Francs ($200 in 1993 U.S. dollars - Ed.), only to be nicely trimmed. I shall summon him when I arrive at Los Angeles.

On Sport:

To the Chicago Abbatoir today. Mark me: If a Bull could bounce a Ball, all America would come out to see it, then make riot afterward.

On Names:

The American etiquette with names is preposterous. If my experience today at the town chop house be a harbinger--and I think it so to be--soon they will be calling their President by his last name, and their waiter by his first!

On the Social Compact:

En Train today for the Western Territories. Not one aphorism came to me, in the concatenation of people shooting Buffalo from the open windows. A century hence, should this continue, no American will wear a coat of animal fur, but every American will carry a musket.

On Transportation:

The town of South Bend has a fine Cathedral of Notre Dame. I was shown the Studebaker Bros. Wagon Works nearby. Such large and clumsy things! Would the Government but lift the Tariffs, I think that Americans would most surely flock to the little and well-made caliches that one sees everywhere in Japan.

On Entertainment:

The Americans have a democratic taste, even in the matter of plays and actors. Flowery verse and the flummery and artifice of our Parisian productions would go over as well as the Montgolfiers’ balloon, lead-filled. I could bring here a bemuscled farm lad from the Austrian hinterlands and only have him leap and jump about, and the Bijou gallery would crown him King of Thespians.

On the Theater:

Mr. Bagnell of the Lyric Theater, one of New York’s ornaments, kindly gave me supper tonight after the play. He offered from his generous heart to grant my dearest wish. “I want for nothing in material things,” I replied. “But I always wanted to direct.”