White has been a kind of national housekeeper and caretaker. He has gone on steadily and quietly, looking around and ahead, poking into public and domestic corners, defusing bombs, and brushing down cobwebs, caretaking whether anybody else cared or not (thousands cared that he cared); and hardly any literate American has not benefited from his humor, his nonsense, his creativity, and his engaging wisdom. White's readers can glean the astute observations and experiences of a dedicated denizen of megalopolis as well as of a sensible, serious dirt farmer living by an arm of the Atlantic Ocean down in Maine. White has managed to divide his time fruitfully between these two places, Manhattan and Maine. His concerns, however, are not merely tactile and local but ultimately transcendental. For the critical side of him is engaged with assessing the quality of life open to us in our time. He thus merits the title of philosopher although in no academic sense of the word.
Apart from his own unfaltering sophistication, White as critic of our national life can be seen as a logical descendant of a whole line of nineteenth century American humorists, beginning with Maine's Seba Smith, whose character Major Jack Downing reported the doings, first, of the state legislature and then of the Congress in Washington. White, in no sense clowning his coverage, did hover over and provide enlightening political analysis during the painful birthing of the United Nations in San Francisco, as well as subsequently in New York. In these writings, however, the humorist is not strongly in evidence but appears only in the vital personal flavor that eases the underlying didacticism without destroying the objective validity of his argument. In his commitment to freedom and his belief in the necessity of world federation, White is persuasive and convincing. He is likely to leave the reader feeling that the only hope for survival of the human race is a 'one world' government, though like every other political architect he cannot furnish a practical blueprint for overcoming the stumbling block of nationalism.
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