Wealth & Money Quote by James Weldon Johnson

Johnson delivers the line with a diplomat-poet's scalpel: praise that immediately curdles into a critique of how nations price affection. The opening clause sounds like a travel writer's pleasantry, then he snaps it into a comparative experiment. If money were the whole story, London would adore Americans too. It doesn't. So the joke is also a diagnosis: "popularity" can be cultural, aesthetic, even eroticized, while "toleration" is transactional and faintly resentful.

The subtext is about the social chemistry of empire. Paris, still nursing its self-image as capital of taste, can metabolize the American tourist as a kind of flattering audience - loud, rich, hungry for culture, and therefore useful to French prestige. London's posture reads colder: an imperial metropolis treating outsiders, even affluent ones, as necessary irritants. Johnson's final jab, "merely tolerated because they do spend", has the bite of someone who has watched politeness operate like a tariff.

Context matters: Johnson was a Black American intellectual moving through European capitals in an era when American democracy advertised itself abroad while practicing segregation at home. That tension sharpens the observation. He's not just counting smiles in cafes; he's measuring the difference between being welcomed and being endured. The line works because it refuses the comforting idea that wealth buys belonging. It can buy service. It can't always buy warmth - and when it does, you should ask what else is being purchased.