Politics & Power Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein catches America in the act of smiling with its hand on the lock. The sentence itself performs the contradiction it names: a breathless chain of clauses, no polite pause for resolution, as if the speaker keeps circling the same baffling fact because there is no clean way to reconcile it. Friendly, suspicious; suspicious, friendly. The repetition isn’t redundancy so much as a pressure test, pushing the reader to feel how these traits coexist without synthesis.

The subtext is less about individual temperament than national style. American friendliness is often transactional and forward-facing: the customer-service grin, the quick first-name basis, the social ease that reads as openness. Suspicion runs underneath as a kind of civic muscle memory, a culture built on self-reliance, private property, and the idea that trust must be earned, not granted. Stein’s “foreigner” is the mirror that makes the oddity visible. Outsiders expect friendliness to signal safety, or suspicion to signal coldness; Americans scramble that code, producing a social static that “upsets” because it refuses the foreigner’s interpretive habits.

Context matters: Stein is an expatriate modernist watching the U.S. from abroad, attuned to how national character becomes legible only at a distance. Her tone isn’t moralizing; it’s diagnostic, amused and exasperated. The final “but they just are” lands like a shrug at the end of an argument with reality. It’s also a sly warning: don’t over-psychologize this. In America, warmth can be a boundary, and suspicion can be a form of participation. The contradiction isn’t a bug; it’s the operating system.