The Validity of American Ideals
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE VI AMERICANISM AS AN IDEAL We have thus far been considering ideals which are particularly associated with our national development. But these are by no means all that America represents. America itself is an ideal. To attempt to define it, to analyze its elements is almost to destroy its power. In many an immigrant mind the United States is a synonym for the Golden Grail?a deliverance from all subjection, a pledge of peace and plenty. It requires no cynic to point out that the America of actual fact is something very different from this dream, and yet we should be immeasurably poorer if we were content to say the America of to-day is the true America of our hopes. We admit our crudities, our materialism, our bombastic patriotism and all those other evil qualities which the foreign observer so read
...ily discovers. But we deny that the true America can be known fully from the existing America. We look back across three centuries and see an uninhabited continent receiving a few thousand adventurous souls who sought to tame it into a home land. Across these centuries of development we chart our national development. If growth had stopped, if our present civilization were fastened on us, if the leaven of hope and creative zeal were not yet within our hearts, we might well feel America deserves the criticism to which she has of late been so pitilessly exposed. But still feeling the creative urge, still believing that America is in the making, we demand of our critics that they add this sense of the future to the present they find so unsatisfactory. For there still lies in our minds the promise of a better social order. The past with its rapid development is a promise of a future that shall also see development. America is still becoming. But what is it to become ? Is to-mor...
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