Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience - 2. American Nationalism - 3. Some Historical Reflections
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
6 An American Dilemma
being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the bar-
riers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders
which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being
of any and every class. And that dream has been realized more fully in actual life here
than anywhere else, though very imperfectly even among ourselves.®
This is what the Western frontier country could say to the "East.” And
even the skeptic cannot help feeling that, perhaps, this youthful exuberant
America has the destiny to do for the whole Old World what the frontier
did to the old colonies. American nationalism is fermeated hy the American
Creedy and therefore becomes international in its essenccw
3. Some Historical Reflections
It is remarkable that a vast democracy with so many cultural disparities
has been able to reach this unanimity of ideals and to elevate them
supremely over the threshold of popular perception. Totalitarian fascism
and nazism have not in their own countries—at least not in the short range
of their present rule—succeeded in accomplishing a similar result, in spite
of the fact that those governments, after having subdued the principal
precepts most akin to the American Creed, have attempted to coerce the
minds of their people by means of a centrally controlled, ruthless, and
scientifically contrived apparatus of propaganda and violence.
There are more things to be wondered about. The disparity of national
origin, language, religion, and culture, during the long era of mass immi-
gration into the United States, has been closely correlated with income
differences and social class distinctions. Successive vintages of "Old Amer-
icans” have owned the country and held the dominant political powers they
have often despised and exploited "the foreigners.” To this extent condi-
tions in America must be said to have been particularly favorable to the
stratification of a rigid class society.
But it has not come to be. On the question of why the trend took the
other course, the historians, from Turner on, point to the free land and
the boundless resources. The persistent drive from the Western frontier
—
now and then swelling into great tides as in the Jeffersonian movement
around 1800, the Jacksonian movement a generation later, and the succes-
sive third-party movements and breaks in the traditional parties—could,
however, reach its historical potency only because of the fact that America,
from the Revolution onward, had an equalitarian creed as a going national
ethos. The economic determinants and the force of the ideals can be shown
to be interrelated. But the latter should not be relegated to merely a
dependent variable. Vernon L. Farrington, the great historian of the devel-
opment of the American mind, writes thus:
The humanitarian idealism of the Declaration [of Independence] has always
echoed as a battle-cry in the hearts of those who dream of an America dedicated to
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
