In 1893, when Grover Cleveland was in the White House for his second term, the world's Fair in Chicago was opened—all the earth's peoples were invited to come and bear witness to the brawn and bustle of the strapping young giant of the West.

John Applegate was then only a boy of nine, but memories of the Fair, to which his father took him on a three-day excursion, often return with an extraordinary vividness. He found himself telling Sonny, when Chicago again played host to the world many years later, that this new and more garish exposition could in no way compare with the old—there was nothing, for example, that approached the Court of Honor in beauty, or the gleaming white Administration Building in architectural impressiveness. It was the effect of the exposition as a whole, however, rather than the wealth of its separate parts, that made such an indelible impression upon John Applegate's mind—the majestic colonnades, the graceful arches, the shimmering domes, the swards of greenery with their interlacing tracery of quiet lagoons. His nine-year-old eyes drank the wonder in and, if through the gauze of years he remembers it as a thing of magic beyond compare, his lingering appreciation is only slightly greater than was that of Henry Adams who overcame his misanthrophic antipathy to most aspects of American life long enough to declare: “As a scenic display, Paris never approached it.”

Most of Adams' countrymen felt a similar enthusiasm—throughout the nation there ran a general feeling of exhilarated pride. Millions of Americans, seeing Chicago for the first time, came to realize something of the astonishing saga of the West; the miracle of growth that, in but the span of a single lifetime from 1837 to 1893, had transformed an empty wilderness where wolves howled against the intrusion of scattered trading-posts to a large and thriving city. And there were others who, as they stood before the reproductions of the ships of Columbus' fleet sent to the exhibition by the Queen of Spain, the Pinta, Niña and Santa Maria, were bound to find their imaginations straying to a consideration of the short but immensely eventful American past—a nation's coming of age.

The American had always been conscious of his own uniqueness, hewing his sense of personality out of the wilderness even as he carved his freedom, but now there was added an awareness of the uniqueness of his country. There was a surge of national self-consciousness, a pride in swift achievement, a conviction of strength and authority and increasing power. The American mind, notoriously distrustful of Europe, suspicious of foreigners and all things foreign, was further confirmed in its own isolationism—an historically conditioned reflex, rather than a moral failing, that was to grow increasingly more stubborn and pronounced.

Ever since the War of 1812, when the British under Packenham were routed by Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans, no real threat had been leveled at American independence from abroad. The intervening years had merely strengthened a sense of national self-sufficiency that first began to develop after the defeat of the French in the fourth French-and-Indian War. There had been the affair of Charlotte and Maximilian in Mexico, and in 1870 rumors began to circulate that a foreign power, thought to be Germany, had designs on the island of San Domingo, but these events barely rippled the surface of American indifference and calm. There were two worlds, the Old and the New, and they shared practically nothing in common. Even the moon, in that era of serene self-immolation, began to take on those peculiarly American attributes it has retained ever since—being, on the banks of the Wabash, a quite different and unquestionably superior moon than the one that shone down upon the banks of the Seine, or the Rhine, or the Volga.

George Washington had vividly impressed the American consciousness with his principle of “no entangling alliances,” a statement of isolationist doctrine that both Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson had emphatically reaffirmed, and in that year of the Chicago Fair, as the country neared the presidential campaign of 1896 and the Spanish-American war, the belief that the United States might follow the workings of its own destiny without help or hindrance from abroad was rarely, if ever, questioned or denied. There was even then the belief, more distinctly characteristic of a later isolationism, that Europe was hopelessly stricken with an incurable disease, bled white with hate and endless wars, ground between the millstones of too feckless a way of life and too fatal a way of history. Self-trust passed ever increasingly into self-satisfaction, self-satisfaction into self-love, self-love into doting, and on its great island between the seas a people turned its back upon the world. If there was a hope, and a promise, America contained them both. God was in His Heaven, looking after His favorite people, and all the trials were over.

II

Andrew Carnegie, talkative as ever, voiced in 1893 the large complacency of his time. He compared the era to “high noon, when the blazing sun overhead casts no shadows … There is not one shred of privilege to be met with anywhere in all the laws. One man's right is every man's right. The flag is the guarantor and symbol of equality.” The time, in sum, was perfect.

There were those who might dispute the perfection of the age—the one million citizens who voted the Populist ticket the year before; the other millions who were part of the rising labor movement described in Samuel Gompers's autobiography—but John Applegate, musing upon his memories of the Chicago Fair and the years that marked his coming to man's estate, would be tempted to agree with the steel-master. He recalls the world's climate as being warmer then, the conditions of life more fixed and secure, and while he has been driven to the understanding that the years from 1893 to 1914 were twilight years, hung with the threat of unsuspected doom, there yet remains enough of sentiment and nostalgia to put a halo about the time and turn it into his own Golden Age.

Even the Spanish-American War, as he recalls it, was but a cloud quickly devoured by the sun. He now knows, vaguely, that those years saw the growth of the United States into an international power, that the war with Spain was more than a high vaudeville crossed with a scandal of bad beef, crowded with consequences and implications that no man foresaw, but, in terms of his own education, the historic events of that period left him almost untouched. William Jennings Bryan he remembers principally as Clarence Darrow's opponent at the Dayton “monkey trial” in 1925, revolving about a statute passed by a Fundamentalist-dominated Tennessee legislature that made it unlawful to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible,” (Listen! Hear the voice of Cotton Mather, drifting on the wind) and Theodore Roosevelt, who loomed like a giant in the years of his youth, has gradually faded into a ghostly image with big teeth and glasses and a cowboy's hat—“busting” trusts that, as things turned out, managed to survive unbusted and, in true American fashion, went marching on.

But though John Applegate knows it not, or is carelessly indifferent to the knowledge, the old American debate, the prolonged contest between the few and the many over the right to rule, still troubled the deeps of American life. Even less than P. T. Barnum can William Jennings Bryan be ranked as one of John Applegate's important Americans, his total heritage being hardly more than a single phrase, but it was he, “the Tiberius Gracchus of the West,” who, in the campaign of 1896, voiced the last challenge of the rapidly disappearing frontier—one of the major conquests over nature the Chicago Fair had been raised to celebrate.

When the Democratic convention met in 1896 to nominate its candidate for the Presidency, William McKinley, largely through the efforts of Mark Hanna, had already been selected as the Republican nominee, and a platform drawn up supporting the gold standard and opposing the coinage of free silver unless by international agreement. The Democrats, divided among themselves, met in an atmosphere of tense excitement. The agrarian radicals of the South and West, determined to impose their will upon the convention, had been busily seeking delegates and so dominated the gathering that the opening prayer contained a special passage of sympathy “for our toiling multitudes, oppressed with burdens too heavy for them to bear.”

Contrary to Andrew Carnegie, it was a discontented era, not a perfect one, and all the efforts of the more conservative Democrats to dam the tide of rebelliousness were swept aside. The moment of climax came when Bryan, then only thirty-six years old, wearing the black string tie and alpaca coat that were to become established as his trademark, flung the challenge into the camp of the plutocracy. Defiantly he recited the roll call of those for whom he spoke—the workman, the country merchant, the small town lawyer, the miner, the farmer—and summoned them with religious zeal to rally about the silver banner that floated above his head.

“It is for these we speak,” he cried. “We do not come as aggressors. Ours is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in defense of our homes, our families and our posterity. We have petitioned and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged and they have mocked when calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them. We shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Emily Applegate, coming upon this passage in one of her history books, finds it hard to understand what the excitement was all about. The various issues central to the campaign of 1896—that of free silver in particular—seem incredibly outmoded and old hat. And the full-blown style of the Boy Orator of the Platte, (“A river six inches deep and six inches wide at the mouth,” one of his critics said) serves chiefly to confirm her impression that he belonged to the spread-eagle school of public speakers—those who kept the national bird so constantly on wing, according to the backwoods humorists, that its passing shadow wore a two-foot trail down the Mississippi Valley. But difficult though it may be for Emily to comprehend the alarm, even the terror, Bryan's nomination aroused, causing Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the founder of The Nation, to write of the Democratic convention that selected him: “Beside them the Populists are lamblike, and the socialists suckling doves. The country has watched their mad proceedings with disgust and shuddering, only impatient for the coming of November to stamp out them and their incendiary doctrines”—despite the apparent lack of reason for such hysterical outcries as this, the fact is that in the election of 1896 the country was called upon to take part in the most sharply defined struggle of economic groups since the first campaign of Lincoln.

The westward march of Empire had ended. Free land was giving out and it was becoming increasingly more apparent that other natural resources were equally limited. Farmers already in possession of land were forced to sell their produce at ruinous prices on a glutted market—“Raise less corn and more hell,” the cry was raised in Kansas. Trusts and monopolies had arisen, the growing industrialism had been accompanied by the growth of an angry labor movement whose foremost champion was John P. Altgeld, “The Flaming Eagle” of Illinois, and both the Populist and Greenback movements had been broken by defeat. Bryan's proposed solution to the troubles of the era, his mystic ratio of sixteen to one, is now clearly seen as an economic panacea no more valid than Huey P. Long's “Share the Wealth” program. Somewhat less apparent is the fact that, born though it may have been out of a great ignorance about money, Bryan's hope in silver contained the aspirations of a nobler, more idealistic hope.

The wilderness was no longer the wilderness—the land going, the game going, the forests going—and with the wilderness had passed the wilderness voices. There was no Jefferson, no Jackson, no Lincoln. Some intangible quality had gone forever from American life—the quality, perhaps, lent by men who knew the lessons of nature before they came to the lessons of books—but still, somewhere in Bryan's oratory of that year, rising above the rhetoric, the cracked voice, the distillery reek that came from his bizarre habit of cooling his neck and arms with gin, somewhere there might be heard a last defiant shouting of the old, the familiar, the frontier challenge—the people, not the elect, have the right to rule!

The cry was to be raised again, and yet again, but now for the last time it was threaded with the experience and education of the geographical frontier. And whatever the future's shape, whatever its cast or content, it was inevitably destined to be different from the past. The long, hard labor was over: a continent had been won. The frontier, now, as the wheel of years turned upon the great axle of the century, was the illimitable frontier of time.

III

In the summer of 1896 the aging Henry Adams was once again in Paris. The old malaise was upon him, the tired disillusion, and his letters of the period are full of the weary world-sickness he came in the end almost to enjoy. During the early part of August he visited Chartres, spending a Sunday afternoon with the service and the glass, and upon his return to Paris he wrote his old friend, Elizabeth Cameron:

In my sublimated fancy, the combination of the glass and the Gothic is the highest ideal ever yet reached by man; higher than the Mosaics and Byzantine of Ravenna, which was itself higher, as a religious conception, than the temples of the Greeks or Egyptians. Our age is too thoroughly brutalized to approach or understand any of these creations of an imagination which is dead. I am myself somewhat like a monkey looking through a telescope at the stars; but I can see at least that it must have been great.

There is a wrongness, however, (a wrongness that Adams himself often fell into: or was it a pose?) in emphasizing too strongly the anachronistic quality of his imagination. Disillusioned he was, harshly contemptuous of the commercial ideals of his generation, but, at the same time, he never permitted his gaze, no matter how enraptured by the glories of Chartres or Mont Saint-Michel, to stray very far from the contemporary scene. In the same letter wherein he describes himself as a monkey looking through a telescope, he goes on to say:

Yesterday I read through a whole week of American papers. Frankly my impression was that Bryan could not destroy anything worth preserving, if he makes a clean sweep of all we have. Always, hitherto, I have hated revolutions, not so much on account of the revolutions as on account of the subsequent reaction; but at last I am getting to think that rot and moral atrophy are worse than revolution or reaction.

Paris has had no end of revolutions. Great moats of blood separate everybody from everybody's neighbor. Yet Paris is full of a dozen interests and vigorous influences which exist chiefly because of their mutual animosities, while we have absolutely nothing in our minds except whether we had best make our living by gold or silver.

No doubt Bryan's success would mean chaos, and general ruin for a time, and probably a great breach with Europe. Well! Like Rochefort, I fell as though it were time to say to the public about their duties: Peuple américain, est-ce que décidément tu ne trouves pas qu'en voilà assez! If we allow the crushing intellectual imbecility of McKinley and his Ohio-Pennsylvania following to master us completely, you know the type that must survive. Décidément je trouve déjà qu'en voilá plus qu'assez! I am already stifled by it; what will happen when it alone exists in America! Still believing that McKinley will certainly win, I trust that, like most such men and such régimes, he will create more hostility than revolution itself. But at any rate all my sympathies and all my best wishes are for his opponent, and the larger his support, the better I will be pleased.

The revolt of Henry Adams, if revolt it may be called, was similar to that of Henry James—a protest against the ideals of millionairedom and Barnum's art of money getting. “If,” wrote Adams, “there is such a thing in America as an earnest impulse, an energy or a thought outside of dollars and cents, I should like to see it before total imbecility sets in.” Between James and Adams, however, the points of opposition are more striking than those of similarity—for, while James made a notable effort to oppose the ideals of millionairedom with those of art, Adams permitted himself to sink deeper and deeper into the querulous misanthrophy which, in the end, was to become little more than the bored negation of a spoiled and self-indulgent snob.

“If you asked me to find out five hundred persons in the world you would like to give the volume,” he wrote his brother Brooks just before the publication of Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, “I could only say that, as far as you and I know, five hundred do not exist—nor half that number—nor a quarter of it.”

“‘As far as you and I know,’ and I suspect we know of everybody worth knowing. Thousands of people exist who think they want to read. Barring a few Jews, they are incapable of reading fifty consecutive pages, or of following the thought if they did. I never yet heard of ten men who had ever read my history and never one who had read Hay's Lincoln …

Of course there are several hundred thousand persons in Boston and out of it, who are lecture-goers and frequent libraries; and there are one or two million young women who read poetry in Browning clubs, and mostly come to Paris to study art when they can. I imagine that neither you nor I care much to be admired by these, but in any case they will admire us the more at secondhand. We need not lift a finger to reach that class, who are quite passive, and mere reed-pods of receptivity.”

It is not surprising, therefore, with this blight of bitterness and snobbism upon him, that when he published his book he issued it in a private edition limited to one hundred copies. What had he, who saw in the combination of glass and Gothic the highest ideal ever reached by man, to say to the America of Andrew Carnegie and Pierpont Morgan; to the dilletante young women who read Browning in poetry clubs and studied art in Paris; to those incapable of reading fifty pages? Nothing, he gave the answer—nothing at all.

The deepest impression left by his letters, however, is that he had much to say—that, for whatever the reason, one of the ablest and most far-reaching minds of its generation was permitted to go to waste. Adams was a true world-citizen, beside whom Henry James seems almost provincial at times, and during that era of unbridled nationalistic pride, when a bustling and self-confident America was divorcing itself from the rest of the world, he looked at the global complex and saw, among the many other things that make his correspondence an invaluable guide to the period, traces of the road that would lead, in time, to the tomb of the unknown soldier. To his brother Brooks he wrote:

As far as I can see, the various forces are now fairly well defined. The disruption of '93 has definitely rearranged society and we need not fret about new disturbances because we cannot any longer increase or diminish the forces. That another shock and disruption will come, and come soon, everyone admits—not that the admission proves anything. What form it will take is another matter. In my opinion, the center of readjustment, if readjustment it is to be, lies in Germany, not in Russia or in us. For the last generation, since 1865, Germany has been the greatly disturbing element of the world, and until its expansive force is decidedly exhausted, I can see neither political nor economical equilibrium possible.

In another letter, written in the autumn of 1897 to the English diplomat, Cecil Spring Rice, he continues this train of thought:

Do you know the kinetic theory of gases? Anyway, Germany is and always has been a remarkably apt illustration of Maxwell's conception of ‘sorting demons.’ By bumping against all its neighbors, and being bumped in turn, it gets and gives at last a common motion which is, and of necessity must be, a vortex or cycle. It can't get anywhere except round a circle and return on itself. It has done so since the time of Varus and his legions …

In 1898, when the Spanish-American war broke out, Adams was in Athens. “My mind,” he wrote, “wanders terribly fast between Salamis, where Xerxes is before my eyes, and Key West where our ships are waiting orders. The moment is perhaps a turning point in history; in any case it can hardly fail to fix the lines of a new concentration, and to throw open an immense new field of difficulties. The world is abjectly helpless. It is running a race to nowhere. Slowly and painfully our people are waking up to the new world they are to live in.”

There is a certain esthetic correctness in Adams's remoteness from America at a time when the nation was marching off to war. Sitting on the platform of the Pnyx, clambering across the fields at Phaleron and Eleusis, brooding on past and present and future—this is what we “expect” of this arch-intellectual, telling his beads of private thought alone and above the battle. Yet was he any more remote from the conflict, except in terms of geography, than most of his countrymen—did he not, from his ivory Grecian tower, see its meaning more clearly? America was agitated, to be sure, by all the noise and excitement of war—the balls, the parades, the flags flying, the bands playing Waltz Me Around, Willie and There'll Be A Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight—but the war itself was over too quickly, too successfully, ever to get beyond the opera bouffe stage.

Perhaps, as Adams believed when he wrote from Athens, the people of America were slowly and painfully waking up to the new world in which they were to live. But, in 1900, when he had again taken up residence in the Washington that both fascinated and repelled him, he could nowhere discover the dawn. The country, he reported, was

full of swagger and satisfaction. The change since 1893 is startling. A war or two seems a matter of entire indifference. Grumblers have to scold in private, for they get nothing but chaff in reply. As for money, it seems to lie about loose, for no one confesses to want of it. Even I, who own infinity, open my eyes at the way we sling things about, and the calm acceptance of the new scale … There is no longer the smallest sense of responsibility for consequences. Fifty years ago, we all expected to break our necks at half the speed, but now we look forward to doubling it without a qualm …

Full of swagger and satisfaction—it was in this mood that the nation faced the opening of the new century. The war had served merely to intensify the general conviction of American superiority, to deepen the feeling of national pride. Perhaps, as has become ritualized to say, the war with Spain had meant largely the triumph of William Randolph Hearst—“a blackguard boy with several million dollars at his disposal,” Godkin of The Nation called him. Yet behind the figure of the Lord of San Simeon, whose incredible California palace was but the most outrageous example of a great glut of castles that arose across the land, leaving hardly an American community without a gloomy pile destined eventually to become known as somebody or other's “folly,” whose rapacious pillaging of the trash and treasure of Europe was merely one millionaire's indulgence in a highly popular sport, (Did not one of Hearst's contemporaries, Joseph Leiter, offer to buy the Great Wall of China?), whose untrammelled individualism was but an extravagant acting-out of the generally accepted theory, stated most notably by William Graham Sumner of Yale, that individualism (i.e. laissez faire) was the mainspring of civilization—behind the figure of Hearst triumphant there stood a triumphant people.

“We will cover the ocean with our merchant marine,” Albert J. Beveridge cried out during a speech that sought to endow imperialism with the same supernatural sanction the early Puritans found implicit in success. “We will build a navy to the measure of our greatness. Great colonies governing themselves, flying our flag and trading with us, will grow about our posts of trade. Our institutions will follow our flag on the wings of our commerce. And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.”

Full of swagger and satisfaction—how well had Adams caught the spirit of the time. Later voices would rise in protest—socialists like Jack London and Upton Sinclair, the army of muckrakers led by Lincoln Steffens, academic rebels like Thornstein Veblen, political insurgents like Robert M. LaFollette—but, as the people of the nation stood on the threshold of a brand-new century, most of them would have been in general agreement with Beveridge that American sea-power, American law, American institutions and the American flag were truly agencies of a superior civilization and not improbably of God.

By using the method of historical liturgy—the method, that is, which selects certain events for particular emphasis or celebration—it may be argued that the period from 1898 to 1914 saw the end of American “isolationism” rather than its firm entrenchment. With beguiling simplicity, the terms of this argument run as follows: The war of 1898 forced the United States to assume responsibilities, not only in the Caribbean, but as far away as the Philippines. The dash of the battleship Oregon from San Francisco around the Horn, in order to participate in the battle of Manila, dramatically demonstrated the need of a canal across the Panama Isthmus—the canal, in turn, made plain the necessity of a “two-ocean” navy. Beyond this, concludes the argument, the United States had recognized its vital interest in the peace of Asia by participating in the settlement of the Russo-Japanese war, and in the peace of Europe by its representation at the Algeciras conference. [France, in 1904, made certain agreements with England and Spain leading to an increase of her influence in Morocco. Germany, feeling she had been rebuffed, demanded a conference of the signatories of an earlier agreement concerning Morocco negotiated at Madrid in 1880. To the United States, a signatory of the 1880 agreement, Germany appealed for an extension of the “open-door” policy to include Morocco. President Theodore Roosevelt, seeking a peaceful solution, persuaded the contending nations to attend a conference at Algeciras, Spain, in 1906. The attitude of Germany, however, was so uncompromising that Roosevelt threw his influence to the side of France which won a privileged position in Morocco. The resulting treaty was ratified by the United States Senate, but a formal declaration was made that the action was taken only to protect American interests and should not be construed as an abandonment of a non-intervention policy toward Europe.]

But what is here overlooked, or sacrificed to the demands of neatness, is that it is not impossible for internationalism and isolationism to walk hand in hand—that even so narrow a strip of water as the English channel is wide enough to help create a certain insularity of thought and temperament; that, more specifically, while the annexation of the islands in the Pacific may have weakened the geographic foundation of American isolationism it did not undermine its popularity, nor altar the ingrained belief, revealed as early as 1775-76 when the Continental Congress hesitated to enter into an alliance with France, that in the continental insularity of the United States there was contained the promise of a unique destiny, separate and detached from that of the rest of the world. The native suspicion of Europe had in no way been diminished—had, if anything, been deepended by the Boer War—and along with the suspicion there ran a profession of contempt. Thus, when the German Emperor on January 1, 1900, announced his intention of building up the German army to parity with the German navy, ushering in the new century with as noisy a piece of symbolism as history records, it was either ignored or put down as another example of European incorrigibility. Before the assembled officers of the Berlin garrison the Kaiser said:

The first day of the new century sees our army—in other words, our people—in arms, gathered around their standards, kneeling before the Lord of Hosts … Even as my grandfather labored for his army, so will I, in like manner, carry on and carry through the work of reorganizing my navy in order that it may be justified in standing by the side of my land-forces and that by it the German Empire may also be in a position to win the place which it has not yet attained. With the two united, I hope to be enabled, with a firm trust in the guidance of God, to prove the truth of the saying of Frederick William the First: “When one in this world wants to decide something with the pen he does not do it unless supported by the strength of the sword.”

Many persons doubtless read the speech with grave concern, Henry Adams certainly among them, he finding in it further evidence that the kinetic theory of gases had social and political application, that once again Germany was “bumping against all its neighbors,” but the more general view was summed up by an editorial writer for The New York World:

“If Emperor William had sought to wear a costume appropriate to the speech he made at Berlin yesterday, the latest possible style he could have adopted would have been a suit of early mediaeval armor … He and his pose are melancholy reminders of a past whose lessons have been all too imperfectly learned.”

What these lessons were the writer did not trouble to say. But America, the implication ran, had taken them seriously to heart—rejecting, in the process of her education, all such Old World folly. The possible effect that the creation of a larger German navy might have upon America was nowhere publicly considered. Nor, in popular opinion, could it have any. The great island—immense, unique, immune—still lay bastioned by the seas. Whatever shocks might quake the earth of Europe, in whatever skies the storm might rage, here at home the island earth would remain unshaken, the island sky serene. The wisdom of the Almighty, in placing the waters of the earth where He did, had never seemed more profound.

Grateful for the continental insularity of the United States, looking upon it as a gift handed down from above, the turnof-the century American might justify his complacency with verse from Goethe and celebration from Hegel. In 1827, moved to signalize the escape of America from the tyrannies of Europe, Goethe had written:

Amerika, du hast es besser
Als unser Kontinent, der alte,
Du hast keine verfallene Schlösser
Und keine Basalte.
Dich stört nicht im Innern
Zu lebendiger Zeit
Unnützes Erinnern
Und vergeblicher Streit.
[America, you have it better
Than our old continent,
You have no ruins
No tormented stones.
No futile memories
Or vain strife
Vex thy inner spirit
In this living hour.]

Hegel, whose theory of the state as the only absolute reality had been interestingly paralleled in part by John Calhoun of South Carolina, was also prompted to praise America. In his Philosophy of History he called it “the land of the future where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world's History shall reveal itself … the land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe.”

America was not so highly regarded by most other Europeans, Matthew Arnold summing up the general view by calling it “uninteresting” and Sigmund Freud the extreme one by regretting its discovery as “a terrible mistake,” but even these critics agreed that the new world had nothing in common with the old. With so many voices saying so, and with the map of the earth's surface to back them up, the American had no more reason to dispute the geographic and cultural uniqueness of the United States than to deny its temperate climate. And if this implied a rejection of Europe, a more intense interest in the affairs of Main Street than the broad highways of the world, he might reply that he was acting on the advice of Europe's most advanced and intelligent minds. Even Napoleon, Hegel reminded him, was said to have complained, “Cette vieille Europe m'ennuie.”

The American, then, coming into the Twentieth Century, could consider himself guilty of no moral failing in feeling similarly bored. Europe was the past, America the future. As a citizen of that future, inhabiting “the land of desire” he subscribed to its promise much as he might have subscribed to stock in a gold mine—rashly, perhaps, but hopeful and unafraid.