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My purpose...is
to begin exploring our American cultural past... L Adamic |
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@ To DEWITT("PASHA") and ALICE
STETTEN Dear Alice Pasha: @@@@@@@@@@@Twice within the
memory of men now living dreams have had a force strong enough to reshape the
world. At this moment it is the dream of personal power on the part of
"men of destiny" that is dominent, that tumbles the Only yesterday it was another dream,
a dream which set in motion the greatest migration in history. The men did
not scurry in fear: the were led by hope. The broad But somewhere in the roar of
industrialism, somewhere in the tension of our commercialism, that dream was
all but lost, or confused well-nigh beyond recognition. While at first the
rich soil of the new continent and the wealth beneath it were magic and
yielded us a flashy surface growth and an oversupply of material power, we
have never yet flowered all-inclusively as a country and a culture. To a
large degree we are a rootless, bewildered, uncertain people. Life on a mere
economic plane, we have come to realize, has proved as impermanent, shallow,
and sterile as the lands of the Dust Bowl, and we fume and blow fruitlessly
in the winds of Depression. We have no deep tap roots in a cultural past to
give us continuity, stability. Now here we are, in this fateful year
of 1940, still a groping people, splashed by the backwash of events in the
Old World, our thoughts and actions touched by hysteria; the strands of our
texture to our life as individuals and as a people. Here and there the stuff
in the "Melting Pot" has@melted the pot. We eye@one@another@uneasily.
We are on the defensive against ourselves. Here is a danger of our
own--perhaps unavoidable--making. In the lands whence we come or stem
civilization crashes into ruin, and, watching from our ringside seats, we are
appalled. But to be appalled is no answer to anything. Within our American
borders are tens of millions of people who carry within them, whether they
know it or not, many of the things we bemoan losing--many of the things that
were lost in We need not lose them. They were
brought here by the waves of our immigration. They are still here. We need to
cease eyeing one another uneasily and take a positive approach to meeting on
common ground. We need to take stock and come into our rich and varied
cultural heritage of democracy and the arts, of courageous and cooperative
living. Awareness is the step in making these
firmly our own. We shall need them. Before us is the necessity of a
tremendous effort. If we do not exert ourselves now, the old dream that
brought us here is apt to be swallowed by the furious nightmare of the Is it too late to recapture the magic
of that dream? Many people of the second and third and later generations, to
whom You and I and some of our friends
have talked of this for a number of years, especially since 1938, when I
first began the task of which this book is one of the early tangible results.
We thought then, in '38 and '39, it was not too late. You were always
interested in this job of mine, and more helpful with friendliness and
encouragement than you are aware. So I want From Many Lands to be your
book. My purpose, as you know, is to begin
exploring our American cultural past and to urge the cultivation of its many
common fields, not nostalgically, or historically or academically, but
imaginatively and creatively, with eyes to the future, until as a people we
find and dare to sink our roots into our common American subsoil, rich,
sun-warmed and well watered, from which we still may grow and flower. The
failure of It is still not too late. On the
contrary, this is our moment. Now we can do things. This period is in a way a
testing time for us. An opportunity. Now, in crisis and tension, the
situation and its problems in which we are interested will be clearer than
before. Our national weakness will become obvious and we will want to remove
them. Our national weakness will become obvious and we will want to remove them.
Our awareness will be intensified, our emotional quality heightened. As a
people, we will be eager for orientation--for integration and unity under the
sway of an affirmative concept of liberty. We will realize that democracy even
as we have it in the United States is far, far from what it should and could
be; that the evil that seems to have engulfed Europe is not so much the
creation of those who believe in lies and slavery as of those who believing
in truth and liberty do not practice their beliefs, either not at all or with
insufficient consistency, intelligence, passion and energy. We-many of
us-will want to correct this fault in ourselves and others, and become geared
to the real motives and propulsions of our country-the same motives and propulsions,
essentially, that were behind the successive waves of our immigration. Here in America, if anywhere, man can
achieve an all-dimensional quality: strong, rich and secure in his
appreciations, sane in his values, intelligent in his knowledge, firm in his
morality, just and generous in his freedom, cool and deliberate in combat
with the enemies of hid ideals and principles, and great in the enduring
hunger and the epic reach of his spirit. These are not the exact words of our
talks during the past few years, but they are their substance, which I wanted
to put into this book. If we are right, and I believe we are, Yours, LOUS Milford, New Jersey |
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