If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holme...s said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world--the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stick ...out above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100% Americanism, only for those who are Amer...icans and nothing else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of char...acter. He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a private secretary, above all a lack of apparent force. Any private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of t...rance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the ...rights of others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This American system of ours ... call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us... a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, a...nd thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision. Hence the more clearly we see the world divided into Saxons and non-Saxons, into our splendid selves and the rest, the more certain we may be that we are slowly and quietly going mad. The more plain and satisfying our state appears, the more we may know that we are living in an unreal world. For the real world is not satisfying. The more clear become the colours and facts of Anglo-Saxon superiority, the more surely we may know we are in a dream.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
WHEREAS no provisions have, as yet, been made by the World's Columbian Exposition Commission for securing exhibits from the colore...d women of this country, or the giving of representation to them in such Fair, and WHEREAS under the present arrangement and classification of exhibits, it would be impossible for visitors to the Exposition to know and distinguish the exhibits and handiwork of the colored women from those of the Anglo- Saxons, and because of this the honor, fame and credit for all meritorious exhibits, though made by our race, would not duly be given us ... RESOLVED that for the purpose of demonstrating the progress of the colored women since emancipation and of showing to those who are yet doubters, and there are many, that the colored women ... are making rapid strides in art, science and manufacturing, and of furnishing to all information as to ... what the race has done, is doing and might do, in every department of life, that we, the colored women of Chicago request the Columbian Commission to establish an office for a colored woman whose duty it shall be to collect exhibits from the colored women of America ... [ellipses in source]LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »