The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience. When it attempts to resolve contradicti...ons, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways. As a general rule, it does so either in melodramatic actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed with both one may find the stirring instabilities of "American humor." These qualities constitute the uniqueness of that branch of the novelistic tradi tion which has flourished in this country. They help to account for the strong element of "romance" in the American "novel." By contrast, the English novel has followed a middle way. It is notable for its great practical sanity, its powerful, engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a moral centrality and equability of judgment. Oddity, distortion of personality, dislocations of normal life, recklessness of behavior--these the English novel has included. Yet the profound poetry of disorder we find in the American novel is missing, with rare exceptions, from the English.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hamilton took as his major premise the evil nature of man and followed with the consequent need for an authoritative government in... the hands of the propertied, who had a "stake in society" and therefore had most to gain or lose by government; Jefferson argued that since man is naturally well-disposed toward his fellows, all that is necessary for a good society is sufficient training and opportunity to make all men realize that their own good derives from the common good. Hamilton believed the principal duty of government was to protect private property and the sanctity of contract; Jefferson saw it as promoting the general welfare over and above any consideration of wealth.... Hamilton saw American prosperity rising through industrial capitalism; Jefferson looked with suspicion and disfavor upon mercantile activity, found it enslaving, deceitful, predatory, and contrary to man's natural desire to live free and relatively self-sufficient by the fruit of his own labors. Instead of manufacturing, he placed his hopes in an agrarian economy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delecta...ble necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There exists in a great part of the Northern people a gloomy diffidence in the moral character of the government. On the broaching... of this question, as general expression of despondency, of disbelief that any good will accrue from a remonstrance on an act of fraud and robbery, appeared in those men to whom we naturally turn for aid and counsel. Will the American government steal? Will it lie? Will it kill?--We ask triumphantly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
American manners have evolved in a climate in many ways very different from those of the civilization to which most Americans owe ...their heritage. In most European countries manners have evolved as fences, and conventions of public behavior have been devised to protect one's "place." The shopkeeper had one set of manners toward his customers and another toward his employees, as the butler did toward his "master" and toward the servants, and the squire toward his gamekeeper and his mother-in-law. The idea that manners should be an expression of general regard for one's fellow man is the product of a society that hoped to be classless, and though it has fallen far short of its intentions, our conventions are the very opposite of those designed to protect one class from another. What we have tried to do in America is to perpetuate a set of conventions that give the impression of not being conventions at all but attitudes which, we hope, indicate that one of us is as good as another, as deserving of consideration, and as responsible for maintaining a state of good will. Almost as far back as one can go in the literature (if it can be called that) of American etiquette, one finds that manners are referred to as "minor morals."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the inclusive mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while at least, the doom of baseball. For baseball is a... game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age, with its fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management organization. TV, as the very image of the new corporate and participant way of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style of baseball, with its specialist and positional stress. When cultures change, so do games. Baseball, that had become the elegant abstract image of industrial society living by split-second timing, has in the new TV decade lost its psychic and social relevance for our new way of life. The ball game has been dislodged from the social center and been conveyed to the periphery of American life. In contrast, American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game that at the present is supplanting baseball in general acceptance. It agrees very well with the new needs of decentralized team play in the electric age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The chief lesson of the Depression should never be forgotten. Even our liberty-loving American people will sacrifice their freedom... and their democratic principles if their security and their very lives are threatened by another breakdown of our free enterprise system. We can no more afford another general depression than we can afford another total war, if democracy is to survive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utteran...ce. American--on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the struggle against sexism demands the destruction of the American state, and ... the immediate personal nature of sexism req...uires struggle against men who enforce that oppression as well as its institutions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »