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AMERICA

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see: "WEST (THE OLD/WILD)"
see "FREEDOM" for other related links
see "PLACES" for other related links


America does not go abroad in search of monsters
to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and
independence of all. She is the champion and
vindicator only of her own.
--John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)
6th President of the United States.

I got into the car and lit out to drift
for a time. I had a grand ride, over
mountains and rivers and out onto the
prairies, crossed the Cumberland, Tennessee,
Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers. It
rained, the wind blew and the sun shone.
Again I got in love with America. What a
land! O, Charles, if we can but begin to
love it and treat it decently some day!
It is so violent and huge and gorgeous and
rich and willing to be loved, like a great,
fine wench.
--Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)
American writer of short stories.
_Letters_

-

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

[. . . ]

I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy’s Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullett-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.

[. . . ]

You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

--Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)
American poet and novelist.
"American Names" [1927]

-

God bless America,
Land that I love,
Stand beside her and guide her
Thru the night with a light from above,
From the mountains to the prairies,
To the oceans white with foam,
God bless America,
My home sweet home.
--Irving Berlin (1888-1989)
American songwriter.
"God Bless America" [1939 song]

Kate Smith's version:
http://www.cmgww.com/coming/smith.html

-

My country 'tis of thee
Sweet land of felony
Of thee I sing --
Land where my father fried
Young witches and applied
Whips to the Quaker's hide
And made him spring.
--Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
American newspaperman, wit, and satirist.
"A Rational Anthem"
_Black Beatles in Amber_ [1892]

Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States
has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions
of any nation in the world. What is more, that tradition
is unambiguous; its meaning is articulated in simple,
rational speech that is immediately comprehensible and
powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings. America
tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of
freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its
political foundings on, there has been no dispute that
freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us.
No one serious or notable has stood outside this consensus.
You had to be a crank or a buffoon (e.g., Henry Adams
or H.L. Mencken, respectively) to get attention as a
nonbeliever in the democracy.
--Allan Bloom (1930-1992)
American writer and educator.
_The Closing of the American Mind_ [1987]

^

Carol II (1893-1953)
King of Rumania [1930-1940]

While in exile, King Carol told his friend,
the British diplomat Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart,
that during his reign he had selected fourteen
of the brightest Rumanians for special training
in the government service. He sent seven to
England, and seven to the United States, to
study their political and economic systems.
'The seven who went to England were very
smart--they all achieved great success in the
government in Bucharest,' said Carol.

'What about the seven you sent to the States,'
asked Lockhart.

'They were even smarter,' said the king. They
stayed there.'

--_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_
edited by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard [2000 ed.]

^

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic.
Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings,
different hopes, different dreams.
--Jimmy Carter (1924- )
American Democratic statesman, President [1977-1981].
In a speech at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania [27 October 1976].

I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go
back there if Jesus Christ was President.
--Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)
English film actor and director.
Quoted in Leslie Halliwell _Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion_ [1984].

America is the only nation in history which miraculously
has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without
the usual interval of Civilization.
--Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
French statesman.

America cannot and must not be the world's policeman.
We cannot stop all war for all time. But we can stop
some wars. We cannot save all women and all children.
But we can save many of them. We can't do everything.
But we must do what we can do. There are times and
places where our leadership can mean the difference
between peace and war.
--Bill (William Jefferson) Clinton (1946- )
American Democratic statesman and president [1993-2001].
Calling for public support for the stationing of troops in Bosnia,
television broadcast [27 November 1995].

I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,
A Yankee Doodle, do or die;
A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam's,
Born on the fourth of July.
--George M. Cohan (1878-1942)
American songwriter, dramatist, and producer.
"Yankee Doodle Boy" [1904 song]

I came to America tourist Third with a cheque
for ten pounds and I leave plus five hundred,
a wife, a mandarin coat, a set of diamond studs,
a state room and bath, and a decent box for the
ferret. That's what everybody comes to America
to do and I don't think I've managed badly for
a beginner.
--Cyril Connolly (1903-1974)
English writer.
Letter to Noel Blakiston [2 April 1930].

-

In British schools in those days American history stopped abruptly with
the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, on the principle that if they didn't
need us, we didn't need them. But after the First World War, both the
national prejudices I had imbibed and the personal memories of "the
Yanks" that tended to contradict them began to blur together and fade
as the inevitable reaction against Our Gallant Allies set in. Throughout
the 1920s, America became known to us as a lurid society of licentious
movie stars, ruthless gangsters, a boastful citizenry, and a grasping
government called "Uncle Shylock," who was out to bleed old Europe
white with demands for war reparations. Like most healthy schoolboys,
I had no more social conscience than a puppy; so that while it was
proper to defer to one's parents when they bemoaned the money-mad
Republic across the seas and contemplated every American import,
from canned beef to shirts with collars attached, as typical bits of
"shoddy," these horrors paled for me and my friends before the heroics
of Lindbergh, Douglas Fairbanks, and Bobby Jones; the country's
reputation for beautiful and pliant females; the arrival of Fred and
Adele Astaire; and the joys of American jazz.
--Alistair Cooke [Alfred Cooke] (1908-2004)
British-born American broadcater and journalist.
_America_ [1973]


But in the wake of the immigrant flood . . .
paupers became shopkeepers, and the sons
and daughters of peasants bound for centuries
to slivers of poor soil turned into clerks and
nurses and accountants and schoolteachers
and druggists and cab drivers and lawyers
and doctors. Looking back on those sheepish
legions, we should not pretend that they were
ever rollicking characters in a musical comedy.
But we should not forget, either, the millions
who struggled for a decent and tidy life, and
made it, and still do.
--Alistair Cooke [Alfred Cooke] (1908-2004)
British-born American broadcater and journalist.
_America_ [1973]

-

Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men,
whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in
the world.
--Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813)
French-born American agriculturalist, writer, and diplomat.
_Letters from an American Farmer_ [1782]

-

My mother and father never learned to read. How
sad! Oh, they learned to read the Hebrew prayers
phonetically, but never understood the words.

Ma, you're right, "America, such a wonderful land."
Here, you have a chance. On this day I give thanks
to both of you for not missing the boat.

--Kirk Douglas [Issur Danielovitch] (1916- )
American film actor and producer.
_The Ragman's Son_ [1988], Chapter 43

-

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her
bright blue sky - her grand old woods - her fertile fields - her
beautiful rivers - her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains.
But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning.
When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of
slaveholding, robbery and wrong, - when I remember that with the
waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne
to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile
fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am
filled with unutterable loathing, and led to reproach myself that
any thing could fall from my lips in praise of such a land. America
will not allow her children to love her. She seems bent on
compelling those who would be her warmest friends, to be her
worst enemies. May God give her repentance before it is too late,
is the ardent prayer of my heart. I will continue to pray, labor and
wait, believing that she cannot always be insensible to the dictates
of justice, or deaf to the voice of humanity.
--Frederick Douglass [Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey]
(c.1818-1895)
American abolitionist, reformer, and writer.
[1 January 1846 letter to William Lloyd Garrison.]

Newcomers to the United States are struck by
the amenities enjoyed by "poor" people. This
fact was dramatized in the 1980s when CBS
television broadcast a documentary, "People
Like Us," intended to show the miseries of
the poor during an ongoing recession. The
Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary,
with a view to embarrassing the Reagan
administration. But by the testimony of former
Soviet leaders, it had the opposite effect.
Ordinary people across the Soviet Union
saw that the poorest Americans have TV sets,
microwave ovens and cars. They arrived at the
same perception that I witnessed in an
acquaintance of mine from Bombay who has been
unsuccessfully trying to move to the United
States. I asked him, "Why are you so eager to
come to America?" He replied, "I really want
to live in a country where the poor people
are fat."
--Dinesh D'Souza (1961- )
American author.
"10 things to celebrate: Why I'm an anti-anti-American"

Americans . . . judge themselves by a higher standard than
anyone else. Americans are a self-scrutinizing people: even
if they have acted well in a given situation, they are always
ready to examine whether they could have acted better. At some
subliminal level, everybody knows this. Thus if the Chinese,
the Arabs, or the sub-Saharan Africans slaughter ten thousand
of their own people, the world utters a collective sigh and
resumes its normal business. We sadly expect the Chinese,
the Arabs, and the sub-Saharan Africans to do these things.
By contrast, if America, in the middle of a war, accidentally
bombs a school or a hospital and kills two hundred civilians,
there is an immediate uproar and an investigation is launched.
What all this demonstrates, of course, is America's evident
moral superiority.
--Dinesh D'Souza (1961- )
American author.
_What's So Great About America_ [2002]

The thing that impresses me most about
America is the way parents obey their
children.
--Edward VIII (1894-1972)
King [1936], afterwards, the Duke of Windsor.
In "Look" [5 March 1937].

America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what
you look for. . . . It will probably be interesting, and it
is sure to be large.
--E.M. [Edward Morgan] Forster (1879-1970)
English novelist.
_Two Cheers for Democracy_ [1951]

What distinguishes America is not its greater or lesser
goodness, but simply its unrivalled power to do that
which is good or bad.
--Mark Frankland (1934- )
Foreign correspondent and author

^

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), American
statesman, diplomat, scientist, and inventor.

When Franklin was in France, he frequently used
to play chess with the elderly Duchess of Bourbon.
On one occasion Franklin put her king in check
and took it. 'We do not take kings so,' remonstrated
the duchess. 'We do in America,' replied Franklin.

--_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_
edited by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard [2000 ed.]

^

^^

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States was already a
rich and powerful country, stretching its muscles, reaching out toward an
overseas empire. By the end of the century, it was much richer, and much
more powerful; the superpower in the world. It had come out on top in two
world wars (there were more ambiguous outcomes in some smaller, less
glorious wars). Most of its rivals had faded away. When Queen Victoria died,
in 1901, the sun never set on the British empire; it controlled a quarter of the
world. By 2000 the British empire had been reduced to a pitiful handful of
islands; China swallowed Hong Kong in 1997, the last significant outpost
of empire; the population of the bits and fragments left over from imperial
days (Bermuda, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and others) would hardly fill
a football stadium.

All the other empires, too, had crumbled into dust. Two world wars and the
winds of change stripped France of her glory; her African and Asian colonies
were long since gone. She too still had an island here and there, and tattered
remnants of neocolonialism in French-speaking parts of Africa. Germany lost its
empire after the First World War, and had to disgorge its conquests after the
Second. The First World War put an end to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and
the Second World War put paid to the empire the Japanese had cobbled
together. Dutch and Portuguese possessions became independent after World
War II; the last Portuguese outpost, Macao, passed to China at the end of 1999.
The most recent empire to go was the Soviet Union, which never admitted it was
an empire; it collapsed like a house of cards in 1989. At the end of the century,
the Russian bear was a sick, limping, lumbering mess. China loomed on the
horizon; still something of an empire (certainly, the Tibetans thought so), vast,
overpopulated; but so far not a serious rival to American rule in the world.

Economically, the United States was the world power, too. Some countries
were almost as rich, or even richer, in terms of dollars per capita; but most
of these were small, lucky places, awash in oil, like Brunei or Kuwait, or shrewd
little statelets, like Singapore. Even the countries that were both big and rich,
like Germany and Japan, were far behind the U.S. in total gross national
product - the United States, with its GNP in the trillions of dollars, was more
than twice as mighty in terms of sheer wealth as its nearest rival; and in military
and cultural terms, other countries were absolutely nowhere.

That left the United States on top of the heap, pretty much alone; it spent more,
consumed more, mattered more than any other country; and its movies, its
television programs, its popular culture - even its language - resonated all over
the world. From North Pole to South, everybody seemed to know America - its
blue jeans, its movie stars, its rock-and-roll music, its hamburgers and Coca
Cola. American speech was the language of mass culture; it was despised,
resented, admired, imitated, feared, and adored, sometimes all at once, and
sometimes by the same people. Its politicians strutted and congratulated
themselves on American achievements; whether America's preeminence was
the result of God, virtue, or economic policies, or as accidental as winning the
lottery or discovering oil, its place in the world was undeniable. Will the
American hegemony last until 2100? Probably not. Will it shrivel like the British
empire, or in some other way? Only time can tell; and time has nothing to say
at the moment.

--Lawrence M. Friedman (1930- )
_American Law in the 20th Century_ [2002]
Ch. 19 "Law: An American Export" pp. 572-573

^^

^

America at the beginning of the twenty-first century
is rich beyond all reckoning. The Communist
superpower with which it grappled for half a century
lies shattered at America's feet, begging for American
aid, technology, and investment....The United States
leads the world in learning and the arts, in science
and technology, in business and finance. Its shops
are piled high with fresh plums in December and a
hundred varieties of ice cream in August. At the flick
of a switch, Americans can listen to the Brandenburg
Concertos played more finely than they ever were for
the Elector of Brandenburg himself; with a flash of
plastic they can board a jet to Bali or Buenos Aires;
with a tap of a key they can order any book in print
delivered to their doorstep the next morning....And
unlike any previous great power--unlike Victorian
Britain, unlike the caliphs of Baghdad, unlike
imperial Rome--Americans can see nobody and
nothing on the horizon who would dare to take,
who could even imagine taking, all this away
from them.
--David Frum (1960- )
Canadian-born Conservative author.
_How We Got Here_ [2000]

Those who find America an especially violent
and oppressive country ("Amerika") have
apparently never read the history of England
or France, Germany or Russia, Indonesia or
Burundi, Turkey or Uganda.
--Eugene D. Genovese (1930- )
American historian.

No society can survive, no civilization can survive,
with 12-year-olds having babies, with 15-year-olds
killing each other, with 17-year-olds dying of AIDS,
with 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can't read.
--Newt Gingrich (1943- )
American politician.
_The Times_ [9 February 1995]

America, you have it better than our continent,
the old one.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
German poet, novelist, and playwright.
_Almanac for the Muses_ [1831

-

Now, the fact that we are not an empire, but could
be one if we wanted to, confuses the dickens of all
sorts of people. Indeed, some people find the idea
so confusing they willfully refuse to believe it and
just go on insisting we are an empire the way the
guy in the Monty Python skit just kept insisting the
parrot wasn't dead.[...]

Europeans who did have colonies and who did invade
both their neighbors and distant lands for material
gain - and, to be fair, for more ideologically complex
motives - have a hard time computing that America
isn't behaving the way they did. They think they've
evolved past us, that they are on the same road as
us and are simply a few miles ahead of us on the
path to enlightenment.

What they can't grasp is that America took a
different fork in the road a couple of centuries
ago. We can argue about who's on the high road
or the low road now, but we're on different roads.
And judging from the fact that they keep running
into ditches, forcing us to be their AAA service,
I think they can't tell us much we need to know.
Calling us an empire, Hitler-like, and the rest
are simply examples of Europeans misapplying
categories from their past onto the United States.
America isn't the European past, fellas, America
will be the European future, if you're lucky.

--Jonah Goldberg (1969- )
American conservative commentator and author.
"Not Getting America: Misunderstanding the U.S.",
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg092402.asp

-

-

Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.
--Horace Greeley (1811-1872)
American newspaper editor.
_Hints toward Reforms_ [1850]

& note:

Go West, young man, go West!
--John L.B. Soule (1815-1891)
American journalist,
in "Terra Haute {Indiana} Express" [1851].

-

Ours is the only country deliberately
founded on a good idea.
--John Gunther (1901-1970)
American author.
_Inside USA_ [1947]

This land is your land, this land is my land,
From California to the New York Island.
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
--Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)
American folksinger and songwriter.
_This Land is Your Land_ [1956 song]

The Louisiana Purchase, made 200 years ago this month,
nearly doubled the size of the United States. By any measure,
it was one of the most colossal land transactions in history,
involving an area larger than today's France, Spain, Portugal,
Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland and the British Isles
combined. All or parts of 15 Western states would eventually
be carved from its nearly 830,000 square miles, which stretched
from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, and from the Mississippi
River to the Rocky Mountains. And the price, $15 million, or
about four cents an acre, was a breathtaking bargain. "Let the
Land rejoice," Gen. Horatio Gates, a prominent New York state
legislator, told President Thomas Jefferson when details of
the deal reached Washington, D.C. "For you have bought
Louisiana for a song."
--Joseph Harriss,
"Westward Ho!" in _Smithsonian_ [April 2003]

[America is] still the best country for the common
man--white or black . . . if he can't make it here
he won't make it anywhere else.
--Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)
American longshoreman, philosopher,
and author who received the Presidential
Medal of Freedom in 1982.

We are the standard-bearers in the only really authentic revolution,
the democratic revolution against tyrannies. Our strength is not to
be measured by our military capacity alone, by our industry, or by
our technology. We will be remembered, not for the power of our
weapons, but for the power of our compassion, our dedication to
human welfare.
--Hubert H. Humphrey (1911-1978)
38th vice-president of the United States
[1965-1969] and liberal senator [1949-1965
& 1971-1978].
_The Cause is Mankind_ [1964]

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with
all nations; entangling alliances with none.
--Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
American statesman and president [1801-1809].
Inaugural Address [4 March 180I],
in Saul K. Padover _Jefferson_ [1942] p.293.

Sir, they [the American colonists] are a race of convicts,
and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them
short of hanging.
--Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
English poet, critic, and lexicographer.
Quoted in James Boswell _The Life of Samuel Johnson_ [1791].

-

The United States continues to elude me. If I
understand it at all, it is through the strange
profession that has shaped my life, the study
of war. War is repugnant to the people of
United States; yet it is war that has made
their nation, and it is through their power to
wage war that they dominate the world.
Americans are proficient at war in the same
way that they are proficient at work. It is
a task, sometimes a duty.

Americans have worked at war since the
seventeenth century, to protect themselves
from the Indians, to win their independence
from George III, to make themselves one
country, to win the whole of their continent,
to extinguish autocracy and dictatorship in
the world outside. It is not their favoured
form of work. Left to themselves, Americans
build, cultivate, bridge, dam, canalise,
invent, teach, manufacture, think, write,
lock themselves in struggle with the eternal
challenges that man has chosen to confront,
and with an intensity not known elsewhere
on the globe. Bidden to make war their work,
Americans shoulder the burden with intimidating
purpose. There is, I have said, an American
mystery, the nature of which I only begin to
perceive. If I were obliged to define it, I
would say it is the ethos of work as an end
in itself. War is a form of work, and America
makes war, however reluctantly, however
unwillingly, in a particularly workmanlike
way.

I do not love war; but I love America.

--John Keegan (1934- )
English military historian.

-

Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States
could not serve as the world's policeman; it should
also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the
world's midwife to democracy when the birth is
scheduled to take place under conditions of
guerrilla war.
--Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926-2006)
American Conservative political scientist,
professor, author, and the first woman to
serve as the American Ambassador to the
United Nations.
_Dictatorship and Double Standards_ [1979]

Perhaps you have to be born an Englishwoman to realize how
much attention American men shower on women and how
tremendously considerate all the nice ones among them are
of a woman's wishes.
--Gertrude Lawrence (1898-1952)
English stage actress.
_A Star Danced_ [1945]

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
{Inscription on the Statue of Liberty.}
--Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)
American poet.
"The New Colossus" [1883]

Intellectually I know that America is no
better than any other country; emotionally
I know she is better than every other
country.
--Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
American novelist and playwright.
In an interview in Berlin, Germany [29 December 1930].

'There won't be any revolution in America,' said
Isadore. Nikitin agreed. 'The people are all too
clean. They spend all the time changing their shirts
and washing themselves. You can't feel fierce and
revolutionary in a bathroom.'
--Eric Linklater (1899-1974)
Scottish novelist.
_Juan in America_ [1931], bk 5, pt 3

-

I will go as far as anyone in world service, but the first step to
world service is the maintenance of the United States. You may
call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any
other harsh adjective you see fit to apply, but an American I was
born, an American I have remained all my life.

I can never be anything else but an American, and I must think of
the United States first, and when I think of the United States first
in an arrangement like this I am thinking of what is best for the
world, for if the United States fails the best hopes of mankind fail
with it.

I have never had but one allegiance---I cannot divide it now. I
have loved but one flag and I cannot share that devotion and give
affection to the mongrel banner invented for a league.....National I
must remain, and in that way I, like all other Americans can render the
amplest service to the world. The United States is the world's best
hope, but if you fetter her in the interests and intrigues of Europe,
you will destroy her power for good and endanger her very
existence.....Strong, generous and confident, she has nobly served
mankind.

--Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. (1850-1924)
Republican U.S. senator [1893-1924].
Speech before the Senate on the League of Nations [12 August 1919].

-

We shall not make Britain's mistake.
Too wise to try to govern the world,
we shall merely own it.
--Denny Ludwell, c1935

Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the
reins of government with a strong hand, or your
republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste
by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman
Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that
the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman
Empire came from without and that your Huns and
Vandals will have been engendered within your own
country by your own institutions ... Your constitution
is all sail and no anchor.
--Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)
English politician and historian.
To Henry Stephens Randall (American politician) [23 May 1857],
in Thomas Pinney (ed.)
_The Letters of Thomas Babington Macauley_ [1981] v. 6, p. 96.

The immense popularity of American movies
abroad demonstrates that Europe is the
unfinished negative of which America is
the proof.
--Mary McCarthy (1912-1989)
American novelist.
_On the Contrary_ [1961]

The mission of the United States is one
of benevolent assimilation.
--William McKinley (1843-1901)
25th President of the United States from
1897 until his assasination in 1901.

Settled by the people of all nations, all nations
may claim her for their own. You cannot spill a
drop of American blood without spilling the blood
of the whole world ... We are not a nation, so much
as a world.
--Herman Melville (1819-1891)
American novelist and poet.
_Redburn: His First Voyage_ [1849]

One man prefers the Republic because it pays
better than Bulgaria. Another because it has
laws to keep him sober and his daughter chaste.
Another because the Woolworth Building is higher
than the cathedral at Chartres. Another because,
living here, he can read the New York _Evening
Journal_. Another because there is a warrant
out for him somewhere else. Me, I like it
because it amuses me to my taste. I never
get tired of the show. It is worth every
cent it costs.
--H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken (1880-1956)
American journalist and literary critic.
"On Being an American",
_Prejudices: Third Series_ [1922]

America is far from perfect. It has blundered
through arrogance, selfishness, cynicism, and
a great deal through ignorance. But without
America, the history of humanity in the 20th
century would have been infinitely more
tragic.
--Dominique Moisi
Adjunct director of the French Institute for
International Relations in Paris.

I was going to stay on the three million miles
of bent and narrow rural American two-lane,
the roads to Podunk and Toonerville. Into
the sticks, the boondocks, the burgs,
backwaters, jerkwaters, wide-spots-in-the-
road, the don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it-towns.
Into those places where you say, 'My God!
What if you lived here!'
--William Least Heat Moon [Bill Trogdon] (1939- )
American author.
_Blue Highways_ [1982]

America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for
something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration
for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it.
America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World.
History is like that, very chancy.
--Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976)
American historian, author and winner
of two Pulitzer Prizes.
_The Oxford History of the American People_ [1965], ch. 2

When Abraham Lincoln was murdered
The one thing that interested Matthew Arnold
Was that the assassin shouted in Latin
As he lept on the stage.
This convinced Matthew
That there was still hope for America.
--Christopher Morley (1890-1957)
American journalist, novelist, and poet.
_Points of View_

The United States is the greatest single
achievement of European civilization.
--Robert B. Mowat (1883-1941)
British historian.
_The United States of America_ [1938]

We find it almost as difficult as the communists to believe that
anyone could think ill of us, since we are as persuaded as the
communists that our society is so essentially virtuous that only
malice could prompt criticism of any of our actions.
--Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)
American theologian.
_The Irony of American History_ [1962]

America wasn't founded so that we could all
be better. America was founded so that we
could all be anything we damn well pleased.
--P.J. O'Rourke (1947- )
American political satirist.

-

In one generation we have moved from denying a black
man service at a lunch counter to elevating one to
the highest military office in the nation, and to
being a serious contender for the presidency. This
is a magnificent country and I am proud to be one of
its sons.
--Colin L. Powell (1937- )
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [1989-1993]
and Secretary of State [2001-2005].
(At a news conference in Alexandria, VA, where he
announced his decision not to seek the presidential
nomination [8 November 1995].)


One of the fondest expressions around is that
we can't be the world's policeman. But guess
who gets called when suddenly someone needs
a cop?
--Colin L. Powell (1937- )
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [1989-1993]
and Secretary of State [2001-2005].

-

We ought to change the sign on the Statue of Liberty
to read, 'This time around send us your rich.'
--Felix Rohatyn (1928- )
Austrian-born American businessman.
Felix Rohatyn was a governor of the New York Stock Exchange, Chairman of the
New York Municipal Authority, and US Ambassador to France.

We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
--Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)
American Democratic statesman and President [1933-1945].
"Fireside Chat" radio broadcast [29 December 1940].

-

If a nation shows that it knows how to act with
decency in industrial and political matters, if
it keeps order and pays its obligations, then it
need fear no interference from the United States.
Brutal wrongdoing, or an impotence which results
in a general loosening of the ties of a civilized
society, may finally require intervention by some
civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere
the United States cannot ignore this duty; but it
remains true that our interests, and those of our
southern neighbors, are in reality identical.
--Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
American Republican statesman and President [1901-1909].
Letter to The Cuba Society of New York [20 May 1904],
quoted in Edmund Morris, _Theodore Rex_.


Everything is un-American that tends either to government
by a plutocracy, or government by a mob. To divide along
the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American. All
privilege based on wealth, and all enmity to honest men
merely because they are wealthy, are un-American--both
of them equally so. Americanism means the virtues of
courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood--
the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy
America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price,
safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living,
and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
--Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
American Republican statesman and President [1901-1909].
In a letter to S. Stanwood Menken [10 January 1917].

-

America will believe it her duty to concern herself
with the rest of the world, but she will not do this
without being paid for it. The payment she will
demand will not be material but moral. No country
is more convinced than this one that she is right,
or is more arrogant in her moral superiority. If she
intervenes in the affairs of the world it will be to
impose her ideas, and she will consider her inter-
vention a blessing for lost and suffering humanity.
The prospect is cheerless. Whether run by the
American left or right, the world will in either case
suffer a singular form of tyranny, at once biblical
and materialistic.
--Raoul de Roussy de Sales
French journalist and historian.
_The Making of Tomorrow_ [1943] "7 July 1942"

America's greatest enemy is not from without, but
from within, and that enemy is hate: hatred of races,
peoples, classes and religions. If America ever dies,
it will be not through conquest but suicide.
--Fulton John Sheen (1895-1979)
Roman Catholic bishop; the first popular
preacher to appear on television.
_Preface To Religion_ [1946]

I'd rather have the United States be the world's
policeman than the Soviet Union be the world's
jailer.
--attributed to Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918- )
Russian novelist.

I like to be in America!
O.K. by me in America!
Ev'rything free in America
For a small fee in America!
--Stephen Sondheim (1930- )
American musical theater lyricist and composer.
"America" [1957 song]

In the United States there is more space where
nobody is than where anybody is. That is what
makes America what it is.
--Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
American writer.
In _The Geographical History of America_ [1936].

For centuries America and Americans have been the target for
opinions--Asian, African, and European --only these opinions
have been called criticism, observation, or, God help us, evaluation.
Unfortunately, Americans have allowed these foreign opinions the
value set on them by their authors. ... This essay is not an attempt
to answer or refute the sausage-like propaganda which is ground
out in our disfavor. It cannot even pretend to be objective truth. ...
But at least it is informed by America, and inspired by curiosity,
impatience, some anger, and a passionate love of America and
the Americans. For I believe that out of the whole body of our past,
out of our differences, our quarrels, our many interests and directions,
something has emerged that is itself unique in the world: America--
complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous,
unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.
--John Ernst Steinbeck (1902-1968)
American novelist.
Forward to _America and Americans_ [1966].

The home of the homeless all over the earth.
--Alfred Billings Street (1811-1881)
American poet, lawyer, and librarian.

America, my friends, is the only country in
the world actually founded on liberty-- the
only one. People went to America to be free.
--Margaret Thatcher (1925- )
British conservative stateswoman and Prime Minister [1979-1990].

-

If I were asked. . . to what the singular prosperity and growing
strength of that people [the Americans] ought mainly to be
attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.
--Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
French historian and politician.
_Democracy in America_ [1840], pt. 2, bk.3, ch. 12


There are today two great peoples on the earth who,
setting off from different points of departure, seem
to be advancing towards the same goal: they are the
Russians and the Anglo-Americans ... Each of them
seems to be summoned by a secret plan of
Providence one day to hold in its hands the
destinies of half the world.
--Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
French historian and politician.
_Democracy in America_ [1835] bk I, pt. 2, ch. 10

-

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small
room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over
a chair.
--attributed to Arnold Toynbee
(1889-1975) English historian.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
--John Updike (1932 - )
American novelist and short-story writer.
_Problems and Other Stories_ [1980]

I like the German fir-woods, in green battalions drilled
I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing fountains filled;
But, oh, to take your hand, my dear, and ramble for a day
In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her way!
..Oh, it's home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that's westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
--Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)
American clergyman, educator, and author.

-

...teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date
on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize
it with pride and joy: 1492.

The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was
discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were
already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That
was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and
kill them.

--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007)
American novelist and short-story writer.
_Breakfast of Champions_ [1973], ch. 1

-

There is a rank due to the United States, among
nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely
lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire
to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we
desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful
instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be
known that we are at all times ready for war.
--George Washington (1732-1799)
American general and commander-in-chief of the
colonial armies in the American Revolution [1775-1783]
and first president of the United States [1789-1797].

-

I am lost in wonder and amazement. It is not a
country but a world. . . . The West I liked best.
The people are stronger, fresher, saner than the
rest. They are ready to be taught. The surroundings
of nature have instilled in them a love of the
beautiful, which but needs development and
direction. The East I found a feeble reflex of
Europe; in fact, I may say that I was in
America for a month before I saw an American.
--Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Anglo-Irish dramatist and poet.
Quoted in the "St. Louis Daily Democrat"
[26 February 1882].


The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious.
The Bostonians take their learning too sadly:
culture with them is an accomplishment rather
than an atmosphere; their 'Hub,' as they call
it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort
of monster-shop, full of bustle and bores.
Political life at Washington is like political
life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing
for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully
provincial; and though one can dine in New
York, one could not dwell there.
--Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Anglo-Irish dramatist and poet.
_The American Invasion_ in the
"Court and Society Review" [March 1887].


Please do not shoot the pianist.
He is doing his best.
{printed notice in a dancing saloon}
--anon., in Oscar Wilde
_Impressions of America_ "Leadville" [c.1882-1883]

-

The business of America is not business. Neither
is it war. The business of America is justice,
and securing the blessings of liberty.
--George F. Will (1941- )
American columnist.
"A Land Fit for Heroes",
"Time" [11 March 1991]

If the US is an empire it's a very odd
one: Countries where it has troops such
as Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and
Germany suggest they are unhappy about
that and the response is, 'OK," and an
offer to leave. Nero and Napoleon would
have been appalled.
--R. James Woolsey (1941- )
Director of the CIA (1993-1995).
"We Are All Jews,"
http://info.jpost.com/C003/Supplements/FSB/030926/art.04.html

America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot
where all the races of Europe are melting and
re-forming!
--Israel Zangwill (1864-1926)
Jewish spokesman and writer.
_The Melting Pot_ [1908]



TOPICAL

I know that some of the stuff we've been
doing hasn't been explained real well, so
I thought I'd take a shot. Listen to me
real good, now. We, the United States of
America, don't want to kill you or anyone
else, nor do we want to piss you or anyone
else off (well, maybe France). We'd prefer
that everyone just keep sending us their
smartest students and hardest workers while
buying our soft drinks and watching our
action movies. However, we are going to
defend ourselves against attack and take
steps to keep ourselves from being attacked.
We also reserve the right to stick up for
people who are getting slaughtered for no
good reason at all. Don't expect any
different. Ever. [...]

So, remember. We don't want to kill anyone and
we'll try hard not to, but if we have to defend
ourselves we will. Don't think that any bad stuff
that may happen is intentional. It's not. We're
just as likely to !!!! up as anyone else, we just
do it with bigger ordnance.

--William Burton [7 September 2002],

-

To Americans, self-defense means more than
just striking back when they are attacked.
They take a more pro-active approach,
seeking to confront threats as they develop.
Hostile nations should be very wary of the
temptation to use the threat of military
action against American interests to
blackmail the United States. Likewise,
providing aid and comfort to America's
enemies will more than likely attract
unwanted attention.

Despite this pro-active stance towards
self-defense, Americans do not see
themselves as imperialists. They seek
engagement with the rest of the world,
but not domination. Indeed, they will
proudly tell you that after the Second
World War, when their armed forces
occupied much of Western Europe and
most of the islands of the Pacific,
they gave it all back.

Except Guam.

--L.T. Smash,
http://www.lt-smash.us/archives/001441.html#001441

-

American Generosity
_The Wall Street Journal_
May 13, 2006

When the U.N.'s Jan Egeland called the U.S. "stingy" with foreign aid a couple of years back, he was playing to a stereotype promoted by those who want governments to redistribute global incomes. He was also wrong, and now we have the data to prove it.

The Hudson Institute recently released the 2006 Index of Global Philanthropy, the first comprehensive report on international aid by private institutions and individuals in the U.S. The index shows that millions of Americans give to the world's poor at a rate that is anything but "stingy." Voluntary giving by Americans dwarfs government aid the world over.

The assaults on U.S. generosity derive from a view that government assistance is the only aid that matters. Even on that count, the U.S. is far from miserly. In 2004 Washington provided official development aid of $19.7 billion, more than runners-up Japan and France put together. Add the benefits of American innovation and military sacrifice and other First World nations are even further behind.

Then there is the charity from the U.S. private sector. In 2004, the latest year for which many numbers are available, Americans -- through schools, religious institutions, companies, foundations and families -- gave at least $71 billion to the developing world, more than three times what the government gave. The index authors say it is impossible to capture all giving, so if they've erred it's on the low side.

Almost $10 billion came from private groups, $4.5 billion from religious organizations and nearly $5 billion from corporations. But perhaps the most impressive private giving, and arguably the most efficient, is in the category of individual remittances, which the index puts at $47 billion in 2004. According to the authors, "The massive amounts of money sent home by immigrants and temporary workers -- involving little or no overhead and filling people's basic needs directly -- is changing the landscape of development and donor agencies."

These dollars bypass bureaucrats to serve development. Which makes it odd that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development doesn't count it in its annual Development Assistance Committee Report, which lists financial flows to the developing world.

Official aid promoters will respond to this good news about private giving with their standard complaint that American foreign aid is still too low as a fraction of GDP. If development depended on government transfer payments, no number would ever be high enough. That's why we are heartened to hear that next year the index hopes to expand by measuring the effectiveness of private aid.

Hudson's Carol Adelman says the index has been well received. "Many of the private organizations are stunned because they have heard for so long that America is stingy. They knew that American giving was large and important but they had no idea it was so big." That's OK, neither did the U.N.

-

The Power of the Pentagon
By MAX BOOT
_The Wall Street Journal_
May 17, 2006

Any book with a subtitle that refers to "The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power" bears a heavy burden of proof -- to show that the exercise of American power has indeed been a disaster. This would seem a difficult case to make, given that over the past six decades the U.S. has presided over an unprecedented expansion of free governments and free markets across the world, kept the peace in Europe and East Asia after centuries of disastrous conflicts, and defeated such monstrous regimes as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Soviet Russia and Baathist Iraq. The true disaster would have been if, as in 1914 and 1939, America had failed to exercise its power.

James Carroll does not bother to confront any of these obvious points in his lengthy diatribe against the "garrison state." An erstwhile Catholic priest turned moralistic writer (of novels, nonfiction books and a Boston Globe column), he simply assumes as his first principle that American power is indefensible and then unspools a long narrative of America's conduct since the 1940s to illustrate the point. His case should be familiar to anyone who has read anything by such far-left luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Jonathan Schell, or Seymour Hersh. It goes like this:

The bombing of German and Japanese cities, culminating with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a war crime akin to the Holocaust. Thus "America's mid-twentieth century initiation into world power was as much in the state of mortal sin as its birth in slavery had been." America continued sinning by building more atomic bombs and targeting them on the Soviet Union. Good ole Joe Stalin simply wanted to live and let live -- if only we had let him. "By portraying Stalin and his system as warmongering monsters," Mr. Carroll writes, early hard-liners like George Kennan and James Forrestal "helped push the Kremlin in that direction."

Mr. Carroll spends an inordinate amount of space on Forrestal's tortured psyche -- the first secretary of defense committed suicide in 1949 -- to suggest that anyone else who hated and feared communism must have been equally deranged. Richard Nixon, among many others, is portrayed as a warmongering nut job. Ronald Reagan, by contrast, was a warmongering simpleton whose role in the fall of the Berlin Wall was minimal. How original. Mr. Carroll bemoans "Reagan's childlike inability ever to have mastered the broken logic of nuclear deterrence" -- after having spent many pages claiming that deterrence was illogical and immoral.

A few themes emerge from this impassioned narrative. One is that America can do no right. Mr. Carroll has the gall to castigate President Gerald Ford for imposing "a punitive embargo" on Vietnam "in violation of America's obligations under the Paris Accords" -- without ever mentioning that the sanctions were a wan response to Hanoi's invasion of the south, a much bigger violation of the accords.

Another theme is that war, at least as waged by the U.S., is never justified. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait should have been "handled as a diplomatic crisis." The 9/11 attacks should have been addressed with "an internationally coordinated law enforcement effort."

A third theme is that the true heroes of the Cold War were not the soldiers, spies and statesmen who fought communist expansionism but antiwar activists -- like, well, Mr. Carroll -- who tried to impede their efforts. In a book full of too many offensive statements to count perhaps the most infuriating is Mr. Carroll's comparison of the nuclear-freeze movement in the West with the Solidarity movement in Poland. He actually labels nuclear-freeze organizer Randall Forsberg "an American Walesa" -- as if it were just as courageous to protest in Central Park as it was behind the Iron Curtain.

Such tortured logic pervades "House of War." Mr. Carroll wants to argue that in the post-1945 era "the Pentagon usurped controls over the levers of the American economy and culture, over science, academia, and politics." This is belied by two inconvenient realities. First, there is no "Pentagon viewpoint" -- different members of different military branches often have conflicting views, as Mr. Carroll notes on many occasions. Second, whatever the views inside the Pentagon, the major decisions about war have usually been made elsewhere. For instance, in the 1990s, senior generals opposed humanitarian interventions in places like Bosnia and Kosovo, but the Clinton administration acted anyway. Mr. Carroll blithely waves away this problem by proclaiming that "the arrival of 'human rights' as the latest justification for war represented another triumph for the Pentagon." Huh?

The most interesting parts of this dreary (if smoothly written) tirade concern the author's difficult relationship with his late father, an Air Force general who was the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1960s. Unfortunately, Mr. Carroll already told that story in a previous tome, "An American Requiem" (1996). Here he incessantly cites his parentage and his childhood visits to the Pentagon to lend unwarranted authority to antimilitary and anti-American pronouncements of the sort that undoubtedly drove his dad batty. "I have the eyes of a soldier's son, through which, unfortunately, I see everything," he writes with mock humility. (Note that "unfortunately" -- oh, what a curse omniscience is.) In reality he sees nothing beyond his own ideological blinders.

Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the forthcoming "War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today" (Gotham Books).

-----

gallimaufry gal-uh-MAW-free, noun:
A medley; a hodgepodge.
Syn.: jumble, olla podrida, olio, salmagundi, potpourri.
Ex.: Today bilingual programs are conducted in a gallimaufry
of around 80 tongues, ranging from Spanish to Lithuanian to
Micronesian Yapese.
--Ezra Bowen, "For Learning or Ethnic Pride?"
_Time_ [8 July 1985]


end page



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