Tuesday, October 14, 2014

We are all of us immigrants in the industrial world


Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery; cited in Ronald Steele, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980), p. 80:
We are all of us immigrants in the industrial world, and we have no authority to lean upon. We are an uprooted people, newly arrived, and nouveau riche. As a nation we have all the vulgarity that foes with that, all the scattering of soul. The modern man is not yet settled in his world. It is big. The evidence is everywhere: the amusements of the city that jokes that pass for jokes; the blare that stands for beauty, the folklore of Broadway, the feeble and apologetic pulpits, the cruel standard of success, raucous purity. We make love to ragtime and we die to it. We are blow hither and thither lie litter before the winds. Our days are lump of experience.


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