The Waterbury Democrat. [volume] (Waterbury, Conn.) 1917-1946, 1940-10-01

the product now OF q melting pot
that did not melt.
1t may be so, but sometimes as an
old American have felt almost re-
buked in my own casual accept
ance of my citizenship by the eager,
passionate allegiance of new Amer
leans TO the meaning Of this land.
Among the new and the old Amer
leans undoubtedly there are traitors
and grafters, profiteers, troublemak-
erS and termites. The past did not
lack them; the present should not
be incapable of dealing with them.
But the world is different now,
they tell me. You could wait for the
growth of a fighting unity once, now
it must be fllll-grown in an instant.
1t is true. But we made speed here.
We have made it not only on wheels
but on wires-without wires. Some
times now we swoop in decision like
a dive bomber. We may be quickly
wrong, but that is not lack of unity.
That is somebody's minority opin-
ion. Maybe mine.
But today decision must not only
be swift in emergency, it must be
also continuous, implacable, main
tanned. There was a continuity
which ran IL years from the cleo
ton of Harding to the defeat of
Hoover continuity in the Amer
| lean mind which ran at least from
1920 to the decision making disaster
in the fall of 1929. 1t has been eight
years since the first electoral deter
mination upon the New Deal Now
in almost unopposed unity, the deci-
sion upon military and naval secur-
ity has been made. Who expects
that mood to change soon?
America babel, an ant hill over
turned? I have heard some of the
voices. AS one of the ants / have
met others in good many different
parts of the hill.
There are differences certainly be-
tween man cutting pulp in a
Maine woodlot and a man on an
automobile assembly line in Dear
born. There may even be an anger
between an old Yankee and an
Irishman in Massachusetts, even
blood between some southern white
men and a Negro neighbor. We are
people ready with our epithets
everywhere.
But America! That's different. We
let the politicians and the profess
sional patriots make the speeches
about it. We don't want to go to
war. Neither did grandfather in
spite of all the things he said after
he got back. We don't think about
ourselves as heroes. We certainly
don't think about ourselves as the
saviors of civilization. Wed rather
| go to the movies than the war.
But we are Americans and all
that that has ever meant in any
American time. A little bit of honest
history beside the current fears, I
think, will show that we never faced
or fought a war with anything like
the unity which already Is erected
in this land.
1 1t isn't in the newspapers, it does
not come over the radio. But it Is
out there in the country. It is in the
bank and the labor union. It's on the
porches of the country clubs, and in
the pool rooms and the Sunday
school classes. Not in one more than
the others. ..
To hear 1t where it is it often still
sounds like quarrel, as argumenta-
tive individualistic,- and dogmatic as
the pioneers were, as the first pa
triotS were. But those who hear only
confusion in it have never heard
America speaking.
Gladys HaSty Carroll tells what
the American way Of life means
to her, and what she thinks it
means to all Of us, in the next
article of this series on "Our
Country"