Sirs:

As one with an active concern for both the past and the
future of the American radical, I was greatly interested in
Mr. Conant's stimulating remarks. May I suggest one or two
limitations in the portrait that he sketched? Is it quite
accurate to say that "the political ideal" of the American
radical "will, of course, be Jefferson"? I should have
thought that the thoroughgoing equalitarianism which Mr.
Conant urges was even better exemplified by Lincoln, and
that Lincoln, with the deeper knowledge of mankind that
comes from suffering, would be our most catholic guide to
the tragic world of which we are part. There seems to be
a tendency among our intellectuals to-day to refer to the
age of Jefferson as "the ground we stand on." We stood
there a century ago, but the terrain now actually under our
feet was more closely discerned, say, by Thorstein Veblen,
in the classic pages on "The Case of America," in his final
book, *Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise*.

And if, as I would agree, Whitman must be the American
radical's poet, he delivered a gospel somewhat different
from Mr. Conant's. Whitman did not regard "organized busi-
ness groups" and "organized labor" with "equal suspicion."
His great word was "solidarity", and by that he meant
identification with the needs and the hopes of the mass of
the people. In the days of the great Pullman strike, for
instance, he knew that industrial democracy could be built
only by the workers themselves and by their representatives
in unions.

Mr. Conant comes closest to Whitman in his belief that
art and culture should be the creation and the property of
the whole society and not of "a special privileged few."
But, at the same time, the most dangerous assumption in his
essay is that the American radical would "not indulge his
taste for 'Old World culture' without a twinge of conscience."
In brief, at the very time when we are learning the fatal
lessons of political isolation, Mr. Conant is arguing for a
new cultural isolation. If Whitman bade a kind of cosmic
farewell to Old World "feudal" culture, Whitman's master,
Emerson, whom Mr. Conant singles out as the American radi-
cal's "prophet", understood such relations more clearly.