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The rising flood of current news — in the papers, on radio, on television — buried the past. Sociology and social studies, the sciences of unfavorable comparisons, buried history. Americans, forgetting how far they had come, could think only of the present and its extension into the future.
In our day we face the danger that the old-fashioned nationalism (with its corollary isolationism) will become newly respectable. We are in danger of forgetting our oldest American tradition, that the nation exists for the sake of principles that can be shared. This nation first declared its independence in "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." Our uniqueness as a nation may depend on our ability and our power to preserve this paradox. In every generation we must once again declare our independence, while finding new ways to discover and declare our community with the world.
Just after midcentury, there came a new awakening of the American conscience. Like earlier Great Awakenings, it was compounded of religion and an impatience with history. More Americans than ever before were dazzled by the contrast between perfect faith and crude fulfillment. They were less impressed by the fact that Negroes had been emancipated from slavery, that the Constitution proclaimed them equal, than by the fact that Negroes were still enchained by unequal schooling, unequal housing, unequal employment. They were less impressed by the rights that women had won than by the rights still to be won. They became obsessed by the deprivations and in dignities visited on minority Americans, impoverished Americans, imprisoned Americans, mentally retarded Americans.
Frustrated by "victory" in two world wars (and troubled by doubts about the war in Viet Nam), surfeited by an American standard of living, many Americans, then, were tempted to become refugees from the American quest. Some felt that the decent, prosperous life the earlier Americans wanted for their grandchildren had not been achieved by them. But belligerent campaigns for ethnic and racial pride fragmented the nation with new chauvinisms. The fertile pleasures of an immigrant nation were displaced by cold-blooded quotas — unashamed power struggles of Americans against themselves. The struggle for minority rights became a demand for minority veto.
There was a dangerous new temptation to believe that the great national goals could be defined by numbers. Because many of our ills — pollution, inflation and unemployment — had to be described statistically, we were inclined to believe that our goals could be described the same way. We began to be threatened by what the New England Puritans called the sin of pride — belief that all our possibilities had already been revealed to us.
We must have the courage to remain a Byproduct Nation. We must have the courage to be concrete, to specify our projects while still refusing to fence in our national hopes. We must refuse the so lace of ideology and crusading dogmas. While others talk of National Purpose, we must remain a nation in quest, believing that for us there can only be national purposes, that these are newly revealed to every generation, and that our efforts must be devoted no less to discovery than to fulfillment. We must not forget our oldest tradition — that our New World is a reservoir of mystery and of promise.