The Coming of Age of America

The central fact of the twentieth century for America is its involvement with the world, and for a nation bred in the psychic and geographic isolation of a uniform liberal faith this has evoked the dialectic battle of a pair of impulses: the effort to intensify “Americanism,” to retreat to the comfortable womb of ancient fetishes, and the effort to transcend it, to move out maturely into a welter of national experiences where the fetishes have lost their magic. It would be comforting if we could say that this battle has been clear cut, that it has been fought out by Good Men and Bad Men, much as the battle between “conservative” and “radical” has been fought out in the nationalist histories of the Progressive scholars. But this has not been true, if only because the issue itself has been hidden from sight and the men who have grappled with it, as in some Hegelian tale, have served purposes beyond their understanding. The struggle against the constraints of “Americanism,” that peculiar blend of liberalism and nationalism that only America has produced, has been as confused as the record of the twentieth century itself.