We cannot Americanize America worthily by sentimentalizing and moralizing history. When the best schools are expressly renouncing the questionable duty of teaching patriotism by means of history, it is not the time to force shibboleth upon the immigrant. This form of Americanization has been heard because it appealed to the vestiges of our old sentimentalized and moralized patriotism. This has so far held the field as the expression of the new American’s new devotion. The inflections of other voices have been drowned. They must be heard. We must see if the lesson of the war has not been for hundreds of these later Americans a vivid realization of their trans-nationality, a new consciousness of what America means to them as a citizenship in the world. It is the vague historic idealisms which have provided the fuel for the European flame. Our American ideal can make no progress until we do away with this romantic gilding of the past. All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community. No mere doubtful triumphs of the past, which redound to the glory of only one of our trans-nationalities, can satisfy us. It must be a future America, on which all can unite, which pulls us irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more warmly. To make real this striving amid dangers and apathies is work for a younger intelligentsia of America. Here is an enterprise of integration into which we can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which should make us, if the final menace ever came, not weaker, but infinitely strong. FRAGMENT OF A NOVEL Gilbert was almost six years old when they all--Mother, Olga, and baby--went to live with Garna in her tall white house. And his expanding life leaped to meet the wide world, with its new excitements and pleasures. It was like a rescue, like getting air when one is smothering. Here was space and a new largeness in things. Gilbert was freed forever from the back-street. Garna’s house was ridiculous but it was not despicable. For your meals you went down into a dark basement dining-room, behind a blacker kitchen. And the outhouse, buried in Virginia creepers and trumpet-vine, was down a long path bordered by grape-vines, where you went fearfully at night. Gilbert was afraid of this dark, long after he was old enough to be ashamed that his mother must come with him and stand protectingly outside. In winter, the stars shone at him with icy brilliancy, and the vines made a thick menacing mass around him.