The intellectual life of the country was being formed and controlled by English Protestants while the physical American was being built up of a mixture of all of the bloods of the western world and the process is still, I believe, going on. In our political thought the Adamses of New England, with their desire to establish an intellectual aristocracy, are still, I believe, more powerful than Lincoln the artist democrat, and, although by the world in general Whitman is recognized as our one great American poet, I have heard of no general movement to introduce him into our public schools to take the place of the decidedly second rate and imitative New Englander, Longfellow. I am sure that almost everyone nowadays knows that there is at this moment something happening in the spiritual life of the American people. In the first place, there has been for a long time now, and particularly among our younger men and women, a rather intense boredom with the more obvious impulses of our American life. There is a new restlessness that is more and more expressing itself in individual revolution against the social laws and customs of another age. Old gods are dead and we have all gone hunting new gods. Men and women are seeking expression for their lives in new and bolder ways and everywhere among writers the Modern is but the man who is trying to give expression to the newer impulses of our lives in books, in song, in painting and in all the others of the seven arts. You must understand of course that as a nation we have put something across. Coming to America as we did, in reality scattered herds of peoples from dozens of European countries, often not speaking the same language, not having back of us the same traditions, spreading ourselves out rapidly over a vast country, cutting down forests, building railroads and bridges over rivers, mountains and deserts, learning to know each other a little in the process, building cities and towns, making the mines produce, making the land produce, we had for a long time need of all our energies for purely physical purposes. A poet or a painter in California in ’49 or in the middle west in Abraham Lincoln’s day would have been a nuisance and a pest. A man I know was during the war arrested and sent to jail for being opposed to war, and I was discussing his fate with a friend. “He ought to be sent to jail,” said my friend. “He ought to be hung. Any man ought to be hung who doesn’t know any better than to be right when all other decent healthy people in the world are wrong.”