The Shaping of the American Tradition

Abstract

Wf T TE Americans are now passing through a period of political and cultural conservatism quite without precedent in all our history. Wearied by a quarter-century of reform and adventure, we would like to rest for a spell and take new bearings. Menaced by a frightful foe, we are testily defensive about ideals and institutions foe despises. Raised by toil, imagination, and circumstance to unexampled material well-being, we are behaving like men with something substantial to be conservative about. Radicalism is out of fashion and liberalism out of office, and there is more talk of American heritage than of American future. The mood of this nation, which considers itself an eminent success and finds itself in imminent danger, is deeply conservative., One of telltale marks of our conservative mood, as it is of any genuine conservatism, is an intense devotion to tradition. Such devotion is not a new or unusual attitude for Americans to adopt. Despite our youth as a nation, or more probably because of it, we have always been fond of rituals, symbols, and slogans that bind us to legendary dead, and our present troubles serve only to stiffen this devotion. Never has it seemed so necessary to invoke example of founding fathers; never have the American dream and the American seemed so exactly synonymous; never have Americans felt so irresistible an urge to celebrate their tradition. Men may celebrate a tradition in many ways. At one extreme, they may be its slaves, bowing down before it in adoration and letting their every action be dictated by those whom they hail as its high priests. At other, they may be its exploiters, using it cynically as a cloak to cover up actions that do it violence. The only kind of devotion to American tradition that becomes free men is a healthy compound of piety and curiosity, of