“The reality bequeathed us by centuries of pioneering and its industrial sequel made our great need the creation of a new reality. But only spiritual force can create. Reason directs and conserves. Reason, it follows, was an ideal guide for the progress westward: and remains an ideal preservative for the traditional moods. Pragmatism, in its servility to Reason, is supine before the pioneer reality whose decadent child it is. As a recreative agent of American life – which it claimed to be – it was destined to be sterile: destined to rationalize and fix whatever world was already in existence. The legs of the pioneer had simply become the brains of the philosopher.” (28 – 29)
“America was builded on a dream of fair lands…..in the infinitely harder problems of social and psychic health, the dream persists. We believe in our Star. And we do not believe in our experience. America is filled with poverty, with social disease, with oppression and with physical degeneration. But we do not wish to believe that this is so. We bask in the benign delusion of our perfect freedom. In the same way, the pioneer…..believed only in pressing on. There is this great difference, however. Physical prowess throve best unconsciously and fostered by a dream. Spiritual growth without the facing of the world is an impossible conception.” (31 – 32)
Excerpts from Our America by Waldo Frank published in 1919
alive in the sea of information 