principle. Modern conveniences appear as signs of degeneracy to them; and the boy who leaves home to go to the city is still their most popular theme of tragedy." It did not occur to Wood that a wholehearted celebration of rural depopulation was not the best index of a flourishing civilization or that a reluctance "to accept the automobile," in communities threatened with outward migration, did not necessarily indicate the idiocy of rural life.

Upstate New York (the city having been assigned to a separate contributor, as if to signify its special relation to the rest of the state and to the nation as a whole) "lagged" in prison reform, in health care, in progressive legislation. The guardians of moral order censored movies for fear that "young folks might get some suggestion out of harmony with the permanent and fixed morality of 'back home.' " They were making "strenuous efforts" to extend this censorship to books and periodicals. It was still a crime to disseminate information about birth control. "Laws forbidding this and that are as common in New York as they are in Kansas." The universities took no more interest in new ideas than the state legislature. "Free speech does not exist." But industrialism was transforming the state in spite of herself. "It is a popular sport among intellectuals," Woods observed, "to sneer at mere industrial advance," but the gains outweighed the losses. Sentimental critics of technology lamented the "despoiling of Niagara Falls," but the "discovery by scientists that Niagara can be enslaved is producing a dream of human freedom which is mightily affecting New York State today." Niagara was doomed; "but on the other side of the ledger millions of people are breaking from the past."

Taken as a whole, these reports conveyed an unmistakable impression of liberal intellectuals' sense of alienation from America. It was not that the country had failed to "keep faith," as Croly wrote in 1922, "with its original idea of the United States as a Promised Land." The Nation's contributors seldom invoked the "original idea" of America. Most of them wrote as if the "promise of American life" had been a swindle from the beginning. Croly's brand of social criticism implied that whatever democracy Americans managed to achieve in the future would have to rest on their achievements in the past. The authors of "These United States" assumed, on the other hand, that "breaking from the past" was the precondition of cultural and political advance. That Americans refused

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