to make the break proved the country's backwardness and immaturity, its hatred of intellectual and artistic freedom, its fear of new ideas, its intolerance of anything that called the old ways into question, its puritanical obsession with sexual purity, and worst of all, its suspicion of intellectuals. Since liberals retained at least a formal allegiance to the idea of democracy, they tended to regard its shortcomings with indignation rather than with Mencken's ironic detachment. They shared his contempt for the majority, however. As they understood it, democracy meant progress, intellectual emancipation, and personal freedom, not popular self-government. Self-government, it appeared, was incompatible with progress.

A handful of contributions to "These United States," in contrast with the rest, defended cultural particularism and local self-government. In New Mexico, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant found a clearly articulated sense of the past that might make it possible to achieve material well-being without "cheapness." She saw the state's mixture of Spanish, Indian, and Anglo-Saxon populations as a model of cultural pluralism. Willa Cather likewise attributed Nebraska's vigor and prosperity to the presence of Bohemian, Scandinavian, and German immigrants. She questioned the "rooted conviction" of "legislators that a boy can be a better American if he speaks only one language than if he speaks two." Like Randolph Bourne, she conceived of cosmopolitanism as a meeting of well-articulated national cultures, not as the subordination of national and ethnic peculiarities to some universal pattern. "It is in that great cosmopolitan country known as the middle West," she wrote, "that we may hope to see the hard molds of American provincialism broken up."

A couple of contributors went so far as to find positive value in provincialism. Maine, according to Robert Herrick, had achieved a "stable condition of comfort, self-reliance, non-parasitic occupation common in the New England of a previous generation, which makes for sturdiness, individualism, and conservatism." Maine lacked the "lighter, the more suave

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