ABSTRACT
When our society was established this “natural” process of Americanization continued in its own unobserved fashion, defying the social aesthetic and political assumptions of our political leaders and tastemakers alike. This, as I say, was the vernacular process, and in the days when our leaders still looked to England and the Continent for their standards of taste, the vernacular stream of our culture was creating itself out of whatever elements it found useful, including the Americanized culture of the slaves. So in this sense the culture of the United States has always been more democratic and American than the social and political institutions in which it was emerging.
