ABSTRACT
Lecturing at the University of Indiana in 1938, the Harvard philosopher Ralph Barton Perry gave a vivid comparison of two famous philosophers, no longer alive, whom he had known at his university. Lecturing at the University of Michigan, Ralph Barton Perry addressed both outlooks in his analysis of American character. That character, he said, was an amalgam of opposites. In “The American Cast of Mind,” Perry placed himself among those writers who related American character to the growth of government and economic planning in the New Deal and the war. It might be supposed that the continental vastness of America, and its unparalleled variety of climate, natural resources, race and creed, would make such an inquiry both impossible and unprofitable. The colonial mind of America was moulded by Protestant Christianity and in the main by Puritan and Evangelical Protestantism.
