ABSTRACT
Some of the charges against contemporary American culture one may perhaps be permitted to discount in advance. There are a great many people today, there have been a great many people throughout American history, who have in effect called the United States a Carthage. There are those who argue that during the past half century, despite the spread of good living among its people, it has been headed in the Carthaginian direction; that it has been producing a mass culture in which religion and philosophy languish. The arts are smothered by the barbarian demands of mass entertainment, freedom is constricted by the dead weight of mass opinion, and the life of the spirit wanes. The number of writers of talent who made good incomes by writing for the mass magazines without the sacrifice of an iota of their integrity is much larger than one might assume from the talk of the avant-gardists.
