ABSTRACT
The latest glass egg of American politics is the word "Americanism". As an issue "Americanism" will not stand much analysis. Stripped of its confusion, its rhetorical question-begging, and its rather casuistical attempt to appropriate an emotion for party purposes, what remains is the thing which Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt described as the "heroic mood". It is a vague sense that in a world crisis America should be playing a more decisive and affirmative role. What the role should be has never been defined in terms of statesmanship. It is a civilized and useful feeling, one which directed by a trained intelligence would do much for the world. But it is not "Americanism". It is what Americanism might come to be. Americanism as an historic thing is the America of fact, the America which exists in New York and Pittsburgh and Lincoln, Nebraska, where idealism is at once a redeeming hope and a brutal mockery.
