The consequences of the Declaration are now beginning to be understood. The way we took the land and left it, or held it until it failed us; the way we brought men of all nations here and let them move, as we moved, over the face of a continent; our absorption in our own capacities and our persistent endeavor to create national well-being for every man; our parallel indifference to our fellowmen, our State, and our God; our wealth and our endless optimism and our fulfilment of Democracy by technology are some of the basic elements in our lives. Whoever neglects them, and their meaning, in practical life, will not ever have us wholeheartedly on his side; whoever starts with these, among other, clues to discover what America is, will at least be on the right way. All we have to do in the war will rise out of all we have done in our whole history; our past is in the air we breathe, it runs in our veins, it is what we are.
CHAPTER X[ToC]
Popularity and Politics
There are some consequences of our history so conspicuous and so significant that they deserve to be separated from the rest and examined briefly by themselves.
In the United States every week 34 million families listen on an average four hours a day to the radio; 90 million individual movie admissions are bought; 16 million men and women go bowling at least once, probably oftener; thousands of couples dance in roadhouses, juke-joints, and dance halls; in winter 12 million hunting licenses are issued; millions of copies of the leading illustrated magazines are sold; and, in normal times, some ten or fifteen million families take their cars and go driving.
These are not mass enterprises; they are popular enterprises; there are others: mass-attendance at sport, or smaller, but steady, attendance at conventions, lodge meetings and lectures. For the most part, all these can be divided into sport, games, fun; the search for information in entertainment; and entertainment by mass-communication.
Sport is pleasant to think about; after all the scoldings we have had because we like to watch athletic events (just as the ancient Greeks did), it is gratifying to report the great number of people who are actually making their own fun. The same ignoble but useful desire for money which has so often served us has now built bowling alleys, dance halls and tennis courts, so that we are doing more sports ourselves. Sport began to come into its own after Populism and Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal; it is therefore not anti-social and even withstood the prosperity of Harding and Coolidge.