Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter II AMERICAN IDEALS: LIBERTY AND INITIATIVE An Americanization program cannot progress satisfactorily until common agreement is reached in regard to the meaning of Americanism. The fifty-seven varieties of Americanism must be analyzed. Their constructive elements must be unified; the rest must be discarded. The new tendencies of the hour in Americanism must be distinguished and evaluated. We, the current makers of Americanism, need to become thoroughly grounded in its history, nature, and potentialities. Americanism is composed of ideals and practices, and oftentimes the practices have fallen far below or even contradicted the ideals. The problem of bringing American practices into line with American ideals is essentially the problem of Americanizing the native- born. This question will be discussed in detail in Chapter VII. Our first task is to analyze American ideals. The four groups of these ideals, which will be presented in order in this chapter and Chapters III, IV. and V, are these: (i) liberty and initiative; (2) unron and co-operation; (3) democracy and justice; and (4) internationalism and brotherhood. Liberty and initiative have constituted the most striking aspects of American life and character. It wasthese traits which dominated the 120 men who braved the sailing vessel perils of an unknown Atlantic and took up settlement on May 14, 1607 on the James River, courageously facing malaria, Indian hostility, gaunt famine and rampant death. Since the migration of the Virginia colonists was motivated partially by the desire to seek the reported fabulous wealth and the new lands of America, the liberty-loving spirit did not come to political expression until 1618, when the Virginians secured the right to elect their own legislative assembly and thus to…
