The Land of the Large and Charitable Air
The essay argues that places become most meaningful when they embody states of mind, moral traits, and collective ideals. Boston, like Babylon, Zion, and the points of the compass, is more than a location: it is a psychological and symbolic reality. The author imagines a “Psychological Geography” that would chart communities by temperament, doctrines, fads, assumptions of superiority, and characteristic products. Such a study is especially needed for Americans, who too often interpret their country through borrowed European analogies. They should learn to see national life directly rather than mistake every political danger for Cesarism, every popular movement for the French Revolution, or every social distinction for Old-World class divisions. To think nationally requires imagination, because a nation joins landscape, people, history, and ideals into a single spiritual fact. Other nations readily call forth symbolic landscapes: Israel is desert-born, Greece evokes its islands, England its island security, and Spain its sombre severity. America is harder to picture as a whole because its regions differ so widely. New England’s rocks, rills, meeting-houses, and Pilgrim tradition cannot contain the experience of North Dakota’s stone-free fields or Texas’s exuberant independence. A truly national vision must encompass cities, valleys, the Mississippi’s immense fertility, prairies, mountains, and the lands beyond them. America’s unifying atmosphere is “the large and charitable air.” The decisive American state of mind is the West. It is not simply a direction but a feeling of movement, opportunity, incompleteness, and freedom from restraint. Its attention is fixed on the future rather than the past; it honors expectations as elsewhere people honor accomplished facts. The Westerner imagines towns, suburbs, industries, and fortunes before they fully exist, finding prophecy even in a plank sidewalk leading toward an unrealized suburb. This spirit survives changes of surroundings, as shown by an Oxford don who remembers Dodge City as a place of incomparable civic newness. Critics may call newer regions crude, raw, and without distinction, but the essay contends that their lack of old exceptionalities permits serious attention to the welfare of ordinary people. Railroads, stockyards, cornfields, and unfinished buildings matter because of the human energy, ambitions, and visions attached to them. America is a fresh arena in which people visibly make roads, cities, and fortunes while the continent impresses its scale upon their imaginations. Chicago, unlike cities whose beginnings are obscured, still contains people who have witnessed and made its growth; its self-consciousness is therefore natural. The charge that the Western American is merely a boastful materialist or worshiper of wealth is rejected. Making money and talking eagerly about it are not the same as revering wealth. In mining communities, sudden millionaires are treated as players who have won a difficult sport, not as beings made morally superior by property. The rich man who wants public esteem must show what he will do with his fortune, and wealth is often directed toward art, science, religion, and other public purposes. Material things are not final values when they remain instruments of human purposes; the souls of men, unlike the commodities condemned in Babylon, are not for sale. The Westerner’s expansive speech arises from sincerity, creative confidence, and identification with a growing community. He speaks beyond present facts because he expects reality to catch up with his vision. His delight in bigness is not necessarily vulgar: immensity has its own poetry, as the ocean differs from a brook. In necessities, abundance matters. The West’s glory lies in extending to the many what elsewhere are luxuries for the few, including higher education. Its ideal is to provide generously for human needs and future growth. America has shown this moral amplitude most clearly in education and charity. Yet it still faces searching questions: it lacks a distinctive art adequate to the land, a great church organizing spiritual freedom, sufficiently large statesmen, and industrial leaders who unite enterprise with courage, loyalty, and service. The Republic may be “weighed in the balances and found wanting,” but this is not a prophecy of ruin; it is a challenge to renewed effort. Hope rests in young Americans who recognize national evils without whining, scolding, or foretelling disaster. Animated by the pioneer spirit, they attack democratic abuses with cheerful iconoclasm and find exhilaration in remaking their country.
By Samuel M. Crothers · First published 1934 · Genre: Literary Essay, American Cultural Criticism, Social Commentary · 8,276 words
First lines
Are you not constrayned (my fellow Academicks) to subscribe to this my opinion that the knowledge of no nation is so necessary as the searching out of a man's own Country and the manners thereof and the right understanding of that Commonweale whereof each one of us is a part and member. The Lamie that are a certaine kind of monsters are laughed at in the Poeticall Fables in that they were so blinde at home that they could not see their own affaires, could foresee nothing; but when they were once gone from home they were accounted the most sharpe-sighted and curious searchers of all others.... [Are not they] very ridiculous when as by taking long voyages unto farre remote people, after they have curiously sought out all matters amongst them are ignorant of the principall things at home and know not what is contayned within the precincts of their country, and are reckoned altogether strangers on their native soile? -- CORYAT'S _Crudities_.
Similar titles
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Genres
- Literary Essay — The work is a sustained reflective prose essay, developing an argument through observation, quotation, analogy, anecdote, and rhetorical commentary rather than through fictional plot.
- American Cultural Criticism — It examines American national character, especially the imaginative, moral, and social meanings attached to the United States, the West, wealth, education, charity, and public life.
- Social Commentary — The essay comments on class assumptions, material success, philanthropy, democratic habits, civic growth, popular attitudes, and the responsibilities of citizens and institutions.
- Political Essay — Its discussion of national consciousness, democracy, statesmanship, leadership, reform, civic responsibility, and American public ideals gives it a strongly political dimension.
Tags
American nationalism · psychological geography · regional identity · the American West · frontier spirit · Manifest Destiny · continental America · New England and the West · Boston symbolism · Chicago growth · prairie towns · Dodge City
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The Land of the Large and Charitable Air is listed on Textopian as an essay by Samuel M. Crothers, dated 1934 CE.
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- Work type: Essay
- Author: Samuel M. Crothers
- Date: 1934 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Literary Essay, American Cultural Criticism, Social Commentary, Political Essay, Philosophical Essay
- Length: 8,276 words
- Structure: 1 section, 87 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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