1776-1917
MEN, nations, and movements are symbolized by their moments of crisis. The long, tedious, humdrum years of life never get into picture, never fire human imagination; even though those years are the necessary foundations upon which great events rise. So America for nearly a century and a half has been symbolized—at least in European eyes—by that great moment when she rose in the world and asserted her independent status “among the nations of the earth.” The men of ’76 have stood for American valor, American military skill, American statesmanship. Now has come a time when “a decent respect for the nations of mankind requires” that Americans shall again stand for their portrait in history. This time we are standing among the civilized nations not for independence, but for interdependence! Where once we stood for a nation consecrated to freedom, now we stand for a community of nations consecrated to justice. Perhaps when the new portraits are painted in this great hour of crisis all the nations of the world will appear in history with new faces. The soldier of the revolution of ’76; the red-capped liberty girl of France, the conventional John Bull, the German war lord—all will “suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.” And the old portraits that glimpsed the old truth about the old world shall in the new world have but an archaic interest!
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE.