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Show iin WASHiNGT0N i'Li'7pV Wler Sheod What About 'Americanism'? WNU Washington Bureau 621 Union Trust Building, HOW wide and how deep is your Americanism? Will it embrace our new concept of national life, including in-cluding the good neighbor policy and tolerance here at home, as fixed by our foreign policy? Does your Americanism contemplate contem-plate protection of your religious beliefs be-liefs by recognizing the right of others oth-ers to their religious beliefs? Does it tolerate and respect the rights and opinions of others? Does it follow the basic chart we have set down for world peace and international life . . . that world peace and the good neighbor policy cannot succeed unless the peoples of the world WILL that we have peace and live together as good neighbors? These questions have been raised by the senate hearings and debate on the ratification of the charter of the United Nations. They were raised also on the first pronouncement pronounce-ment of James F. Byrnes, new secretary sec-retary of state, after he took his oath of office. He said: "The making of an enduring peace will depend on something more than skilled diplomacy, something more than paper treaties, something more even than the best charter the wisest statesmen can draft. Important as Is diplomacy, important as are the. peace settlements and the basic charter of world peace, these cannot succeed unless backed by the will of the peoples of different lands, not only to nave peace, dui to live together as good neighbors." And that means that we must start hcrp at home at being good neighbors, neigh-bors, one to another. We were an intolerant, bigoted nation 26 years ago. We kicked the Versailles treaty and the Covenant of the League of Nations overboard. Our Americanism then was in the narrow sense ... we thought we could live within ourselves, self-sufficient . . . apart from the rest of the world. As a result of this attitude atti-tude of intolerance, all sorts oi "isms" and movements grew up in our national life . . . neighbor was arrayed against neighbor . . . social distrust and unrest festered. "Today," concluded the new secretary sec-retary of state, "there can be no doubt that the peoples of this war-ravaged war-ravaged earth want to live in a free and peaceful world. But the supreme task of statesmanship the world over is to help them to understand under-stand that they can have peace and freedom only if they tolerate and respect the rights of others to opinions, opin-ions, feelings and ways of life which they do not and cannot share." Postwar Changes These postwar years will see many changes in the national life of our nation. Returning veterans, seared by war and broadened in their contact with other peoples, will have a strong influence on the affairs af-fairs of the country . . ; decentralization decentraliza-tion of population . . . and the mass movement of population as a result of war dislocations are already felt . . . the political pattern of the nation in changing . . . old political lines, such as once divided the North and the South, are being wiped out and recent events point to a new lineup which will see the great centers cen-ters of population and the small towns and rural areas divided by widely divergent viewpoints. A generation ago the most outspoken out-spoken voices of liberalism came from the rural sections of the West and Midwest . . , Beveridge, Nnrris, LaFollette Sr., Bryan, Walsh of Montana, Kenyon of Iowa, Olson ni Minnesota and others . . . . v. the reactionaries and so-called c servatives represented the East ;. the populous centers of the Nor i Today the pendulum swings the :.: er way with representatives, generally, gen-erally, from the West and Midwest the pillars of conservative thought, while such men as Aiken of Vermont, Ver-mont, White and Brewster of Maine, Saltonstall of Massachusetts, To-bey To-bey of New Hampshire, and others from the larger cities become the supporters of liberal thought In the cities, the influence of labor unions, no doubt, has caused a swing from conservative to liberal and given impetus for reform from the industrial East and North. And so the picture presented indicates the future will see the mass thinking of the large areas of population pitted pit-ted against the individual thought of the small towns and the rural areas. The purest form of Americanism today is found in the rural sections of the nation, and if the present tendency ten-dency toward decentralization of J population , and industry is carried through, as It will be, the influence of the small town and rural comma- j nity will be felt more and more on the national life of the nation. The experiences following the last war. should be a warning that there is no place today in this pure Amer- icanism for the forms of intolerance1 and bigotry which polluted the body of our social and political life during thai period. j |