In truth all these mid-century American heretics were not heretics at
all in relation to really stupefying and perverting American tradition.
They were sturdily rebellious against all manner of respectable methods,
ideas, and institutions, but none of them dreamed of protesting against
the real enemy of American intellectual independence. They never dreamed
of associating the moral and intellectual emancipation of the individual
with the conscious fulfillment of the American national purpose and with
the patient and open-eyed individual and social discipline thereby
demanded. They all shared the illusion of the pioneers that somehow a
special Providential design was effective on behalf of the American
people, which permitted them as individuals and as a society to achieve
their purposes by virtue of good intentions, exuberant enthusiasm, and
enlightened selfishness. The New World and the new American idea had
released them from the bonds in which less fortunate Europeans were
entangled. Those bonds were not to be considered as the terms under
which excellent individual and social purposes were necessarily to be
achieved.
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