"...behind a mask that conceals the real self." 1933

"'Secondary relationships,' the nemesis of early psychologists, suddenly ceased to be destructive. Impersonality no longer led to disintegration of rural mores but to increased freedom for individuals to choose the roles they wished to play. 'Since the major portion of social contacts in the city are of the touch-and-go type, external appearance assumes a pronounced social value,' they [Gist and Halbert, in Urban Society, 1933] concluded; 'because of the exaggerated emphasis on external form, many urban persons live behind a mask that conceals the real self.' City dwellers learned to express their personalities by closely adhering to conventions and customs symbolic of their attitudes to life.

As Gist and Halbert concluded:

"This masquerading, posing, playing a role, gives the outward impression of hypocrisy, and to the rural person, who deliberately avoids artificiality and who cannot understand the basis of urban relationships, the metropolite is hypocritical, untrustworthy, a 'slicker.' Yet withal it is a natural phenomena, a form of social adjustment that has grown out of the exigencies of urban life.'"

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 187.
  

1925 traffic jams in NY, et al

"Traffic controls were frequently as primitive as sewage disposal. With the development of the skyscraper, two to six new 'cities' rose from the streets of the old; massive traffic jams became a daily hazard of urban life. 'Every day the congestion increases,' [Clarence] Stein concluded, ' in spite of traffic policemen, curb setbacks, one-way streets, electric traffic signals.' Subways were equally crowded by 1925."

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 178.
   

organizing play

"Play was no longer a means of exercise but an end in itself, a science conforming to the needs of an urban culture. The rural image of informal outdoor exercise gave way to an urban ideal for town and country alike. In the 1920's, the National Recreation Association found rural play patterns woefully inadequate. Country children had nowhere to go but the open fields and nothing but their own inventiveness to guide them. In 1929, the Association published a rural recreation handbook to bring the social games of urban society to those who still lived in the country."

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 75.
   

RIP American Romantic Style

"Old-fashioned attitudes toward death and burial were conditioned by crowded old-world graveyards in London, where, as one writer put it, corpses are 'buried in standing postures because not room is left to lay them down.' In many such graveyards, the dead were periodically removed to make more room, and in other cases, whole cemeteries were leveled as building sites. The American cemetery seemed by contrast 'a special kind of park with a peculiar dignity and sacredness,' which offered visible signs of grace and immortality with the changing seasons. Romantic melancholy inspired the first 'rural' cemeteries...."

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 67.
   

false values, John Burroughs, 1912

"The show and splendor of great houses, elaborate furnishings, stately halls, oppress me, impose on me. They fix the attention on false values, they set up a false standard of beauty; they stand between me and the real feeders of character and thought."

-- John Burroughs, 1912, "The Gospel of Nature", in Century 84, cited in The Simple Life, Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, David E. Shi, 1985/2007, p. 199.
   

differing equalities: Jefferson's and Putin's

"We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal." V. V. Putin, Op/Ed NYTimes September 11, 2013

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." US Declaration of Independence, July 2/4, 1776, written mainly by Thomas Jefferson.

the 99% in NY in 1765

"Is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one, especially when it is considered that Men frequently owe their wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?" 

-- From a letter to the editor of the New–York Gazette, cited in The Simple Life, Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, David E. Shi, 1985/2007, p. 53.

   
See full text: http://libertystreeteconomics.typepad.com/.a/6a01348793456c970c0167644d814f970b-popup
from http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2012/04/historical-echoes-we-are-the-99-percent-1765-edition.html
 

"...to defend the subordination or even extermination of..."

"...but in a larger sense the Southerners were sharing in, and taking advantage of, the general shift toward racialist thinking in Europe and the United States. This racialist thinking was used to justify more than the southern institution of slavery. It served to defend the subordination or even extermination of non-European peoples throughout the world and was believed by Europeans to explain the ever-increasing gulf of power and progress that separated them from the peoples they were overrunning."

-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 122.
   

Karamzin with Kant, 1789, on future life

Konigsberg, June 19, 1789 [notes of conversation with Immanuel Kant]

"...I [Kant] take comfort in the fact that I am already sixty and that soon I shall reach the end of my life, for I hope to begin another, a better one.
"When I consider the joys I have known, I now feel no pleasure, but when I remember those occasions when I acted in conformity with the moral law inscribed in my heart, I am gladdened. I speak of the moral law. We might call it conscience, a sense of good and evil -- but it exists. I lied. No one knows of my lie, yet I feel ashamed. When we speak of the future life, probability is not certainty; but when we have weighed everything, reason bids us believe in it. And suppose we were to see it with our own eyes, as it were? If we were much taken with it, we would not longer be able to interest ourselves in the present life, but would be in a continuous state of languor. And, in the opposite case, we would not be able to comfort ourselves by saying, midst the trials and tribulations of the present life, 'Perhaps it will be better there!' But when we speak of destiny, of a future life, and so on, we presume the existence of an Eternal Creative Reason which created everything for some purpose and everything good. What? How? But here even the wisest man admits his ignorance. Here reason extinguishes her lamp and we are left in darkness. Only fancy can wander in this darkness and create fictions."

-- Letter of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Karamzin, [Columbia University Press, NY, 1957], p. 40-41. 
   

"the greatest nation in the history of...", 1840s

"It was unusual by the late 1840s to profess a belief in innate human equality and to challenge the idea that a superior race was about to shape the fates of other races for the future good of the world. To assert this meant challenging not only popular opinion, but also the opinion of most American intellectuals."


-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 250.