Eliot of
Cambridge, and Hy Gill of Seattle; of Dr. Lyman Abbott of New York and
Tom Watson of Georgia; of General Leonard Wood and Colonel William
Jennings Bryan; of ex-slaves living in their cabins behind Virginia
manor houses, and Filipino and Kanaka fishermen living in villages
built on stilts beside the bayous below New Orleans; of the dry salt
desert of Utah, and two great rivers meeting between green rocky hills,
at Harper's Ferry; of men working in offices at the top of the Woolworth
Building in New York, and other men working thousands of feet below the
ground, in the copper mines of Butte and the iron and coal mines of
Birmingham--when one thinks of these things one quickly ceases to fear
that the United States is standardized, and instead begins to fear that
few Americans will ever know the varied wonder of their country, and the
varied character of its inhabitants, their problems, hopes, and views.
If I lived somewhere in the region of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia
and wished quickly to learn whether the country were really standardized
or not, I should get into my automobile--or into some one else's--and
take an autumn tour through Baltimore, past Doughoregan Manor, some
miles to the west of Baltimore, on to Frederick, Maryland (where they
dispute, quite justly, I believe, the truth of the Barbara Frietchie
legend), and thence "over the mountain wall" and down into the
northeastern corner of the most irregularly shaped State in the Union,
West Virginia.
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