LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

ace; in the midst of 100 million or so assorted descendents of people
racially European, MEAN anything for the welfare or illfare of the
UNorganized 100 million ? And if so, how so ? And sailors don’t care?
Whalers don’t care, landlubbers seem fairly indifferent.
Ernest Poole might write a book on the subject. Another bloke whose
name I forget might write a book on the subject. Wrote a novel I rather
liked, about a New England family goin’ to seed on a farm that was like
a white elephant. I mentioned it and was promptly reproved by a
highbrow friend (not a professor) who assured me that that novelist
would never write a somethin’ or other. Marquand, that’s the fellow’s
name, Marquand the novelist.
Well, I don’t take such high ground. I think all those American novelists
who try to set down a slice of history ought to get credit for it. Even if
they go a bit heavy, or leave in 40 pages in 3 or 4 hundred that just aren’t
quite book-writin’. But still you get a bit of Van Buren, or a bit of some
epoch that young America OUGHT to know more of; 1830 or 1930, but
at least tryin’ to peg down some part of our white man’s heritage and
tradition. Not bein’ cute and cunnin’, but trying to tell the next
generation at least part of what ought to be known.
That’s why I keep on hammerin’ on the disgrace to the nation implicit in
not printin’ Joe Gould. I mean that is one why. And Mr. McAlmon
always printed in Paris. Two sets of men, tryin’ to put down American
history, one doin’ it in meritorious novels, that the highbrows niff at
snobistically, one set or a few scattered fragments doing impractical
stuff, lack of national discipline, lack of civic responsibility.
Workin’ in BOTH these branches of United States incompetence. Oh,
little things, here and there, just a straw shows how the wind blows. And
then the United States gets bumped OFF, like the frogs did. After more
50 years warnin’. And the frogs sellin’ 15 thousand copies, a whole