American IndividualismIn this book, Hoover expounds and vigorously defends what has come to be called American exceptionalism: the set of beliefs and values that still makes America unique. He argues that America can make steady, sure progress if we preserve our individualism, preserve and stimulate the initiative of our people, insist on and maintain the safeguards to equality of opportunity, and honor service as a part of our national character. |
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achievement administration altruism American individualism autocracy become capital centuries character civilization contain faults coöperation courage destroy dividualism Divine Right divine spark domination dustries emotion employees equal opportunity equality of opportunity ernments failure fair chance fair division faith frozen strata greater groups growing HARVARD COLLEGE hindmost human progress ideals ideas impulse to production increasing industry initiative injustices insists instincts institutions intellectual intelligence ization justice labor liberty lie in agreements living and comfort mass ment million mind moral motivation nation nomic Old World individualism organization PHASES pioneer political portunity potent force preserve production and distribution Proletariat proof radicalism realization regulation revolution road Russia safeguard self-interest sense of respon sense of service share sibility social forces social philosophies social system society spiritual forces standard of living steadily stimulation to invention strata of classes surplus things throttle tion tyranny ualism vast vidual
Popular passages
Page 71 - Progress will march if we hold an abiding faith in the intelligence, the initiative, the character, the courage, and the divine touch in the individual. We can safeguard these ends if we give to each individual that opportunity for which the spirit of America stands. We can make a social system as perfect as our generation merits and one that will be received in gratitude by our children.
Page 9 - ... that while we build our society upon the attainment of the individual, we shall safeguard to every individual an equality of opportunity to take that position in the community to which his intelligence, character, ability, and ambition entitle him; that we keep the social solution free from frozen strata of classes; that we shall stimulate effort of each individual to achievement; that through an enlarging sense of responsibility and understanding we shall assist him to this attainment; while...
Page 32 - That high and increasing standards of living and comfort should be the first of considerations in public mind and in government needs no apology. We have long since realized that the basis of an advancing civilization must be a high and growing standard of living for all the people, not for a single class; that education, food, clothing, housing, and the spreading use of what we so often term non-essentials, are the real fertilizers of the soil from which spring the finer flowers of life.
Page 37 - But those are utterly wrong who say that individualism has as its only end the acquisition and preservation of private property— the selfish snatching and hoarding of the common product. Our American individualism, indeed, is only in part an economic creed. It aims to provide opportunity for self-expression, not merely economically, but spiritually as well. Private property is not a fetish in America.
Page 33 - The only road to further advance in the standard of living is by greater invention, greater elimination of waste, greater production and better distribution of commodities and services, for by increasing their ratio to our numbers and dividing them justly we each will have more of them. The superlative value of individualism through its impulse to production, its stimulation to invention, has, so far as I know, never been denied. Criticism of it has lain in its wastes but more importantly in its...
Page 13 - The social force in which I am interested is far higher and far more precious a thing than all these. It springs from something infinitely more enduring; it springs from the one source of human progress— that each individual shall be given the chance and stimulation for development of the best with which he has been endowed in heart and mind ; it is the sole source of progress; it is American individualism.
Page 63 - The American pioneer is the epic expression of that individualism and the pioneer spirit of response to the challenge of opportunity, to the challenge of nature, to the challenge of life, to the call of the frontier.
Page 8 - No doubt individualism run riot, with no tempering principle, would provide a long category of inequalities, of tyrannies, dominations, and injustices. America, however, has tempered the whole conception of individualism by the injection of a definite principle, and from this principle it follows that attempts at domination, whether in government or in the processes of industry and commerce, are under an insistent curb." The principle he has in mind is "an equality of opportunity," backed by "that...
Page 37 - Our development of individualism shows an increasing tendency to regard right of property not as an object in itself, but in the light of a useful and necessary instrument in stimulation of initiative to the individual; not only stimulation to him that he may gain personal comfort, security in life, protection to his family, but also because individual accumulation and ownership is a basis of selection to leadership in administration of the tools of industry and commerce. It is where dominant private...
Page 20 - This guarding of our individualism against stratification insists not only in preserving in the social solution an equal opportunity for the able and ambitious to rise from the bottom; it also insists that the sons of the successful shall not by any mere right of birth or favor continue to occupy their fathers' places of power against the rise of a new generation in process of coming up from the bottom.