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48 Su
let us work toward both a brave and a colorful New World through the maintenance of local customs and cultures. ... As one contribution . . . the small community, we hope, will continue to live, and think, and play to itself."
The small community will, we hope, continue to live and think and play to itself! Try saying that to a "mass manufacturer" or a broadcaster or advertising executive. It does not sound like heretical doctrine, but he would probably turn upon you and declare that it is distinctly un-Ameri' can in a land that is "all for one and one for all"; or perhaps — with a proudly modern gesture— that it is only another form of isolationism reduced to village terms.
It may be clear that the three diverse articles fitted neatly into a single frame. Picture an untraveled young American soldier, half-blinded to beauty by the regimentation of life and thought and play in most of our small cities, approaching the lovely hill towns of Italy, passing from Orvieto on its Etruscan hill to Assisi, rich with memories of Giotto and of St. Francis, through Perugia with its fountains and palaces, to Siena with its great market-place, its fabled Cathedral in which the victor horse is crowned after the Palio, past San Gimignano, Dante's City of Towers, and on to Florence, the Queen of all beauty. Every one of these hill towns is Italian to the core but even the least of them has a soul of its own, a culture, a style, a tradition of its own, that endears it to its dwellers. Even from Rome or from
January, 1945
KANSAS CITY
America, which are not places so much as symbols of fortune, men who were bred in the hill towns still look homeward with love and with longing.
Can we honestly say the same for the men born and bred in many of our American communities? We do not need the report of the War Department's survey on Employment to tell us that we cannot, because, with only a few exceptions — ten towns out of a thousand perhaps — there is little to distinguish the life or the culture of one American community from another. And this in spite of differences that a lavish nature has provided in the v/ay of mighty mountains, wide plains, deep canyons, great rivers — a miracle of grandeur and variety. The railroad stations, the Main Streets, the bridges, the.