Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Love of This Land: An Address Delivered by Archibald Macleish at the Opening Session of the Freedom Forum, Marking the 40th Anniversary of Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, November 21, 1953
Yeats was thinking of another country and another time Ireland and the Civil Wars ofthe 'twenties but there is not an understanding man or womanin America today who will not read these words as though they were writ ten of us.we share the same guilt and we know it. With us in this country also the heart has been fed on fantasies the most degrading of all fantasies the fantasies of hatred.with us too the heart's grown brutal with the fare. And it is our tragedy, as it was the tragedy of those of whom Yeats wrote, that hatred is more real with us than devotion. The true indictment of our generation is precisely the terrible in dictment of the great Irish poet: More substance in our enmnies than in our love?' A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man. And so too of a nation.we know it, all of us. The revulsion against our fears and hatreds and against those who have used them for political or eco nomic advanta ge is mounting through out the country. There is no reputablenewspaper and scarcely a respected leader of the religious or moral or in tellectual life of the Republic who has not condemned the exploiters of these miseries. We are coming to know the worth of that winter patriotism which measures itself not by its love for Amer ica and all that America means but by its mere passion against the Soviet Union. Condemnation of the Soviet Union is understandable enough. The whole country detests its doctrines and practices the hypocritical protesta tions of that worst of slaveries which Communism is the dishonest justifi cation of the most fraudulent of means by the most contemptible of ends. But the country, nevertheless, finds it in creasingly hard to believe that Amer ican patriotism consists only in the detestation of the Soviets. Above all, we find it hard to believe that that man is an American patriot who would sac rifice to the hatred of Russia the heartof what America is the freedom of the individual mind and soul and con science.
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