Other nations have been rich and prosperous and powerful, art-loving and
empire-building. No other nation on a vast scale has been controlled by
a self-conscious, self-restrained democracy in the interests of progress
and freedom, industrial as well as political. It is in the vast and
level spaces of the Mississippi Valley, if anywhere, that the forces of
social transformation and the modification of its democratic ideals may
be arrested.

Beginning with competitive individualism, as well as with belief in
equality, the farmers of the Mississippi Valley gradually learned that
unrestrained competition and combination meant the triumph of the
strongest, the seizure in the interest of a dominant class of the
strategic points of the nation's life. They learned that between the
ideal of individualism, unrestrained by society, and the ideal of
democracy, was an innate conflict; that their very ambitions and
forcefulness had endangered their democracy. The significance of the
Mississippi Valley in American history has lain partly in the fact that
it was a region of revolt. Here have arisen varied, sometimes
ill-considered, but always devoted, movements for ameliorating the lot
of the common man in the interests of democracy. Out of the Mississippi
Valley have come successive and related tidal waves of popular demand
for real or imagined legislative safeguards to their rights and their
social ideals. The Granger movement, the Greenback movement, the
Populist movement, Bryan Democracy, and Roosevelt Republicanism all
found their greatest strength in the Mississippi Valley. They were
Mississippi Valley ideals in action. Its people were learning by
experiment and experience how to grapple with the fundamental problem of
creating a just social order that shall sustain the free, progressive,
individual in a real democracy. The Mississippi Valley is asking, "What
shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

The Mississippi Valley has furnished a new social order to America. Its
universities have set new types of institutions for social service and
for the elevation of the plain people. Its historians should recount its
old ambitions, and inventory its ideals, as well as its resources, for
the information of the present age, to the end that building on its
past, the mighty Valley may have a significance in the life of the
nation even more profound than any which I have recounted.

FOOTNOTES:

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