When one thinks of these city groups, and of mail-order houses, and
Fords, one may begin to fear it is indeed true that we are becoming
standardized, but when one lets one's mind drift over the country as the
eye drifts over a map; when one thinks of the quantities of modest,
thoughtful, gentle, generous, intelligent, sound American families which
are to be found in every city and every town, and thinks again, in a
twinkling, of sheriffs and mining-camp policemen in the Far West, of
boys going to Harvard, and other boys going to the University of Kansas,
others to the old Southern universities, so rich in tradition, and still
others to Annapolis or West Point; when one thinks of the snow
glittering on the Rocky Mountain wall, back of Denver; of sleepy little
towns drowsing in the sun beside the Mississippi; of Charles W. Eliot of
Cambridge, and Hy Gill of Seattle; of Dr. Lyman Abbott of New York and
Tom Watson of Georgia; of General Leonard Wood and Colonel William
Jennings Bryan; of ex-slaves living in their cabins behind Virginia
manor houses, and Filipino and Kanaka fishermen living in villages
built on stilts beside the bayous below New Orleans; of the dry salt
desert of Utah, and two great rivers meeting between green rocky hills,
at Harper's Ferry; of men working in offices at the top of the Woolworth
Building in New York, and other men working thousands of feet below the
ground, in the copper mines of Butte and the iron and coal mines of
Birmingham--when one thinks of these things one quickly ceases to fear
that the United States is standardized, and instead begins to fear that
few Americans will ever know the varied wonder of their country, and the
varied character of its inhabitants, their problems, hopes, and views.

If I lived somewhere in the region of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia
and wished quickly to learn whether the country were really standardized
or not, I should get into my automobile--or into some one else's--and