Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 October 1896 — “The Western Idea.” [ARTICLE]

“The Western Idea.”

It seems just a bit strange and awkward that as we grow older as a people we cannot get away from this “Western idea,” this stigmatizing a portion of our country because it is accomplishing with certain enterprising methods what could not possibly be accomplished by any other. It cannot be that we are jealous in the East, because we attach so much importance to the West. It cannot be that we are ashamed of the West, because we like to speak with pride of it. Its people cannot differ so very much from us since half of the American West is really made up of Eastern folks. But yet we go on and on, and everything in the West that is not to our taste is “the Western idea of things.” * ♦ Surfeited with sectionalism, we arc full of tke notion that one part of our country is superior to another. We have still to learn and imbibe the idea that America is America, whether it be New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver or San Francisco. * • We have to learn in this country to accept a man as an American whether he lives in Chicago or in Portland, in New York or in Tacoma! He lives in Amarica, and that makes him not an Eastern man, nor a Western man, nor a Southern man, but an American, living not after an Eastern idea, a 'Western fashion, nor a Southern fancy, but under one central American idea: equality.— Ladies’ Home Journal. There is so much to eat in this country, and it is so cheap and good, that everybody eats too much.