WHEN Calvin Coolidge dedicated a national memorial to the first world war—a 217-foot column flanked by stone sphinxes, towering above Kansas City, Missouri—newspapers called the crowd the largest addressed by an American president. The Liberty Memorial had much to teach the world about America, Coolidge told the throng, eight years after the war’s end. Privately built with donations from ordinary midwestern citizens, the sombre monument revealed a country unashamed of its growing wealth and global influence, but at the same time “not infatuated with any vision of empire”, the president declared. Soldiers of many races, tongues and homelands had come together as an American army, offering the world a great “lesson in democracy”, Coolidge went on. The nation’s “main responsibility is for America,” the Republican was careful to add. But alongside that ambivalence towards foreign entanglements, he offered a message of altruism and exceptionalism. As the youngest and most vigorous of the great powers, it was, he suggested, America’s calling to promote peace and the settling of disputes by reason, shunning the “primal” and “ruinous” hatreds of the Old World....Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2nhnHZf
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