So long as our evaluators indulged in simple misconceptions and discourtesies, the game was harmless and sometimes interesting. But when, after 1918, systems arose which required a bete noire to balance their home-grown bete blanche, America as a powerful nation and a successful system became the natural patsy for those governments which were not doing so well. Since those same governments had closed their frontiers to their own people, they were free to make any generalizations they wished without the disadvantage of having to base them on observation.

This essay is not an attempt to answer or refute the sausage-like propaganda which is ground out in our disfavor. It cannot even pretend to be objective truth. Of course it is opinion, conjecture, and speculation. What else could it be? But at least it is informed by America, and inspired by curiosity, impatience, some anger, and a passionate love of America and the Americans. For I believe that out of the whole body of our past, out of our differences, our quarrels, our many interests and directions, something has emerged that is itself unique in the world: America--complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.

If the text is opinionated, so are the pictures. The camera may record exactly, but it can only set down what its operator sees, and he sees what he wants to see--what he loves and hates and pities and is proud of. So that the pictures in this book, taken by photographers whose ancestral origins cover the whole world, whose backgrounds and experiences are as diversified as their styles and methods and camera techniques, are also opinions--American opinions. None of these pictures could have been taken anywhere else but in America. A European, an African, or an Asian will not find in them an America that he has seen or would see here. But if he is open and sensitive he may learn of what our country is like to us, what we feel about it: our shame in its failures, our pride in its successes, our wonder at its size and diversity, and, above all, our passionate devotion to it--to all of it, the land, the idea, and the mystique.

I know of course that every country has its parallel. No foreigner can know and feel about England as an Englishman does, with his two thousand years in depth. I have seen a Pole kiss the earth of his homeland on returning, and a Dane shyly caress with his hand a ruddy iron stanchion on a Copenhagen dock. It is not that Americans are different in the quality of their feeling; but the feeling has rarely been set down about our whole country.