John Steinbeck -- "Our land is of every kind geologically and climatically, and our people are of every kind also -- of every race, of every ethnic category -- and yet our land is one nation, and our people are Americans. In the beginning we crept, scuttled, escaped, were driven out of the safe and settled corners of the earth to the fringes of a strange and hostile wilderness, a nameless and hostile continent. Some rulers granted large sections of unmapped territory, in places they did not own or even know, as cheap gifts to favorites or to potential enemies for the purpose of getting rid of them. Many others were sent here as a punishment for penal offenses.
"Far from welcoming us, this continent resisted us. The Indigenes fought to the best of their ability to hold on to a land they thought was theirs. The rocky soils fought back, and the bewildering forests, and the deserts. Diseases, unknown and therefore incurable, decimated the early comers, and in their energy of restlessness they fought one another. This land was no gift. The firstlings worked for it, fought for it, and died for it. They stole and cheated and double-crossed for it, and when they had taken a little piece, the way a fierce-hearted man ropes a wild mustang, they had then to gentle it and smooth it and make it habitable at all. Once they had a foothold, they had to defend their holdings against new waves of the restless and ferocious and hungry.
"America did not exist. Four centuries of work, of bloodshed, of loneliness and fear created this land. We built America and the process made us Americans-a new breed, rooted in all races, stained and tinted with all colors, a seeming ethnic anarchy. Then in a little, little time, we became more alike than we were different -- a new society, not great, but fitted by our very faults for greatness, E Pluribus Unum."
[John Steinbeck and Newsscan]
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