514 CONFERENCE ON NATURAL BEAUTY 



These are things that have to be dealt with in the search for beauty, 

 unpleasant things. 



Consider Charles Sheeler's "American Landscape" in the Museum 

 of Modern Art a stark landscape with locomotives, and factories, 

 and a dwarfed human figure. Critics have seen it as epitomizing 

 modern America. There is also in the painting, however, a minus- 

 cule ladder, leading to nothing or something a symbol, perhaps, 

 of what we are trying to do here. 



As I sat and listened to distinguished speakers this morning 

 and I mean this as no criticism whatever I had the feeling that 

 lying about were the dispersed, broken rungs of a ladder. It 

 is necessary for us as educators to somehow or other put into that 

 ladder these broken and dispersed rungs in order to climb out of the 

 situation in which we find ourselves. 



One part of this tenuous ladder is something that I would like 

 to emphasize for a moment from the educational and from the 

 anthropological standpoint, because it is better if change can be 

 effected by degrees through existing dreams and institutions, through 

 something with which at least part of the society is already familiar. 

 There exists in our society something which has survived in spite 

 of the way we have exploited certain aspects of this continent over 

 the past couple of hundred years. You will remember that in the 

 beginning, in the writings of Jefferson, in men after him and in 

 men before him, right down to yesterday, there has been a pastoral 

 dream variously expressed which lingers on, the dream of America 

 as the great good place, the new Eden. I can remember my 

 father in his declining years and I am sure there were many like 

 him saying with just a little money, we might be able to buy 

 some cheap land in Arkansas. My father was not a farmer, but 

 this was part of the American dream. If you failed somewhere, 

 there was land, a place out there, and so we used to send occasionally 

 for these catalogs for land we never could buy, and dream this 

 dream which helped to keep us alive in a lot of slovenly places 

 where we lived. 



And now, in this America which Lady Jackson has spoken of as 

 "exploding," as the world is exploding, this dream is at the point 

 of vanishing, except as it is rephrased in the Great Society about 

 which our President has spoken. It seems to me that this is part 

 of our ladder, that we can preserve that earlier dream, which is 

 part of our tradition, and translate it into modern means and ways, 



