“America. betaking herself to formative action(as it is about time for more solid achievement, and less windy promise), must , for her purpose, cease to recognize a theory of character grown of feudal aristocracies, or form’d by merely literary standards, or from any ultramarine, full-dress formulas of culture. polish, caste, &c., enough, and must sternly promulgate her new standard, yet old enough, and accepting the old, the perennial elements, and combining them into groups, unities, appropriate to the modern, the democratic, the west, and to the practical occasions and needs of our own cities, and of the agricultural regions.”1 Walt Whitman wrote this poem back in 1855. A hundred years before r