With all the other American youths of his generation he had been
swept off his feet by the propaganda that then went on and is still going
on, and that is meant to create the illusion of greatness in connection
with the ownership of money. He did not then know and, in spite of his own
later success and his own later use of the machinery by which illusion
is created, he never found out that in an industrial world reputations
for greatness of mind are made as a Detroit manufacturer would make
automobiles. He did not know that men are employed to bring up the name
of a politician so that he may be called a statesman, as a new brand of
breakfast food that it may be sold; that most modern great men are mere
illusions sprung out of a national hunger for greatness. Some day a wise
man, one who has not read too many books but who has gone about among men,
will discover and set forth a very interesting thing about America. The
land is vast and there is a national hunger for vastness in individuals.
One wants an Illinois-sized man for Illinois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio,
and a Texas-sized man for Texas.
To be sure, Steve Hunter had no notion of all this. He never did get a
notion of it. The men he had already begun to think of as great and to try
to imitate were like the strange and gigantic protuberances that sometimes
grow on the side of unhealthy trees, but he did not know it.
Pages:
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112