Word: frontierisms
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Kennedy and Johnson changed that--Kennedy by raising expectations of government support, and Johnson by moving towards fulfilling them. Regardless of how successfully they have dealt with the actual problems, the Model Cities, Head Starts and Job Corps of the New Frontier and the Great Society have irrevocably made what used to be called civil rights into the hard issue of black power...
Once upon a time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants-Puritans and the children of Puritans-clamped a code on America as tight as the pillory. Ramrod stiff with duty, tense with work ethic, the code operated splendidly on the frontier, and more or less adequately until after World War II. But then WASP "defaulted on their birthright of cussedness and irreverence" and turned into what Schrag calls the "plastic WASP." Still claiming to be the model-the only model-for a Good American, the plastic WASP has ended up a crabby tyrant of pallid respectability...
...response was instantaneous. Within four days after the new regulations went into effect along the Oder-Neisse frontier, 15,000 Poles trooped into East Germany, snapping up cameras, household appliances and electric shavers, which are almost impossible to buy at home. Going the other way, 90,000 East Germans invaded Polish grocery stores to take advantage of that country's lower food prices, bought thousands of wicker baskets and cleaned out the stock of blue jeans in the port of Szczecin (formerly Stettin...
...Almost all the parties and their disparate factions agree on the basic issues: absolute neutrality between East and West and trade with the Common Market. Rather like Greta Garbo. Finland vants to be left alone, but it cannot afford to be. Sharing 788 miles of its 1,583-mile frontier with the Soviet Union, with whom it fought brutal losing wars in 1939-43, Finland is secure only while remaining neutral...
After the lettermen come the revivalists. Boniface Baker, the easygoing grandson of a Fox convert and one of De Hartog's compromisers, suddenly catches the old fire again. In his mid-50s, Baker frees his slaves, parcels his indigo plantation among them, and takes off for the frontier. One solid measure of the book is that it makes this radical gesture oddly plausible...