DEMOCRACY IN AMERICAN LIFE; WHAT IS DEMOCRACY?

Two of the Walgreen Foundation Lectures. The first is the historical approach, from the establishment of the democratic dogma with Thomas Jefferson as its progenitor here as an effort to stem the tide of protected interests upheld by the Constitution. The effect of westward expansion and the Civil War; democracy and industrial capitalism. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and finally Bryan -- symbols of the American democracy and its leaders- only to see the end of an era with slums, sharecroppers, class hatred deeply imbedded, and another generation required to prove the need for planned democracy....The second book handles the subject from todays viewpoint, and shows how the problem has changed with new factors in science and society. Our strength lies in the ideal democratic state and in the principle of flexibility. Where democracy has fallen it has been a technological not an ideological failure. America is just beginning to put democracy to the test, and isolation is today a declaration of bankruptcy. We must make democracy work -- we must accept the need for organization of machinery for planning, streamline our government, and prepare to lay the basis for a democracy that recognizes the world as its basis.