YALE UNIVERSITY YOUNG REPUBLICANS 153

not only graciously accepted but oftentimes framed. It is the office
that makes the man, said a famous American, and I can tell you from
experience he spoke a solid truth.

We have learned from this inquiry into students and governors that
images once formed are not easily transformed, that ideas accepted are
not swiftly rejected, that a good name has as much or more ostensible
worth than a multitude of good deeds. And so far the knowledge
hasn't cost us much. It can be a pleasant pastime poking fun at our-
selves through the eyes of the world and we may even revel in the
awkward poses the makers and perpetuators of image have cast us.

But the game gets serious, even grim, when it turns to a considera-
tion of our image as a nation. Suddenly we're not smiling anymore.
We grow tense, uneasy. And like Benjamin Franklin at the first Con-
stitutional Convention, we wonder whether the arise on his canvas has
painted a rising sun or a setting one.

We, as a nation, are no longer frontiersmen facing a natural adver-
sary, but individuals in search of ourselves in a world become in-
humanly industrialized, organized and computerized. It is not the over-
abundance of space and the underabundance of material affluence that
threaten our calm but the complexity of dealing with great densities
of population and enormous prosperity that confuses and frightens us.
The bread and circuses of the Great Society, like those of the once-
great Roman Republic, seem to drain the vigor from our spirit, making
us appear lazy, timid, effete, dependent and even apathetic. The evi-
dence mounts daily that it is not the historic inevitability of Commun-
ism which will defeat us but the philosophic disability of Democracy
that will lead us down a gold guttered street to obsolescense.

The hue and cry over America's direction in recent years has been
heard from conservative critics in general and the Republican Party
in particular. But the most outspoken and most eloquent voice of dis-
approval has been that from what we may call the Liberal Establish-
ment. It is not Ronald Reagan but Arthur Schlesinger who sees an
America become, in his words, "like one big company town with the
bland leading the bland. "

He bemoans a society which has lost sight of itself, whose sympto-
matic drug is the tranquillizer and which marches into a brave new
world under the banner of togetherness. "Conformity is the greater
danger not when it is coerced but when it is sought, " says Schlesinger,
and he leaves no doubt as to the choice contemporary America has