Rendezvous with Destiny

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With many Americans, realism meant a pessimism that could even conceive an American withdrawal into isolation again. With many more, realism was coming to mean an optimism that would fight through all obstacles and misunderstandings, through crisis after crisis, as long as there remained any sensible hope of a world organized in some substantial degree to keep the peace.

For the realism of the pessimist overlooks, too, the possibility that the American people, for all their wartime grabbing and grumbling, their nagging obsession with gasoline, meat and chewing-gum shortages, may be possessed of a deep sense of the world crisis in which they are involved, may be growing aware that their generation is shaping the history of the world. Their outward apathy may cover a realistic appraisal of the task they face, a grim realization that the better world they want is not to be built overnight in a glorious burst of crusading exaltation, but only by hard, slow, disagreeable, long-continued trial & error. Perhaps Americans must sacrifice old dislikes, perhaps even material advantages, to win to that better world.

In the person of their President, Franklin Roosevelt, they stand on the threshold of that world today.