America is in the state of mind where she must visualize herself again.  If it is not possible to bring in the New Jerusalem to-day, by public act, with every citizen eating bread and honey under his vine and fig-tree, owning forty acres and a mule, singing hymns and saying prayers all his leisure hours, it is still reasonable to think out tremendous things the American people can do, in the light of what they have done, without sacrificing any of their native cussedness or kick.  It was sprawling Chicago that in 1893 achieved the White City.  The automobile routes bind the states together closer than muddy counties were held in 1893.  A “Permanent World’s Fair” may be a phrase distressing to the literal mind.  Perhaps it would be better to say “An Architect’s America.”

Let each city take expert counsel from the architectural demigods how to tear out the dirty core of its principal business square and erect a combination of civic centre and permanent and glorious bazaar.  Let the public debate the types of state flower, tree, and shrub that are expedient, the varieties of villages and middle-sized towns, farm-homes, and connecting parkways.

Sometimes it seems to me the American expositions are as characteristic things as our land has achieved.  They went through without hesitation.  The difficulties of one did not deter the erection of the next.  The United States may be in many things slack.  Often the democracy looks hopelessly shoddy.  But it cannot be denied that our people have always risen to the dignity of these great architectural projects.

Once the population understand they are dealing with the same type of idea on a grander scale, they will follow to the end.  We are not proposing an economic revolution, or that human nature be suddenly altered.  If California can remain in the World’s Fair state of mind for four or five years, and finally achieve such a splendid result, all the states can undertake a similar project conjointly, and because of the momentum of a nation moving together, remain in that mind for the length of the life of a man.

Here we have this great instrument, the motion picture, the fourth largest industry in the United States, attended daily by ten million people, and in ten days by a hundred million, capable of interpreting the largest conceivable ideas that come within the range of the plastic arts, and those ideas have not been supplied.  It is still the plaything of newly rich vaudeville managers.  The nation goes daily, through intrinsic interest in the device, and is dosed with such continued stories as the Adventures of Kathlyn, What Happened to Mary, and the Million Dollar Mystery, stretched on through reel after reel, week after week.  Kathlyn had no especial adventures.  Nothing in particular happened to Mary.  The million dollar mystery was:  why did the millionaires who owned such a magnificent instrument descend to such silliness and impose it on the people?  Why cannot our weekly story be henceforth some great plan that is being worked out, whose history will delight us?  For instance, every stage of the building of the Panama Canal was followed with the greatest interest in the films.  But there was not enough of it to keep the films busy.