From Readers Digest Feby 1956 Let’s Say Something Good About Ourselves By Herbert Hoover During the last score of years our American way of life has been deluged with criticism from our own people who deplore our faults and genuinely wish to remedy them. Among these I myself have joined because of my anxieties over mistaken politics and especially the influence of Karl Marx on our way of life. Criticism comes from the habit of our political parties to deplore the opposition. It arises from the forthright refusal of the American people to wash their dirty linen in secret. It comes from our love of sensational incidents where villainy is pursued by law and virtue triumphs. It comes also from fuzzy-minded totalitarian liberals who believe that creeping collectivism can be adopted without destroying the safeguards of free men. It comes from the Com- THIS ARTICLE is extracted from an address delivered by former President Hoover at Newberg, Ore., on the occasion of his 81st birthday. Munists at home and broad who would overthrow our American system. It even comes from free nations we have tried to help. Altogether, if we look at the criticisms alone we seem to be in a very bad way, and engaged in our decline and fall. In all this clamor, however, we might occasionally mention something good about ourselves. We could point out that our American way of life has perfected the greatest productivity of any nation on earth; that our standard of living is the highest in the world. We could point to our constantly improving health and lengthening span of life. We could point out that our mechanical genius has, by millions of labor-saving machines, taken the sweat from the backs of most of our people. In the field of government we could suggest that our supposedly decadent people still rely upon the ballot and the legislative hall to settle their differences, without the use of secret police or slave camps. In the cultural field we could point out that with only about six percent of the world’s population we have almost as many youth in our institutions of higher learning as the rest of the world put together. We could probably enumerate more libraries and more printed serious words than the other 94 percent of the people of the earth. On the moral and spiritual side, we have more hospital and charitable institutions than all of them.