‘Go West, young man, go West,’ newspaper editor Horace Greeley advised ambitious 19th-century Americans as the nation pursued its Manifest Destiny. Well, it might have been Greeley, or perhaps John Babson Lane Soule, editor of the Terre Haute (Indiana) Daily Express. No matter the author: the advice is as applicable today as it was 150 years ago — and not only for young men.
After a stint in the rancorous atmosphere of our nation’s capital, where resurgent Democrats are out to prove that another surge, this one in Iraq, is doomed to failure, I headed west on a business trip. America’s Manifest Destiny, of course, has already been fulfilled. We long ago ‘overspread the continent allotted by Providence’, to borrow from John L. O’Sullivan, who coined the phrase in 1845.
My reason for heading west was to fulfil a number of speaking engagements, and attend meetings at Arizona’s most venerable and prestigious law firm (a client), Snell & Wilmer, famous for having won the lawsuit that brought Colorado River water to Phoenix and made it possible for this city of hundreds of verdant fairways and millions of air-conditioners (it was 104°F when we arrived) to grow into the nation’s fifth largest (behind only New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston).
At one of those meetings I was reminded that Washington D.C. is not America, that patriotism and civility remain dominant strains in American life, and that the American West is not the same as the West Side of Manhattan, where love of country is confined to an appreciation of the virtues of country houses scattered around Long Island.
The audience for my talk included some 400 lawyers and a smattering of spouses; with more than half of all new law school graduates women, the term ‘spouse’ at meetings such as this includes almost as many men as women.
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