we will all wake some
morning to learn that there is
not one decent man
We doubt that there ever was a time in this country when so many people were trying to discredit so many other people. About a year ago, we started to compile a handbook of defamation, showing who was disemboweling whom in America, but the list soon got too big for us and we abandoned the project as both unwieldy and unlovely. Discreditation has become a national sickness, for which no cure has so far been found, and there is a strong likelihood that we will all wake some morning to learn that in the whole land there is not one decent man. Vilification, condemnation, revelation—these supply a huge part of the columns of the papers, and the story of life in the Unit.
From the essay, Discredit of Others, published on October 4th, 1952 in the New Yorker Magazine and republished in On democracy / E. B. White; edited by Martha White; foreword by Jon Meacham, New York, Harper Collins, 2019.
In the forward to the book is this quote from Mr. White.
To hold America in one’s thoughts is like holding a love letter in one’s hand—it has so special a meaning.
No Haiku For You 