“The true democracy of St. Louis, Edward I and Washington is forgotten,” lamented the American architect Ralph Adams Cram in 1917, “and a false democracy has taken its place.…” The assertion was no aberration of wartime hysteria, and was less eccentric in the early twentieth century than it would have been before or since. It gave pointed expression to a set of attitudes which had strong appeal to a significant number of Cram's countrymen, and which casts light on the perennial efforts of Americans to define their place in history and to balance the competing claims of tradition and innovation.

Charles H. Randall arrived in San Francisco in the late summer of 1849. He came a convinced believer in the California Dream. His first letter home to his parents told them firmly that there appeared “no limits” to his “chances of making money”. In August 1850 William P. Dangerfield said much the same. “Proverbial ships” were about to dock. It did not matter that on arrival Dangerfield and his party had but two dollars each. Gold was everywhere, wealth for all close at hand.

Your diddler is ingenious. He has constructiveness large. He understands plot. He invents and circumvents.

The attempt to bridge the chasm between multiplicity and unity is the oldest problem of philosophy, religion and science, but the flimsiest bridge of all is the human Concept, unless somewhere, within or beyond it, an energy not individual is hidden; and in that case the old question instantly reappears: – What is that Energy?

That the newspaper press in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake colonies was chock-full of advertisements for runaway convicts is a clear indication of the significance of transportation to America in that period. The existence of convicts in Virginia and Maryland stemmed from the provisions of the Transportation Act passed by the British parliament in 1718. This stated that felons found guilty of non-capital crimes against property could be transported to America for seven years while the smaller number of criminals convicted on capital charges could have their death sentence commuted to banishment for either fourteen years or life. Between 1718 and 1775, when the traffic ended with the approach of war, more than 90 percent of the 50,000 convicts shipped across the Atlantic from the British Isles were sold by contractors to settlers in the Chesapeake, where there was a continuous demand for cheap, white, bonded labour. Though many convicts were people who had resorted to petty, theft in hard times rather than habitual criminals, they were often viewed with jaundiced eyes in the Chesapeake as purveyors of crime, disease and corruption. They also had to endure, along with slaves and indentured servants, the everyday reality of lower-class life in colonial America: the exploitation of unfree labour. It is therefore not surprising that many convicts, like other dependent labourers, tried to free themselves from bondage by escaping from their owners.

The former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O'Neill, has observed “I hate to say it about such an agreeable man, but it was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became President.…I've known every president since Harry Truman and there's no question in my mind that [Reagan] was the worst.” This is a severe indictment by a highly qualified observer. Nevertheless it is an opinion that will be challenged here. It will be argued in this article that far from being the “worst” of recent presidents Ronald Reagan, despite his failings, was more effective in office than most who have held the position in the last fifty years. However, as a preliminary to our analysis it may be useful to summarize the apparently formidable case against Reagan.