Ohio History Journal

  • 1
  •  
  • 2
  •  
  • 3
  •  
  • 4
  •  
  • 5
  •  
  • 6
  •  
  • 7
  •  
  • 8
  •  

OHIO HISTORY CONFERENCE: PROCEEDINGS 261

OHIO HISTORY CONFERENCE: PROCEEDINGS                 261

 

and our record in military production, would have been far more brilliant

than it was.

 

In the afternoon session held in the Auditorium of the Ohio

State Museum and presided over by Stanton L. Davis of the Case

School of Applied Science, the following papers were read by

James M. Miller of Waynesburg College, Waynesburg, Penna.,

and by Philip D. Jordan of Miami University.

 

 

THE SPIRITUAL FORCE IN EARLY WESTERN CULTURE

By JAMES M. MILLER

 

Culture, since the beginning of time, nas been the evidence of man's

struggle upward, the measure of his accomplishment. In the sense in which

I shall use the term, it is the effort of groups of people to improve their

intellectual, spiritual, and esthetic environment. By early western culture,

I mean that effort limited roughly to the upper Ohio Valley in the first

quarter of the nineteenth century, that somewhat neglected period which

saw the settler supplant the pioneer, and which saw the establishment of a

permanent, stable society, the parent of our modern industrial democracy.

The importance of that period and that culture in shaping our later

and larger culture cannot be ignored. If such a thing exists today as an

American culture, I am sure that it must be sought within and immediately

adjacent to the Ohio Valley. Other sections afford established cultures, of

course, but they are likely to be especially significant of the areas which

produced them, and to offer particular values and characteristics not widely

representative. The significant American culture of today is to be found,

I am sure, in spite of Boston and New York, in spite of Miami and Holly-

wood, in our own Middle West, even in our own Ohio Valley.

Our modern conception of history, with its emphasis on social and

cultural aspects, makes us aware of certain vital forces which have been

instrumental in driving our society forward, and in making us what we are.

These forces are numerous--the forces of heredity, of environment, of

economic necessity, of political expediency, of intellectual capacity, of emo-

tional content, of spiritual urge. The effects of these forces vary with time,

and their significances are always dwarfed or magnified by the attitudes and

sympathies of the observer. If I were to seek the dominant forces which

shape the development of a culture, I would seek first a symbol of that

culture. I offer you, therefore, a symbol of our fully developed mid-

western culture, a characteristic product of the culture of the last genera-

tion.