Article December 7, 1957 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Arthur Holly Compton

Dr. Arthur Holly Compton
in The Rotarian Magazine,
Evanston, Illinois

There is one great predominant fact in our world, and that fact is interdependence.... Interdependence, loyalty to man, and the need to be needed, they are all part of the same story and they are the fundamental parts. Loyalty to man doesn't mean just loyalty to the people in my particular group, my family, my company, my city, my nation, my race, or my religion. It means loyalty to mankind....

In his book "The Epic of America" the late James Truslow Adams undertook to find what it is that makes the United States great. After studying many different things—the natural resources, the background of the people, etc.— he concludes that the true secret of its greatness is the "American dream."... It is a dream, he says, not of high wages and motorcars only, but a dream of a social order in which every man and every woman would have an opportunity to grow to the greatest stature that was innately possible to them, where they would be recognized not for how they happened to be born but for what they are.

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