Foreign propagandists have a strange
misconception of our national character. They believe that we Americans must be
hybrid, mongrel, undynamic; and we are called so by the enemies of democracy
because, they say, so many races have been fused together in our national life.
They believe we are disunited and defenseless because we argue with each other,
because we engage in political campaigns, because we recognize the sacred right
of the minority to disagree with the majority and to express that disagreement
even loudly. It is the very mingling of races, dedicated to common ideals, which
creates and recreates our vitality. In every representative American meeting
there will be people with names like Jackson and Lincoln and Isaacs and Sehultz
and Kovack and Sartori and Jones and Smith. These Americans with varied
backgrounds are all immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. All of them are
inheritors of the same stalwart tradition of unusual enterprise, of
adventurousness, of courage--courage to "pull up stakes and git moving". That
has been the great compelling force in our history. Our continent, our
hemisphere, has been populated by people who wanted a life better than the life
they had previously known. They were willing to undergo all conceivable
hardships to achieve the better life. They were animated, just as we are
animated today, by this compelling force. It is what makes us
Americans.
单选题
The title below that best expresses the main idea of this selection is ______.