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010 _a26019830
040 _aUtSlPG
041 7 _aen
_2iso639-1
050 4 _aE151
100 1 _aWoodruff, Douglas,
_d1897-1978
245 1 0 _aPlato's American Republic
264 1 _aSalt Lake City, UT :
_bProject Gutenberg,
_c2025
300 _a1 online resource :
_bmultiple file formats
336 _atext
_btxt
_2rdacontent
337 _acomputer
_bc
_2rdamedia
338 _aonline resource
_bcr
_2rdacarrier
500 _aRelease date is 2025-07-30
508 _aDonald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
520 _a"Plato's American Republic" by Douglas Woodruff is a satirical philosophical dialogue written in the early 20th century. It stages Socrates and his companions debating the character of modern America, skewering its faith in Progress, mass opinion, industrialism, and reformist zeal. In playful Platonic fashion, the work takes aim at cars and commerce, Prohibition, politics, and higher education to question what a good life and a good polity require. The opening of the work places Socrates in “Athens, 1925,” where Agathon, Lysis, and Phaelon draw him into a comic-earnest inquiry sparked by an American who wants to buy the Parthenon. Agathon recounts Socrates’ disappointing U.S. lecture tour (outshone by Xantippe’s praise of American womanhood), which leads Socrates to dissect America’s worship of numbers and “Progress,” its fixation on automobiles, and the absurdities of parking and speed. The dialogue then widens to the Civil War’s legacy, the dominance of a vast federal machine, and the alliance of manufacturers and preachers (amplified by propaganda) in shaping “public opinion,” treated as a tyrant of souls. Socrates lampoons Prohibition as the product of that alliance (with women’s support), notes how it corrodes respect for law, and contrasts Ellis Island’s “undesirables” with the Statue of Liberty marooned offshore. Turning to education, he attacks swollen universities, fundraising presidents, timid faculties, and the cult of “facts” and experts, and proposes training a female guardian class to reorient the nation’s aims. The section closes with a plan to limit numbers and dethrone the card‑index mentality, all delivered in witty, Plato-like exchanges that mix satire with serious critique. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
534 _pOriginally published:
_cNew York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1926
653 _aUnited States -- Civilization
856 4 _uhttps://archive.org/details/platosamericanre0000wood
856 4 0 _uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76595
999 _c117320
_d117320