Life & Wisdom Quote by Otto Friedrich

A neat little joke with a historian’s sting: Friedrich flatters Americans as restless, mobile, hungry for the horizon, then quietly reminds them that this national self-image is built on an origin story of departure and displacement. The line works because it collapses two very different kinds of “eagerness for travel” into one breezy cause-and-effect. Today’s leisure tourism and business mobility get rhetorically stapled to the desperate, coerced, or ideologically driven crossings that populated the “New World.” The punchline is the implicature: Americans don’t just like to go places; the country itself is a product of going places - and of other people being made to go places.

Friedrich, writing in a late-20th-century moment when mass air travel and “American abroad” confidence felt normal, uses understatement to smuggle in a critique of innocence. “In the first place” has the rhythm of a sitcom aside, but it also gestures toward first causes: colonization, migration, conquest, slavery. He doesn’t enumerate them; he doesn’t have to. The omission is the point, mirroring how national narratives often glide over the grim logistics of settlement while celebrating the romance of the journey.

There’s also a sly reversal of exceptionalism. Travel isn’t proof of sophistication here; it’s almost a compulsion, a habit inherited from founders who didn’t stay put. Friedrich’s wit lands because it lets readers laugh at the stereotype, then realize the stereotype is a history lesson - and a moral question - in disguise.