Life & Wisdom Quote by Sam Walter Foss

This is boosterism with a spiritual edge: a demand for people as vast, uncompromising, and unfinished as the American landscape itself. Foss isn’t merely praising “grit.” He’s staging a recruitment pitch for a nation that, at the turn of the 20th century, believed its geography carried a destiny. The line’s engine is scale. Mountains and plains aren’t scenery; they’re measuring sticks. If the land is epic, the citizen must be epic too.

The repetition of “Bring me men” works like a drumbeat from a pulpit or a town hall, turning poetry into civic summons. “Match” is the sly pressure point: nature has already set the standard, and ordinary ambition suddenly looks like underperformance. Foss’s “men” is historically literal, reflecting an era when public life and expansionist projects were coded male, but it also signals a type: the builder, the settler, the industrial organizer, the imperial administrator. That word choice reveals the poem’s blind spot as much as its energy.

“Empires in their purpose” lands with deliberate swagger. It’s aspirational and ominous, capturing the Gilded Age/Progressive Era blend of moral mission and imperial appetite. The phrase romanticizes bigness - big projects, big institutions, big influence - while laundering the costs behind the clean abstraction of “purpose.” Then Foss swivels to “new eras in their brains,” upgrading conquest into imagination. He wants not just muscle but a future-minded mindset, the kind that treats history as something you can draft.

It’s effective because it flatters the reader into responsibility: if you live under these mountains, you’re obligated to think and act on their scale.