Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Gold Appleton

Appleton’s line flatters and needles in the same breath, a travel-slogan halo hiding a cultural slap. “Good Americans” sounds pious, even civic-minded, but the reward he offers isn’t heaven or historical glory. It’s Paris: a worldly afterlife of taste, art, and permission. The joke works because it treats aesthetic refinement as a moral category, as if virtue were proven not by deeds but by where your imagination wants to retire.

In the mid-19th century, Paris functioned as the capital of cultural legitimacy for Anglophone elites: the Louvre, the boulevards, salons, fashion, the aura of modernity. For an American critic, invoking Paris is less about France than about America’s insecurity. The young republic is prosperous and self-confident, yet still anxious about being provincial. Appleton turns that anxiety into a witticism: the truly “good” American is the one who, even in death, escapes the nation’s earnestness for Europe’s cultivated decadence.

There’s also a sly critique of American moralism. If “goodness” lands you in Paris, the line implies American virtue can be narrow, dutiful, even joyless, and that the antidote is cosmopolitan sensuality and art. Paris becomes a permission slip to want more than utility, more than respectability.

It endures because it’s a meme before memes: a compact status argument. It praises Americans while quietly ranking them, suggesting the highest form of national success is to transcend the nation’s own cultural limits.