Politics & Power Quote by Herman Melville

Melville is needling a young nation’s insecurity where it hurts: in its craving to be told it’s already great. The line reads like a patriotic toast until you hear the acid in the word choice. “Let America first” mimics the cadence of civic piety, but what follows isn’t heroism or virtue; it’s “mediocrity.” He’s staging a grotesque reversal of values to show how nationalism can turn into an aesthetic and moral blind spot: the homegrown, however second-rate, gets a standing ovation; the genuinely excellent, if foreign, gets treated as a threat.

The intent isn’t simply to scold chauvinism. It’s to expose how cultural confidence is often manufactured through selective applause. “In her children” softens the argument with familial language, making the bias sound natural, even tender. That’s the trick he’s pointing at: the nation imagines itself as a parent, and parental loyalty becomes an alibi for bad judgment. The ellipsis in the middle functions like a swallowed thought, a pause of disgust or disbelief, as if the speaker can’t quite bring himself to finish the sentiment he’s diagnosing.

Context matters. Melville wrote in an era when American letters were still obsessively measuring themselves against Europe while simultaneously posturing about independence. His jab lands on that contradiction: a culture eager to declare itself mature, yet so defensive it must overpraise its own “children” to avoid admitting someone else did it better. It’s less a complaint about taste than a warning about what happens when identity becomes the critic.