Politics & Power Quote by James A. Michener

Michener’s jab lands because it flatters other nations while diagnosing an American insecurity that still feels current: the country that exports culture at industrial scale often acts embarrassed by the people who make it. By lining up Russia, France, Germany, and China, he’s invoking civilizations that canonize their authors as moral witnesses or national architects. In those places, “the writer” can be a public institution: revered, feared, sometimes censored, but rarely dismissed as ornamental.

Then comes the knife-turn: “still a frontier country.” Michener isn’t describing geography; he’s naming a psyche. Frontier culture prizes utility, speed, conquest, and measurable output. It treats art as leisure, maybe even indulgence, and it mistrusts introspection because introspection slows the march. “Almost shudders” is the perfect verb: not outrage, not debate, but a reflexive flinch. Creative expression becomes suspect, coded as soft, elitist, impractical, or dangerously questioning.

The subtext is also self-indictment. Michener was a bestselling, establishment-friendly novelist, the kind of writer America does reward - as long as literature behaves like commerce and civics at once. His complaint isn’t that Americans don’t read; it’s that they often want stories without the social authority of “writers,” entertainment without the permission to critique.

Context matters: Michener wrote in a century shaped by Cold War cultural prestige and state sponsorship abroad, while the U.S. increasingly routed artistic value through markets and popularity. Reverence, in America, tends to go to entrepreneurs. Writers are welcome - until they expect to matter.