Politics & Power Quote by Norman Corwin

There is a sly optimism baked into Corwin's phrasing: not a trumpet blast about American greatness, but praise for a particular skill - the knack for "toss[ing] off" would-be masters. The verb matters. "Toss off" is casual, almost athletic, suggesting that oppression in the U.S. is rarely defeated by polite reform alone; it gets shrugged away, heaved aside, made socially untenable. Corwin isn’t canonizing institutions so much as a recurring American mood: impatience with anyone who tries to stand too tall on other people's necks.

The subtext is also a warning. You only celebrate the ability to eject "oppressive characters" if you assume they reliably appear. Corwin’s America is not inoculated against authoritarian personalities; it’s a place that periodically lets them rise, then decides - sometimes late, sometimes bloodily - to cut them down to size. That nuance keeps the line from becoming sentimental civics.

Context deepens the intent. Corwin was a mid-century radio writer, a master of public-address rhetoric who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, McCarthyism, and the long churn of civil rights. He knew propaganda’s seductions and mass media’s power to either flatter strongmen or puncture them. So the praise lands less as triumphalism than as a writer’s faith in the audience: the belief that, despite bouts of fear and conformity, Americans can still recognize a bully in costume and, eventually, refuse the role assigned to them.