Politics & Power Quote by Paul Harris

In the anxious middle decades of the 20th century, Harris is trying to bottle something fragile and sell it back to the country as its best self. Calling tolerance "in the genius of America" is a savvy rhetorical move: it treats pluralism not as a grudging compromise among factions, but as a native resource, a point of national pride. He’s not begging for patience; he’s asserting ownership. Tolerance becomes patriotic.

The kicker is the phrase "in its application to our own people". That qualifier is doing most of the moral work. Harris is implicitly admitting a gap between American ideals and American habits: it’s easy to praise freedom when it’s abstract, harder when the targets are your neighbors, your co-workers, the "wrong" church, the "wrong" party, the "wrong" last name. The line reads like a gentle indictment of the era’s reflexes - nativist crackdowns, Klan-era moral panic, Red Scare suspicion, and the quiet social enforcement of who counts as fully American. "Today" adds urgency, suggesting tolerance isn’t a settled inheritance but a perishable civic practice.

As a lawyer and civic organizer, Harris speaks in the register of institutional maintenance. He’s not romanticizing difference; he’s warning that democratic stability depends on restraint, especially when politics turns personal. The word "precious" carries a double edge: it praises tolerance while hinting at its vulnerability. In a period when ideological sorting was hardening into hostility, Harris frames tolerance as America’s rare competitive advantage - and as a test it can still fail at home.