Croly and Nationalism.

This article highlights the peculiarities of Herbert Croly's personality. He became the editor-in-chief. of "The New Republic". While the other editors brought with them both remarkable talents and strong beliefs, in editorial conferences Croly's were the ideas that most often prevailed. His theory of democratic 'nationalism, developed five years before in "The Promise of American Life," became the living thread of the New Republic's early policies. Croly, in fact, was the most unprepossessing of men. Small, almost gnome-like, he looked out on the world from behind a face of startling homeliness. The significance of all this is that Croly emphasized the cultural aspects of nationalism, not the political or the military. He was an early prophet of that American cultural renaissance so many intellectuals foresaw in the years before World War I.