AMERICAN ADVICE
America upsets people for various reasons today though it is hard to resist the music, movies and much else. How ever, you cannot help approving of the American work ethic that made peanut farmers into Presidents (Jimmy Carter) and dirt poor hillbillys from the Ozark mountains into glamorous editors who defined a whole way to be for working girls.
More, if you examine the upper class, the white Anglo Saxon Protestants, these values were pretty sound, really. You had to study, you had to have accomplishments, you had to be outdoorsy. You had to work at something that added to the sum of human knowledge, you had to support museums, universities, good causes, grow gardens and practice serious philanthropy. And most appealing, you had to practice thrift: use money for graces, not for show. An Austrian Jew who seems to have Americanized into white Anglo Saxon Protestants views was Felix Frankfurter, star of the Harvard Law School, adviser to President Roosevelt and Supreme Court Judge. I love his advice to a Young man interested into going to Law. The best way to prepare for the Law is to come to the study of Law as a well read person. No less important for a lawyer is the cultivation of the imaginative faculties by reading poetry, seeing great printings and listening to great music. Stoke your mind with the deposit of much good reading and widen and deepen your feelings by experiencing vicariously as much as possible the wonderful mysteries of the universe and forget all about your career
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