Egalitarianism in America

Writing in the early 1960s, Willmoore Kendall declared with characteristic iconoclasm:

… if the future of individual initiative depends on . . . containing the advance of leveling for the sake of leveling, of principled egalitarianism, then . . . we can safely say that private initiative is safe for the foreseeable future because, as far as this threat is concerned, there exists in America a healthy public opinion which, when the chips are down, is against leveling.