If any young man is about to commence the world,” a reform-minded New York journalist wrote in 1838, “we say to him, publicly and privately, Go to the West.” Today, Horace Greeley’s advice comes down to us as “Go West, young man” and has been mythologized into a slogan of Manifest Destiny. But at the time Greeley wasn’t expressing any messianic desire to tame a savage continent. Rather, he was alarmed by how terrible economic conditions had become in New York.
via Stay Put, Young Man by Timothy Noah | The Washington Monthly.
