When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

Pete Seeger who calls it a "landmark" saw it "almost as soon as it came out. Sandburg supported the civil rights movement and contributed to the NAACP. His Complete Poems won him a second Pulitzer Prize in 1951.

Mencken called Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat". L. H.