An Artist In America by Thomas Hart Benton

“For submerged hysterical attitudes Holiness is supplying the furor, and over the face of the industrial South it is encouraging the growth of madness, of crazy idiosyncrasy, and social irresponsibility. Maybe it is the last decadent flare of that Protestantism which accompanied the rise of capitalism over the world. Maybe its lunatic, disintegrating wildness is a portent, a symbol of the end of social ways which are also disintegrating, wild, and irresponsible. Whatever it is, it is cultivating a weed patch of aberrant psychologies which will be very difficult to clear out of the fields of our future social plantings.”

-Thomas Hart Benton, 1937