The Americans in Paris

There's a detail in McCullough's book that sticks with you: these weren't people fleeing America for something better. Samuel Morse, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the young doctors who crossed the Atlantic to study in Parisian hospitals, the sculptors who apprenticed under French masters. They went to Paris to get good, then came home. That's the whole story in one sentence, and it's worth sitting with.

Compare that instinct to a lot of what passes for cosmopolitanism now, where going abroad seems to mean deciding your own country isn't worth the trouble. McCullough's Americans did the opposite. They treated Europe like a finishing school, not an escape hatch. They wanted the technique, the training, the ideas, and then they wanted to bring all of it back and build something with it here.

That's not a small distinction. A nation that sends its best people out to learn and expects them back is a confident nation. It believes in itself enough to risk exposure to something better, without losing its footing.

McCullough understood that ambition and patriotism aren't opposites. They can be the same instinct pointed the same direction. Worth remembering the next time someone treats loving America and wanting to improve it as a contradiction.