Straight America, a Call to National Service

In 1916, with Europe at war and America on the brink of its own reckoning, Frances Kellor issued a searing challenge to a nation asleep at the wheel. This is not a gentle plea for civic duty. It is an indictment. Kellor argued that America, glutted on prosperity, had grown dangerously complacent: its citizens apathetic, its immigrants half-integrated into the national fabric, its sense of purpose dissolving into comfortable drift. She called for universal national service, compulsory Americanization education, and a radical reimagining of what it meant to belong to a nation built entirely on newcomers. The book pulses with genuine alarm about national cohesion and the fragility of democracy untended. It remains essential reading for understanding the anxieties that have always attended American belonging, and the question that refuses to quiet: what do we owe the country that claims us?