Liquor Jack: John Vachon: In the Heartland: Elevation

http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsa/8a05000/8a05300/8a05380v.jpg

Dubuque, Iowa, April 1940

Now, as in the first estate the permanency of the nation was provided for; and in the second estate its progressiveness and personal freedom;
there remains for the third estate only that interest which is the ground, the necessary antecedent condition, of both the former.
These depend on a continuing and progressive civilization. But civilization is itself but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence,
the hectic of disease, not the bloom of health, and a nation so distinguished more fitly to be called a varnished than a polished people,
where this civilization is not grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity.
We must be men in order to be citizens. 

-- S.T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, 1830
 

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises as much from their historical life process
as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process.

-- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Critique of the German Ideology [ms.], 1846