Welcome to the very first episode of the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful and worthy of our love.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute. I call this

one America the Beautiful. Beauty in a man, as Aristotle thought of it, is the outward bloom of inward goodness.

What is good is intrinsically most worthy of love, but it is beauty that draws the soul's attention to the love-worthy thing.

Beauty awakens love.

And since no country can live without love,

and since I live in this country,

I was thinking about what it is that makes America beautiful,

what it is that makes America good.

I was doing this in the kind of freedom that seems at home in America,

when my thoughts turned in a certain way

to my native city of Los Angeles.

America in my lifetime has seemed very interesting

among all the places in the world at any time.

Like Athens in the time of Pericles, or Rome under Augustus,

England in the age of Victoria.

America even in the age of Victoria.

America, even in the earliest imaginations of it, was the new world, to Europe's old world.

And California seems to be to America something like what America is to Europe.

The American dream took on fresh life in the California dream.

And when one thinks of the beautiful California dream, one thinks immediately of the palm trees of Los Angeles and sunny January, and in particular of the city of dreams, Hollywood.

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