In upstart communities the loyalties of people were in inverse ratio to the antiquity of their communities, even to the point of absurdity. Older towns could point only to the facts of limited actual accomplishment, while the uncertain future was, of course, ever more promising. Promise, not achievement, commanded loyalty and stirred the booster spirit. One was untrue to oneself and the spirit of expanding America if one remained enslaved to a vision which had lost its promise. The ghost town and the booster spirit were opposite sides of the same coin.
Boorstin, Daniel (1965) The Americans: The National Experience. New York: Random House. Page 122.
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 Slogans
The booster spirit is a common American trait. Historian Daniel Boorstin calls cities built by boosterism
"upstart communities," where visions of the future always show more promise than achievements in the present.
Atlanta is an upstart community but displays its visions, not in city plans or PANORAMIC CITY VIEWS promising
future greatness, like Paris or San Francisco, but in slogans. ATLANTA named itself "Gate City to the South" in
1857, promoting the town of about six thousand citizens as the most important railroad center in the South. That
slogan established an identity for the young city, inviting Civil War General William Sherman to burn it seven
years later. Atlanta quickly rebuilt itself after the Civil War. In 1886, Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta
Constitution, spoke eloquently for a "New South," calling for industrialization to replace its agrarian past.
Grady said, "We have raised a brave and beautiful city." The next year the City adopted a new seal. Its centerpiece
was a phoenix, recalling the myth of the beautiful bird rising from the ashes of its own destruction. Atlanta's
destruction became its best asset, but it was rebuilt exactly as before. The city still did not have a plan, but
it had more fireproof buildings. "Atlanta - The Next International City," the slogan adopted in the early 1970's
even before the city had any international flights from its airport, turned out to be an Olympic prophesy.
In Atlanta, city slogans are substitutes for city plans.
 Atlanta Essay
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