A Certain Idea of America, page 18
This distinguished America from old Europe, from which it had kicked away. There titles, families, and inherited wealth dictated standing: If you had them, you’d always be at the top. If you didn’t, you’d always be at the bottom. That static system bred resentment. We would have a dynamic one that bred hope.
You can give a dozen examples, and perhaps you are one, of Americans who turned a brilliant system into a lived-out triumph. Thomas Edison, the seventh child of modest folk in Michigan and half-deaf to boot, filled the greatest cities in the world with electric light. Barbara Stanwyck was from working-class Brooklyn. Her mother died, her father skipped town, and she was raised by relatives and foster parents. She went on to a half-century career as a magnetic actress of stage and screen; in 1944 she was the highest-paid woman in America. Jonas Salk was a hero of my childhood. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who settled in East Harlem—again, working-class nobodies. Naturally young Jonas, an American, scoped out the facts of his time and place and thought, I’ll be a great lawyer. His mother is reported to have said no, a doctor. He went on to cure polio. We used to talk about him at the public school when we waited in line for the vaccine.
In America so many paths were offered! But then a big nation that is a great one literally has a lot of paths.
The American dream was about aspiration and the possibility that, with dedication and focus, it could be fulfilled. But the American dream was not about material things—houses, cars, a guarantee of future increase. That’s the construction we put on it now. It’s wrong. A big house could be the product of the dream, if that’s what you wanted, but the house itself was not the dream. You could, acting on your vision of the dream, read, learn, hold a modest job, and rent a home, but at town council meetings you could stand, lead with wisdom and knowledge, and become a figure of local respect. Maybe the respect was your dream.
Stanwyck became rich, Salk revered. Both realized the dream.
How did we get the definition mixed up?
I think part of the answer is Grandpa. He’d sit on the front stoop in Levittown in the 1950s. A sunny day, the kids are tripping by, there’s a tree in the yard and bikes on the street and a car in the front. He was born in Sicily or Dubrovnik, he came here with one change of clothes tied in a cloth and slung on his back, he didn’t even speak English, and now look—his grandkids with the bikes. “This is the American dream,” he says. And the kids, listening, looked around, saw the houses and the car, and thought, He means the American dream is things. By inference, the healthier and more enduring the dream, the bigger the houses get, the more expensive the cars. (They went on to become sociologists and journalists.)
But that of course is not what Grandpa meant. He meant, I started with nothing and this place let me and mine rise. The American dream was not only about materialism, but material things could be, and often were, its fruits.
The American dream was never fully realized, not by a long shot, and we all know this. The original sin of America, slavery, meant some of the earliest Americans were brutally excluded from it. The dream is best understood as a continuing project requiring constant repair and expansion, with an eye to removing barriers and roadblocks for all.
Many reasons are put forward in the argument over whether the American dream is over (no) or ailing (yes) or was always divisive (no—dreams keep nations together). We see income inequality, as the wealthy prosper while the middle class grinds away and the working class slips away. There is a widening distance, literally, between the rich and the poor. Once the richest man in town lived nearby, on the nicest street on the right side of the tracks. Now he’s decamped to a loft in SoHo. “The big sort” has become sociocultural apartheid. It’s globalization, it’s the decline in the power of private-sector unions and the brakes they applied.
What ails the dream is a worthy debate. I’d include this: The dream requires adults who can launch kids sturdily into Dream-land.
When kids have one or two parents who are functioning, reliable, affectionate—who will stand in line for the charter-school lottery, who will fill out the forms, who will see that the football uniform gets washed and is folded on the stairs in the morning—there’s a good chance they’ll be OK. If you come from that now, it’s like being born on third base and being able to hit a triple. You’ll be able to pursue the dream.
But I see kids who don’t have that person, who are from families or arrangements that didn’t cohere, who have no one to stand in line for them or get them up in the morning. What I see more and more in America is damaged or absent parents. We all know what’s said in this part—drugs, family breakup. Poor parenting is not a new story in human history, and has never been new in America. But insufficient parents used to be able to tell their kids to go out, go play in America, go play in its culture. And the old aspirational culture, the one of the American dream, could counter a lot. Now we have stressed kids operating within a nihilistic popular culture that can harm them. So these kids have nothing—not the example of a functioning family and not the comfort of a culture into which they can safely escape.
This is not a failure of policy but a failure of love. And it’s hard to change national policy on a problem like that.
A CONTINUING MIRACLE
July 3, 2019
I’m not really big on purple mountain majesties. I’d love America if it were a hole in the ground, though yes, it’s beautiful. I don’t love it only because it’s “an idea,” as we all say now. That strikes me as a little bloodless. Baseball didn’t come from an idea, it came from us—a long cool game punctuated by moments of high excellence and utter heartbreak, a team sport in which each player operates on his own. The great movie about America’s pastime isn’t called Field of Ideas, it’s called Field of Dreams. And the scene that makes every grown-up weep is when the dark-haired young catcher steps out of the cornfield and walks toward Kevin Costner, who suddenly realizes, That’s my father.
He asks if they can play catch, and they do, into the night.
The great question comes from the father: “Is this Heaven?” The great answer: “It’s Iowa.”
Which gets me closer to my feelings on patriotism. We are a people that has experienced something epic together. We were given this brilliant, beautiful thing, this new arrangement, a political invention based on the astounding assumption that we are all equal, that where you start doesn’t dictate where you wind up. We’ve kept it going, father to son, mother to daughter, down the generations, inspired by the excellence, and in spite of the heartbreak. Whatever was happening, depression or war, we held high the meaning and forged forward. We’ve respected and protected the Constitution.
And in the forging through and the holding high we’ve created a history, traditions, a way of existing together.
We’ve been doing this for 243 years now, since the first Fourth of July, and in spite of all the changes that have swept the world.
It’s all a miracle. I love America because it’s where the miracle is.
In celebration of that miracle, three books that touch on the why, how, and what of loving America.
Start with E. B. White on why. America should be loved, tenderly, for a large and obvious reason: because it is a democracy. In July 1943, at the height of World War II, he tried to define what that means.
“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time,” he wrote in The New Yorker. “It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad.”
That’s from the recent book On Democracy by E. B. White. In the introduction Jon Meacham notes that Franklin D. Roosevelt loved White’s short essay “The Meaning of Democracy.” One of his speechwriters, the playwright Robert E. Sherwood, said FDR read it aloud at gatherings, in his unplaceably patrician accent, often adding a homey coda at the end: “Them’s my sentiments exactly.”
There’s a lot of sweetness in this collection.
Here’s an argument on how to love America:
There was a young man in 1838, an aspiring politician almost too shy to admit his ambition to himself or others, who gave a talk to a Midwestern youth group. It was a speech about public policy, but it showed a delicate appreciation of psychology, of how people feel about what’s happening around them.
America’s Founders—“the patriots of ’76,” he called them—were now all gone, James Madison having died nineteen months before.
In their absence Americans felt lost. Those men stood for this country, they modeled what it was in their behavior. Admiration for them had united the country. Now, without them, people felt on their own. First principles were being forgotten, mob rule was rising. In Mississippi, they were hanging gamblers even though gambling was legal. “Next, negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection, were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State; then, white men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and, finally, strangers from neighboring States, going thither on business.”
It was madness, and it threatened the republic. If people come to understand “their rights to be secure in their persons and property” were now at the mercy of “the caprice of the mob,” their affiliation with the American government will be destroyed.
The answer? Transfer reverence for the Founders to reverence for the laws they devised. “Let reverence for the laws…become the political religion of the Nation.” Let all agree that to violate the law “is to trample on the blood of his father.”
Unjust laws should be replaced as soon as possible; the citizenry has the means. “Still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed.” But only “reverence for the constitution and laws” will preserve our political institutions and retain “the attachment of the people” now that the founding generation has “gone to rest.”
You have already guessed the speaker was Abraham Lincoln, then only twenty-eight. It is from his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, and it is a small part of a stupendous compilation of the best things said by and to Americans called What So Proudly We Hail, edited by Amy and Leon Kass and Diana Schaub. Its diverse contributors include Philip Roth, Ben Franklin, Willa Cather, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
My friend Joel, an America-loving New York intellectual, gave me the book as a gift. He opens it every night at random and always finds something valuable. Now so do I.
As I read I thought of those who today oppose illegal immigration. They are often accused of small and parochial motivations. But I believe at the heart of their opposition is a delicate understanding that when the rule of law collapses, as it does daily on the southern border, everything else can collapse. Many things are more delicate than we think, and those most inclined to see that delicacy are most dependent on responsible leaders who will keep the laws of the nation strong and operable.
Here, quickly, on what you love when you love America.
A few years ago the historian David McCullough was asked to be commencement speaker at the 200th anniversary of Ohio University. In researching the school’s background and the area’s history, he came upon a rich trove of stories of the largely unknown Americans who in 1788 went to the Northwest Territory and settled “the Ohio.”
The Pioneers is about the remarkable New Englanders who insisted from the beginning that there would be absolute freedom of religion, that there would be a major emphasis on public education, and that slavery would be against the law.
It is an inspiring story, harrowing, too. They suffered and caused some suffering, too. And yet, Mr. McCullough notes, historians would see that the ordinance that allowed the pioneers into Ohio “was designed to guarantee what would one day be known as the American way of life.”
To read it is to feel wonder at all the sacrifice that went to the making of: us. And our continuing miracle.
ON KEEPING OUR COMPOSURE
April 26, 2018
Spring came to New York this week after a month of gloomy cold and drizzle. The sun was out. Monday afternoon just before dusk there was a bird outside my window, all by itself and singing so loudly—byeet-byeet-chur-chur-chur. Over and over as if it had just discovered its voice. I was emailing with a friend, your basic hard-bitten journalist, and told him what I was hearing—it sounded like the beginning of the world. He wrote back not with irony but with the information that a band of baby rabbits had just taken over his garden and were out there hopping and bopping: “They are so excited to be on earth.” This struck me as the most important news of the day.
My bird sang on a few minutes and then flew away, but it made me think, for the first time in years, of William Carlos Williams of 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford, New Jersey, and his famous poem from his 1923 collection, Spring and All:
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
No one is sure what it means, though a poem doesn’t have to mean. To me it’s about how so much depends on reality—on what is, on the suddenly seen tenderness of what is, and how it can catch you unaware.
So now to what I’ve been thinking about, which is a question: What is required of us at this point in history? What is required of those of us who aren’t making history but observing it, watching with concern or alarm? There’s a sense now of not getting the news but listening for what shoe just dropped.
Thursday morning there was the president’s latest unhingement, in a phone interview on Fox & Friends. He was agitated; he spoke of witch hunts, monsters, fakes, phonies, and killers. They are “trying to destroy” his doctor, who withdrew his nomination as secretary of veterans affairs. James Comey is “a leaker and he is a liar.” “There is no collusion with me and the Russians.” “Fake news CNN actually gave the questions to the debate.” “They have a witch hunt against the president of the United States.” “It is a horrible thing that is going on, a horrible thing. Yet I have accomplished, with all of this going on, more than any president in the first year in our history. And everybody—even the enemies and haters admit that.” He’s disappointed in his Justice Department. The “corruption at the top of the FBI, it’s a disgrace.” Michael Cohen represented him “with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal.” “But I’m not involved, and I’m not involved—I’ve been told I’m not involved.” He gets along with Kanye West. “I get along with a lot of people, frankly.” “CBS and NBC, ABC—they’re all fake news.” They tried to suppress the Trump vote, so that his supporters on Election Day would say, “So let’s go to a movie, darling, and we’ll come home and watch Donald lose.” “Let me tell you the nuclear war would have happened if you had weak people.” “I don’t watch NBC anymore; they’re as bad as CNN. I don’t—by the way, I made them a fortune with The Apprentice.”
You could call the interview far-ranging or scattered, you could call it typically colorful or really nuts, but you couldn’t hear it without feeling more disquiet and unease. And that was just Thursday’s installment of As the Trump Turns.
So what is required of us at this roiling time? What are some behavioral rules for the road? The political turbulence we’re experiencing isn’t going to go away, and what’s important at such a time is to absorb the daily shocks, think long-term, speak your mind, share your heart, and do your best.
Beyond that, I think the great requirement of this moment, in the second year of the Trump era, is, Don’t lose your composure. Don’t let it rob you of your peace. Maintain your poise. Don’t let the history around you destabilize you. Don’t become sour. Keep on your game, maintain your own standards.
There are people on television who level the gravest charges against the administration. But they don’t look sad, they have a look of cackling glee. History isn’t unfolding for your amusement. If it’s such a tragedy, you could now and then look stricken.
It would be good for people to dig deep. Everything in our national political life is in flux. Don’t just oppose. Take time to look at why you stand where you stand. Why are you a Democrat? What truths, goals, realities of that party deserve your loyalty? Republicans, the same.
And we should stick to our knitting. Help your country in every way you can within your ken. National figures come and go, but local realities sink in and spread; families fail or flourish. We are a great nation and an earnest people. We forget this, especially in cynical times, but we are.
Many of our political figures are not enjoying their spring.
Republicans on the Hill are bracing for a blue wave. Some have gotten out of the way, some have hunkered down.
Mr. Trump is their problem. Whatever magic he has is not transferable. The base continues to shift under their feet.
Democrats, too, are antsy. Their party continues to split, and they don’t know where the safe area is between the rising left and its demands, and the old Clintonian moderation and its rewards.
What is required of Republican politicians who wish to survive?
To succeed in a dramatic era, a politician needs a combination of caution and imagination. Caution—a knowledge of human nature, an understanding of coalitions, and an admission that history laughs. Imagination—the ability to ascertain the lay of the land and smoke out possibilities, even find room for compromise, knowing that history sometimes bows. This involves the ability to make distinctions. Being imaginative doesn’t mean being unrealistic, and caution isn’t cowardice. To be imaginative is to be open and intuitive as—yes—an artist, not like some gerbil munching on numbers with little pink hands.
