Tomorrow is the 224th
anniversary of American independence and, as such, a day for all Americans—even
despite the turmoil of the last months and weeks—for all Americans to celebrate
and to honor. The revolutionary spirit, after all, that moved our nation’s
founders to feel that they were behaving nobly and well rather than
reprehensibly and treacherously by renouncing their allegiance to their king is
alive and well in our nation’s apparently systemic need constantly to
re-evaluate the givens of our national life and to revise where necessary. This
is a very good thing!
It’s taken a lot to get this far.
The American republic was, after all, a very different place on July 4, 1776,
when independence was declared. All thirteen of the original colonies condoned
slavery within their borders and although they differed dramatically in terms
of the numbers of enslaved individuals present in each (ranging from more than
187,000 in Virginia to fewer than a thousand in New Hampshire), there was no
state in the new nation that did not have slaves among its populace. Nor were
they any in which women could vote, hold public office, or appear in court on
their own behalf. Nor was public education a right extended to all regardless
of financial or social class, or ethnic or religious background; it wasn’t
until 1870, almost a full century after independence, that every single state
had tax-subsidized elementary schools open to all. (And it took another
half-century after that—until 1918—for every state in the Union actually to require
its children to attend elementary school.)
Even from the beginning, America
was a work in progress. New ideas, new institutions, new ways of seeing things
and doing things—these were the hallmarks of Americanism even as early as the
first decades of the republic. And they remain in place even today—the nationwide
demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death while in police custody were
an affirmation of American values, not a repudiation of them. And yet the
concept of Americanism itself has fallen into desuetude: I can’t actually
remember the last time I noted someone writing seriously about it or even using
the term other than cynically. So I thought that this week, in honor of Independence
Day, I would write about Americanism and see if the reticence so many seem to
harbor about using it to define our national ethos is justified or not.
Part of the problem has to do
with patriotism’s malign stepsiblings: chauvinism, jingoism, nativism, and unfounded
exceptionalism. But setting aside the kind of skittishness that thought
naturally engenders, the more basic question to ask is whether Americanism has
an actual definition. Or is it one of those words that simply means whatever
someone using it wills it to denote?
To many, Americanism is rooted in
the “city on a hill” concept according to which the specific mission of America
is to serve as a beacon of light and hope for the world. That was how John Winthrop
used it when he preached a sermon on board the Arabella in 1630 and called upon
his fellow Puritan emigrants to imagine that they had been called by God to
build in a new land a society that would exemplify the ideals and moral bearing
that they found it impossible to embrace in England, one that would serve, to
use Thomas Paine’s turn of phrase, as “asylum for mankind.”
That was certainly what President
Kennedy had in mind in 1961 when he declared that the point of America existing
in the first place is to prove to the world that the finest philosophical
principles—equality before the law, for example, or the supreme independence of
the individual—could actually serve as the ideational underpinning of a nation
of like-minded individuals seeking not to admire that “city on the hill” from
the distance but actually to live and thrive in it. And it was equally
certainly what President Reagan had in mind in his farewell address to the
nation when he spelled out what the image of the shining city on the hill meant
to him personally:
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know
if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a
tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed,
and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with
free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be
city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will
and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.
In my opinion, those words from
decades ago define the great challenge facing our nation on this Independence
Day.
My readers know that I am at
heart a nineteenth-century man, one whose literary heroes—Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman,
Fenimore Cooper, Irving, Twain, Emerson, and Thoreau—all came and went within
that one century’s boundaries. (Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were
born in 1783 and 1789 respectively, but both only started publishing as adults.
Mark Twain died in 1910, but all of his major works were published before
1900.) All, with no exceptions at all, addressed the question of the American
ethos in their writing. But, of them all, it was and is Whitman—Long Island’s single
greatest contribution to American culture—who spoke and speaks the most loudly
and clearly to me on the topic of Americanism and its potential, even today, to
inspire us and lead us forward.
I’ve had a copy of Leaves of
Grass close at hand for most of my days. (The teenager in my story, “Under
the Wheel,” who always has a copy in his backpack is some version of the
teenaged me.) But I also have a 1921 book in my library entitled The
Patriotic Poems of Walt Whitman. And it is within the pages of that book that
I have found the verses that I hope can serve as my Independence Day gift to
you all.
What is America? Whitman knew!
“Center of equal daughters, equal sons / All, all alike, endear’d, grown,
ungrown, young or old, / Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich /
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law, and Love / A grand, sane, towering
seated Mother / Chair’d in the adamant of Time.”
What is American freedom? Whitman
knew that too. “Land tolerating all, accepting all, not for the good alone, all
good for three, / Land in the realms of God to be a realm unto thyself, / Under
the rule of God to be a rule unto thyself. / (Lo, where arise three peerless
stars, / To be thy natal stars my country, Ensemble, Evolution, Freedom / Set
in the sky of Law.) / Land of unprecedented faith, God’s faith / Thy soil, thy
very subsoil, all upheav’d, / The general inner earth so long so sedulously
draped over, now hence for what it is, boldly laid bare, / Open’d by thee to
heaven’s light for benefit or bale.”
What is American destiny? “Equable,
natural, mystical Union thou (the moral with immortal blent), / Shalt soar
toward the fulfilment of the future, the spirit of the bod and the mind, / The
soul, its destinies. / The soul, its destinies, the real real / (Purport of all
these apparitions of the real); / In thee America, the soul, its destinies, /
Thou globe of globes! thou wonder nebulous! / By many a throe of heat and cold
convuls’d (by these thyself solidifying), / Thou mental, moral orb—thou New,
indeed new, Spiritual World! / The Present holds thee not—for such vast growth
as thine, / For such unaparallel’d flight as thine, such brook as thine, / the
FUTURE only holds thee and can hold thee.”
And, speaking of the future,
Whitman could see that clearly too: “Others take finish, but the Republic is
ever constructive and ever keeps vista, / Others adorn the past, but you, O
days of the present, I adorn you, / O days of the future, I believe in you—I
isolate myself for your sake, / O America, because you build for mankind, I
build for you….”
To me, these verses exemplify the
best of Americanism, combining proud determinism with a sense of our national destiny
to create a republic that does not merely pay lip service to the philosophical
principles of equality and decency of which our Founders spoke, but which seeks
constantly to morph forward, even if in fits and starts, to a future in which
the ideals of the Constitution serve collectively as the paving stones of which
is constructed the road forward for a nation united by trust in itself and hope
for the future.
Our nation in floating forward on
troubled seas. In my opinion, we are tormented by a lack of moral leadership in
the highest offices of the land, by a malignant willingness to accept vulgarity
and tawdriness as things that can be condemned but not truly eradicated, by a
national malaise born of inequality going back to the dark days of the era of Reconstruction
that followed the Civil War, and, now, by a relentless virus that is stalking
our nation’s streets and public places. But I am a Long Islander now…and
Whitman is my man. He lived through the Civil War and saw for himself the
almost unimaginable carnage it left in its terrible wake. He lived through the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, regarding whose terrible death he wrote some
of his greatest poems. He wrote one single book, which he spent his life
endlessly revisiting and revising. (In that, he was America personified.) And
he left behind a dream for us to embrace as Americans seeking to make real the
vision he codified in his verse, the one in which America is exceptional not
because of its wealth or its military power, but because of the strength of its
core ideas…and the power of its will to create in this place something new and truly
remarkable.
