Independence Day 2020

Tomorrow is the 224^th 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.