A country is more than a set of principles. It is a character—and America’s is rebellious.
“In America, you can be anything you want.” So a French friend of
mine said when I asked how America looked to her and her friends in
Paris. I was curious about the French attitude toward the U.S. after
Bill Clinton left office, then things soured under Bush, then improved
under Obama, and took a dive with Trump. She had come to New York City
in the late ’90s and earned a doctorate at Columbia. I assumed she was a
close observer of the U.S. from an early age.
“What did America mean to you?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said at first.
“Well, what books did you read—Huck Finn, Gatsby . . . ?”
“All we read in school were French books. We didn’t read about the States or talk about them.”
“George Washington, Lincoln, Martin Luther King?”
“No.”
“But you must’ve seen movies and shows,” I pressed. “C’mon, what did you think America was about?”
She paused, then came up with the be-anything-you-want answer.
I
waited for her to go on, but she was silent. She couldn’t elaborate. No
political theory or historical framework, no famous persons or events.
She didn’t mark America as a nation where religion won’t leave the
public square, which Europeans often say. Instead, to her it was an open
society—really open. That was all, not anything specific, not the
Revolution, the Rocky Mountains, First Amendment, Frost’s poetry, or
jazz, just a plain and simple freedom of choice.
As she thought
back to her youth, you could see the contrast sharpen. Americans were
free, French kids weren’t. She felt the restraints of family, church,
community, and class (her father was a prominent intellectual, her
mother a Catholic from an old aristocratic line). Young Americans
weren’t restrained at all.
I heard the same thing said years
before by a graduate student studying French, a man who’d spent many
semesters abroad, when the 1969 film Easy Rider happened to
come up in conversation. I regarded that offbeat drama as just one more
anti-American sally from a time of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. That’s
one reason I liked it. I couldn’t consider those slovenly characters
anything but the opposite of Main Street America.
“No, no,” he replied, “those guys were completely American.”
“What?” I said with a start, the image of Fonda and Hopper on the highway as Steppenwolf blared running through my head.
“Yeah, we saw them right off as standard cowboys.”
“But
they’re outlaws,” I argued. “They can’t mix with regular people. They
grab a couple of prostitutes and get blasted on LSD.” My friend laughed.
“You
think Americans are good law-abiding people? You think they stay in one
place, salute the flag, go to work in the morning and church on
Sunday?”
Although at the time I had never voted Republican and
thought Dan Quayle’s “family values” a joke, I wasn’t interested in
another cosmopolitan putdown of God-fearing Chamber of Commerce America.
I got enough of it at work, where for years I watched colleagues in
American Studies gear their enterprise toward a goal that was summarized
by a fellow professor who, when I asked what was the core of her
heterogeneous field, answered, “Against American Exceptionalism.” Added
to that, I regularly included on my syllabi raw depictions of American
life such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. I was also
at work on a narrative history of a nasty riot in Atlanta in 1906 that
had a section on the re-founding of the Ku Klux Klan in a garish
ceremony atop Stone Mountain in November 1915. I didn’t need outsiders
to enlighten me.
Besides, I already knew what European
intellectuals and American expatriates thought of the United States.
During the ’90s, I spent nearly every summer in France, packing up as
soon as the semester ended for a pensione on the Boulevard Raspail or a
cottage near the Loire. I came to expect a degree of condescension once
people learned where I was from. I didn’t take offense; it was part of
the tourist condition. One time, an attractive, boyish young lady
sitting at the next table in a café introduced herself, offered me a
smoke, then held up her pack of Marlboros. “See,” she said in careful
English, turning the box this way and that as she pointed to the angles
of red and white one by one. “K-K-K.”
This was different, though.
My acquaintance didn’t want to knock our country. His remark about
churchgoing was provocative, but he knew that most Americans live
law-abiding, God-believing lives. When he referred to “Americans,” he
meant Americans in the ideal, what used to be called the “National
Character.” He was a literature person like me, and we think in symbolic
terms, not concrete data. I picked up his archetypal angle instantly.
To him, the heroes in Easy Rider were mythic figures, not
ordinary individuals, and this was his point: Those easy riders
possessed an authentic Americanism I had overlooked.
My friend
liked to toss flamboyant pronouncements, then smile and pass on, but
this one stuck. I kept thinking about it. I taught American literature
every year and had a bundle of themes I used to tie together works from
the Colonial Period to the mid-20th century. I assigned definitive
statements such as the section in Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer entitled “What Is an American?”; Leaves of Grass, which says in its preface, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”; Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio;
and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Autobiography” (“I am an American. / I was
an American boy. / I read the American Boy Magazine / and became a boy
scout / in the suburbs.”). A fresh thesis about what constitutes
“American-ness” was always worth entertaining.
I viewed Easy Rider
again and the pieces started to fall into place. Wyatt and Billy as
American idols . . . bikes on the highway as an American pilgrimage . . .
jail and expulsion as rugged individualism meeting a stuffy society . .
. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Billy and Wyatt
do the deal in Los Angeles, hop on their bikes, hit the road, and travel
the West. What could be more American than that?
They shun
middle-class existence and domesticity, to be sure, and so do Natty
Bumppo, Thoreau, Ishmael and Ahab, Whitman, Huck, Bohemians in Greenwich
Village in the 1920s, the Beats, and the Invisible Man.
They have no lineage and no roots, nothing to tie them to place or
country, and neither do Bartleby, aptly named Christopher Newman (hero
of Henry James’s The American), Shane, Gatsby, Thomas Sutpen, and dozens of orphans and runaways in the corpus.
If
they drift into crime, well, so do Hester Prynne, young Ben Franklin,
the signers of the Declaration of Independence on the day of signing,
John Greenleaf Whittier’s Barbara Frietchie, Clyde Griffiths (whose fate
is, Dreiser says, an American tragedy), Montag in Fahrenheit 451, the free spirits in “Howl” who “crashed through their minds in jail,” Norman Mailer at the Pentagon protest recounted in Armies of the Night, and Thelma and Louise, another pair on an American road trip.
It was almost funny: Easy Rider
as traditional. It gave me something novel to say to undergraduates
unfamiliar with the Sixties and faithful to a work ethic that carried
them to this wealthy university.
Did it make Ken Kesey and the
Merry Pranksters on the bus careening across America traditional, too,
as Tom Wolfe wrote it up in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? What about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?
Those
flights couldn’t be more contrary to conceptions of America put forward
by the patriotic authorities. Here, for instance, is how the Heritage
Foundation defined Americanism in 2010, in its report “Why Is America
Exceptional?” After noting that “The American people are among the most
hard-working, church-going, affluent, and generous in the world,” it
says:
America was founded at a particular time, by a particular people, on the
basis of particular principles about man, liberty, and constitutional
government.
The American Revolution drew on old ideas. The United
States is the product of Western civilization, shaped by Judeo-Christian
culture and the political liberties inherited from Great Britain.
A
quotation from Chesterton follows—“America is the only nation in the
world that is founded on a creed”—which Heritage ties to the
Declaration. Principles, ideas, civilization . . . it sounds as if
America happened in the mind of Thomas Jefferson, certainly not in the
scheming of Billy and Wyatt, Dr. Gonzo, and Neal Cassady.
How
settled and rational all of that sounds, and how inadequate to so many
burning moments of assertion scattered across American literature,
history, and art. Not that it’s wrong, just a little staid.
A
heritage is more than a descent of beliefs. “I think there is no country
in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy
than the United States,” de Tocqueville observed during his historic
tour. He also said, “Americans have not needed to draw their philosophic
method from books; they have found it in themselves.” In the section
“Intellectual Movement in the United States,” he didn’t examine the
content of their thoughts or their primary influences. Instead, he
detailed their “habits of mind,” their tastes, interests, “democratic
instincts” and “common opinion”—in sum, the disposition of those
singular individuals realizing the principles the Heritage Foundation
underscores.
So did Crevecoeur in the Letters, which the Founders loved. George Washington rated it with Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia
as the best descriptions of life in the New World. It painted a
sympathetic picture of the character of the citizens, their “national
genius” (Crevecoeur’s term), and that’s exactly what the budding nation
needed.
At one point, Crevecoeur explains how religions are able
to cohabit in a particular community. We have a Catholic here, a
Lutheran there, he says, a “seceder” and a Low Dutchman, too, and they
all get along. The Catholic believes in transubstantiation, but while in
Europe they fight over such things, in America “his prayers offend
nobody.” The Lutheran, on the other hand, affirms consubstantiation, but
“by doing so he scandalizes nobody.” The “seceder” has a “hot and
fiery” faith, Crevecoeur admits, but not enough followers to threaten
his neighbors. The Low Dutchman has a “coarse idea” of church but he
happily joins this “strange religious medley” without disrupting his
neighbors, living a neat and sober life on earth and letting God decide
who is right in the next life.
This happy coexistence thrives not because they read James Madison on religious toleration. It’s because they have thick skins: I don’t bother you and you don’t bother me.
* * *
When
I read history-of-ideas descriptions of the American advent such as the
Heritage document, I imagine memorable persons in play. It’s a
professional habit. A literature teacher is inclined to reckon this
characterological side more than is a political thinker or a
policymaker. He tends to see the creed and not the personality, the
First Amendment and not the temperament that will go to jail for it.
To
the theorist, America is a doctrine, not a drama. It is a nation of
laws, not one of images and actions. He tracks conceptual terms, not
metaphor and melody. He doesn’t rank Walden and O Pioneers! anywhere close to the Civil Rights Act. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is more relevant than Hemingway and John Dos Passos joining the ambulance corps in World War I.
Americans
in the mid-19th century loved Italian opera and Shakespeare, even in
the untamed reaches of the West, as you can see in the episode of the
thespian’s stay in town in John Ford’s 1946 film My Darling Clementine,
but those storylines don’t fill out the American Idea, not to the
political scientist. The New Deal of FDR and the tax cuts of President
Reagan he will debate with fervor, but Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront
telling his brother in the back of the car, “I coulda had class, I
coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum,”
words that have become a classic statement of dignity for the
down-and-out—those words may reach our political analyst as touching
theater, but not anything to incorporate into a national understanding.
At
the National Conservative Conference in Washington, D.C., in 2019,
intelligent minds expounded a vision of America that broke from the
free-market fundamentalism of the libertarian right, the global zeal of
the neoconservative right, and the statist control of the
social-democratic left. It was a sincere effort to forge 21st-century
conservatism for the middle and working classes. But in my two days of
attendance, apart from a reference to Whitman in an opening speech, I
didn’t catch a single remark about a novel, poem, play, film, song, or
painting.
There is a reason for that. When you draw the creed out
of abstraction, add the human factor, and mix them in a local
habitation, things get a little messy. The grounds of American-ness grow
less distinct, the ideals less firm. Democratic propositions fall into
the hands of persons of will and self-interest, which complicates the
history. It doesn’t discredit those individuals or the beliefs, but it
does grant the heritage a human reality whose grimier ingredients make
it more appealing to me, not less.
A survey of American history,
literature, and art shows that some of the prototypical figures in our
past don’t always observe the best parts of the American Idea. The
characters that espouse the creed aren’t as worthy as the creed alone.
The self that acts out the propositions is not so clean and high-minded.
“Give me liberty or give me death!” is as much an expression of Patrick
Henry’s intractability as it is of Lockean self-government. When
Thoreau heads to the woods on July 4, 1845, the chosen date is as much
an outburst of “Leave me alone!” as it is a private repetition of “All
men are created equal.”
This is the complication. Too many
exceptional figures in the American grain are too headstrong and
disruptive for the orderly wisdom of the Constitution. The self they
project has too much of the daimonic to suit the “decent respect,” “prudence,” and “patient sufferance” mentioned in the Declaration.
Even
so judicious a personage as Booker T. Washington strays into perilous
defiance. There is the Washington who counseled blacks to be patient,
move slowly, and build up some capital before pushing for equality, an
accommodationist approach that dismayed militant blacks such as W.E.B.
Du Bois.
But there is another Washington who in 1902 supported Du
Bois’s lawsuit against the Southern Railway after he was refused a
sleeping car berth because of his color. Washington advised him at each
step and promised that when the bills came, Washington would “bear a
portion of it provided I can hand it to you personally and not have any
connection with your committee.” He urged Bookerites in Virginia and
Tennessee to initiate similar lawsuits, and he prodded Robert Todd
Lincoln, the president’s son and head of the Pullman Company, to end
segregation in the cars.
He did it privately, but I don’t take
Washington’s secrecy as cowardice. If word got out that he was
litigating against “White Only” rules, his reputation would fall, and so
would his influence in the Republican Party (which brought federal jobs
to many hundreds of blacks), along with donations to Tuskegee
Institute. These were grave risks he didn’t have to take. I include them
in my presentations to let audiences know that Washington had a
reckless side that puts his public circumspection in a more tactical
light. There is a reason that Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots
(inspiration for Birth of a Nation), considered Washington a wolf in
sheep’s clothing and a threat to white supremacy in the South.
His
covert actions add a daring element to the cautious race policies he
voiced in public. It makes him less conciliatory and more interesting,
and it makes the ideas of equality more dynamic and real—and a little
impure in their realization.
With facts such as those in hand, the
heritage becomes less abstract and more human. The ideas are universal
and static; the American people are individualistic, a little ornery,
the strong ones making ideas their own and living them as instinct. It
is entirely typical for one of our greatest philosophers to say, “The
history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of
human temperaments,” as William James did in a 1906 lecture that became
the first chapter of Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.
Emerson
boasted, “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.”
Generations of readers bore him out, including William James’s father, a
friend of Emerson’s who said once that he didn’t think much of his
friend’s ideas but that “it was utterly impossible to listen to Mr.
Emerson’s lectures, without being perpetually haunted as to your
intellect by the subtlest and most searching aroma of personality.”
Yes, personality over ideas, temperament over philosophy, the temperament itself spirited and obstinate: it’s a recurrent theme.
In the train of national types found in a U.S. history class or American
literature survey, the high meaning of ideals settles into an insistent
will again and again. The words of freedom are made flesh in the
vehement person of “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs” (“Song
of Myself”); or Emily Dickinson admitting, “I never hear the word
‘escape’ / Without a quicker blood” (#77); or Grant at Appomattox in the
dirty uniform of a private but with a general’s straps, “rough garb,”
he calls it in Personal Memoirs; or Charles Foster Kane in another very
American story, caught in an affair, telling his wife and political
rival, “There’s only one person in the world to decide what I’m going to
do, and that’s me.”
Here is a sharper example. Everyone loves Huck Finn, including Disneyland and the New York Times,
which devoted many columns over several days to Twain after he died in
1910 and went so far as to track down the boyhood friend who was the
model for the character and ask him for remembrances of the author. One
would expect Huck, a quintessential American figure, to embody those
“particular principles” and “old ideas” mentioned above, if in a
mischievous way.
How, though, does this summation of him by T. S.
Eliot tally the Judeo-Christian, Western-Civilization conception of the
country? “Huck is alone: there is no more solitary character in
fiction,” Eliot says. Tom Sawyer will recover, grow up and marry, and
become a successful lawyer or whatever suits his tactical wit. Jim will
join his family. What about Huck?
For Huckleberry Finn, neither a
tragic nor a happy ending would be suitable. No worldly success or
social satisfaction, no domestic consummation would be worthy of him; a
tragic end also would reduce him to the level of those whom we pity.
Huck Finn must come from nowhere and be bound for nowhere. His is not
the independence of the typical or symbolic “American Pioneer,” but the
independence of the vagabond. His existence questions the values of
America as much as the values of Europe. . . . He belongs neither to the
Sunday School nor to the Reformatory. He has no beginning and no end.
Hence, he can only disappear.
I read that description of Huck
years ago when I was starting to teach. It hit me as awfully desolate,
killing the humor in the book, such as when the drunken Boggs riding
wildly through town with gun drawn spots Huck, leans over, and mutters,
“Whar’d you come f’m, boy? You prepared to die?” The onlookers laugh and
assure Huck he’s “the best-naturedest old fool in Arkansas.”
The humor doesn’t last long. What follows is ghastly: Boggs is shot down
in the street right in front of his 16-year-old daughter. His killer
had given Boggs until 1:00pm to shut up, after Boggs in the midst of his
rowdiness had called the man a cheat. The man drops his pistol as the
townspeople carry the victim inside.
Huck sticks around; he
doesn’t run in horror. We are so eager to find out what will happen that
we forget the curious kid seemingly unfazed by the bloodshed. He races
forward to get “a good place at the window” and witness Boggs expire.
Twain details the bullet hole, the convulsing chest, the screaming girl,
“and after that he laid still; he was dead.”
All of this runs
through Huck’s eyes—that’s what Eliot’s remarks made me keep in mind.
Huck’s response to the horror is as withheld as the conception of
Huck-as-Stranger demands. He doesn’t judge; he doesn’t interpret. Not a
single moral response passes his lips. He doesn’t even describe his own
feelings. He only observes.
I have taught the novel many times
over the years, and I know that I have never made my students realize
how lonesome and ill-adapted Huck is. I haven’t realized it myself. He’s
too distant. It’s not just that my 21st-century classroom with
computers along the walls and cell phones in every backpack prevents us
from bridging 150 years of drastic change, or that our collective
education—their AP classes and majors, my doctorate and tenure—disables
any identification with this illiterate runaway.
It’s that you can’t attach anything to him. Huck doesn’t have a
philosophy or a religion or a politics. He’s all feeling and tendency.
He
doesn’t reason himself into separation; he just doesn’t like to draw
attention or get involved. No Rousseau-like objections to being
socialized, merely discomfort with new shoes and clean clothes and
cropped hair. He prefers a drunken father who beats him to a school that
“learns” him. Nothing more than an impulse to get away impels his
famous final intent: “I reckon I got to light out for the territory
ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and
sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” There it is,
nothing more to it than that: I can’t stand it.
* * *
I
like these unruly types. They’re good for America. They add
iconoclastic pep to the body politic; their restive instincts have
redeeming value. They go their own way and do their own thing, and we
need a little more individualism, a lot less groupthink.
They don’t care about the sovereignty of the people, only the state of
their conscience. They don’t cry about injustice; they want space. They
don’t appeal to the Bill of Rights; they trust their iron will. They
renounce because of disposition, not principle. They speak for no one
but themselves.
The minute they saw their opposition become a
popular habit, they would have none of it. Thoreau would not have
welcomed another fellow setting up 100 yards away and following his
lead. Emily Dickinson didn’t go to her room, shut the door, and create a
legendary corpus in order to be an example to others. Jack Kerouac
despised the Hippies who idolized him. Wyatt and Billy stick to
themselves. These acts follow an old strain of nonconformity. Wyatt’s
helmet and gas tank are decorated with the American flag.
Such renegades exist because the “world’s opinion” (Emerson’s phrase) now and then grows overbearing, and these Americans can’t
stand it. A stifling social atmosphere, a bad law, an authority figure
can make these characters cry, “No! in thunder,” as Melville said of
Hawthorne.
When William F. Buckley started his rollicking campaign
for mayor of New York City in 1965, he knew he would never win, but the
reality of two political parties so stale and phony in their approach
to governance was too much. He had to act, announcing his platform in
National Review with the headline, “Mayor, Anyone?”
Norman Mailer
marched on the Pentagon in 1967 and halted at the rope marking a line
they must not cross; soldiers stood just beyond. It signified to him the
military-industrial complex that had bungled the war and tarnished the
country. To pass that barrier was to risk a beating and an arrest, but
he had to do it. It’s an existential face-off, Me vs. It, and Mailer,
like the others, won’t back down.
“Nothing at last is sacred but
the integrity of your own mind,” Emerson said, but our characters don’t
claim anything sacred about their motives. They simply refuse the going
tendency. They honor a different Founding, a personal declaration of
independence. The episodes are fraught and intense, the outcomes not
always pleasing. They risk themselves, their happiness, their lives,
even, and pay the price in loneliness and fatigue. Conformity is
soothing, self-assertion tricky. It isn’t nice to be alone; it isn’t
easy to rebel! If they abide by others, though, they can’t live with
themselves.
Frederick Douglass doesn’t fight his overseer because
slavery is immoral. He doesn’t invoke rights and the Constitution. He’s
simply had enough. He and other such rebels don’t form a more perfect
union or insure domestic tranquility. They strike against the existing
tranquility. They see the stalwart virtues of yesterday become the
temperate habits of today. They want more out of life, and they’re right
to do so.
George Hanson is the alcoholic lawyer played by Jack
Nicholson who joins the easy riders until some locals attack them in the
woods and George is killed. Billy and Wyatt don’t understand why the
townspeople have run them off.
“They think we’re gonna cut their throat or something,” Billy tells him. “They’re scared, man.”
“They’re not scared of you,” George says, “they’re scared of what you represent to them.”
“Hey, man, all we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.”
“Oh, no,” George corrects him, “what you represent to them is freedom.”
“What the hell’s wrong with freedom, man,” Billy replies. “That’s what it’s all about.”
Mark Bauerlein is emeritus professor at Emory University and an editor at First Things magazine.
