ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 4, 1997 TAG: 9702040057
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARSHALL FISHWICK
WHAT IS "American" about America? What did it mean to our Founding Fathers - and how has this meaning changed in today's rapidly changing world?
Human history begins when humans occupy a land and make it their own. The first humans on what we now label "our land" were people long called Indians, now Native Americans. We do not know for sure where they came from or when, or how they traveled, coped and multiplied.
We do know that when the first Europeans arrived centuries later, "Indians" had highly integrated cultures and rituals that have existed to the present. We know they were driven from their native lands, slaughtered when they resisted superior technologies and herded onto reservations. In recent years, our understanding and respect for these tribal cultures has increased greatly. We have much to learn from these "Americans."
When Europeans arrived, almost five centuries ago, they came with Europeans' manners, languages and dreams. They sought a New World, and quickly conquered or dominated the more "primitive" natives. The invaders set the pace, the agenda and the style. When the 13 Atlantic seaboard colonies gained their independence from Britain, they became the United States. We often refer to these "states," now expanded to 50, as America, realizing full well that other nations in both North and South America rightfully can claim to be "Americans." In other contexts, they should be and are included.
The nation of which we speak, and which is often called "America," was largely derived from Western Europe, especially nonconformist Britain. Virginia, for example, was named for the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. Millions of immigrants from all parts of the world have since made us not so much a united culture as a melting pot - the current term being multicultural. Now it is Asia and Africa, not just Europe, that send vast numbers to our shores.
Nonetheless, the colonies that eventually became the United States generally spoke English, read European books and sold their raw materials to European markets. Our first president, Gen. George Washington, wore a British red coat before donning the blue of the Continental Army. The noble words that Thomas Jefferson penned into our Declaration of Independence echoed those of English philosophers like John Locke. The homes that Washington and Jefferson built for themselves, Mount Vernon and Monticello, copied those of European aristocrats, not Native Americans.
It was one thing to win political independence from Britain, and quite another to win cultural and social independence. As late as 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson complained that we have listened too long to the "courtly muses of Europe." But we kept listening, and we still do.
Long before we declared and won our independence, the question of American-ness had been raised. Shortly after the English landed in Jamestown in 1607 and Captain John Smith assured its survival and named the land to the north "New England," he commented that not everyone "who hath bin at Virginia, understandeth or knows what Virginia is." As a latter-day Virginia historian, I can say just the same thing nearly 400 years later.
An early classic treatment of American-ness was written in 1782, one year after our victory at Yorktown that won American independence: Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's "Letters from an American farmer: Describing Certain Provincial Situations. Manners and Custom, Not Generally Known." We have been trying to describe and explain them ever since. So have dozens of visitors and historians from around the world.
No easy task, this. Henry James, in "The American Scene," found our country "too large for any human convenience." Writers have struggled to capture the "real America," none more successfully than Walt Whitman in poetry, Mark Twain in prose and George Santayana in philosophy. Santayana suggested that our mind is divided in half, symbolized by the modern skyscraper and the traditional colonial mansion. "The American will," he suggested, inhabits the skyscraper; the American intellect inherits the colonial mansion. Leave it to Mark Twain to give this idea an American spin: "American houses have Queen Anne fronts and Mary Ann behinds."
Of all the people who have tried to explain what is "American" about America, none has been more insightful than John Kouvenhoven. In a much-quoted essay on the subject, he listed 12 things that he feels are "distinctly American" - the Manhattan skyline, the gridiron town-plan, the skyscraper, the Model-T Ford, jazz, the Constitution, Mark Twain's writing, Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," comic strips, soap operas, assembly-line production and chewing gum. An intriguing list!
What do they have in common? They are all concerned with process rather than product. It is the mass-production system, not machinery, which has been America's contribution. Kouwenhoven sums up in a memorable paragraph: "Our history is the process of motion into and out of cities; of weltering and the counter process of return; of motion up and down the social ladder - a long, complex and sometimes terrifying rapid sequence of consecutive change. And it is this sequence, and the attitudes and habits and forms which it has bred, to which the term 'America' really refers."
As nations merge into a global village, and American-ness begins to shape the fate of nations and regions our Founding Fathers could never have imagined, our great opportunity to change not only ourselves but millions outside our borders has arisen. The hope Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed in the mid-19th century holds new meaning at the end of the 20th. We need men and women of original perception and original action, who can "open their eyes wider than to a nationality - to considerations and hopes of benefit to the whole human race."
What an exciting thought as shortly will enter a new century and millennium! This open-ended conception of human's potentialities - the very root and seed of democracy - will allow us not only to open new vistas for our own fulfillment, but for many others as well.
Perhaps we can export not only American machines but also the American Dream. If this happens, we can say with Shakespeare: "O brave new world that has such people in't."
Marshall Fishwick is a professor of humanities and communications at Virginia Tech.
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