The great debate

What is America?

Everybody has their impression. In my capacity as a children’s book reviewer, I’ve been looking at two recent publications that view our country through distinct ­perspectives. Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation is the Young Reader ­edition of an earlier book that surveys history through popular songs. Authors Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw are center-left in their political perspective, but they seem to have a genuine affection for their country and aren’t too savage in their examination of its faults. Some of the songs are harsh, like Nina Simone’s “Mississippi [profanity]” written in response to a spate of 1930s lynchings. Protest, according to the authors, makes the nation as much as patriotism.

The other title is America Redux: Visual Stories From Our Dynamic History by Ariel Aberg-Riger. It might best be described as a book-length collage of news photos, portraits, vintage prints, and text, strung together on a single theme. The theme is minorities pushing back against white supremacy, and the presentation is certainly dynamic. Also compelling, frustrating, and ultimately confusing. The opening quote from James Baldwin describes American history as “longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” In her attempt to say something about it, Aberg-Riger gives us the various and the terrible, but the beauty resides only in the black, brown, and indigenous people who challenged the status quo.

Western history in general, and American history in particular, has become a minefield of reinterpretation. In some quarters, it’s so toxic that the Stars and Stripes triggers anxiety and the Fourth of July calls for dirges rather than marches. It’s a civil war of words, where conflicting ideas test whether any nation that so vigorously debates its own existence can long endure.

The debate isn’t new, though. The Revolution that created the United States was our first civil war, beginning with a clash of ideas that led to blood and bullets. Hector St. John de Crevècoeur, a French aristocrat who settled in upstate New York, tried to define the stakes in Letters From an American Farmer, published in 1782. His signature essay asks, “What then is an American, this new man?” An American is heir to European arts and sciences, but freed from European traditions and obligations. He is a man of property, entitled to the fruits of his labor. He is a free agent in a classless society, owing no allegiance to a king or a church. And he participates in a great ­destiny: “Here, individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great change in the world.”

Interestingly, Crevècoeur wrote those words in England, after being hounded off his farm for suspected Tory sympathies and held in British-occupied New York City for suspected espionage. Returning to New York in 1783 as the newly appointed French consul, he found his farmhouse destroyed in an Indian raid, his wife dead, and his children missing. Eventually, Crevècoeur returned to his homeland and died there, leaving it to the Americans to discover for themselves who they were. We haven’t figured it out yet.

Americans might be simply defined as individuals freed to act out their human nature. Human nature is complicated, and so is American history. The “glory and garbage of the universe” (according to another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal), turned loose on a largely empty continent, will do glorious and garbagy things. Glorious are the innovations, the material prosperity, and the opportunity to follow up on a good idea. Less so is the freedom to exercise greed and prejudice. Americans aren’t uniquely good or evil; we’ve just been uniquely unfettered.

That’s why John Adams said our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. We the ­people, left and right, still believe that; the disagreement is over whose morality, and what religion.