I’m about 47 hours away from submitting grades for the Spring semester. Then sweet freedom! I’ve got a small library of books that I’m plunging into directly, beginning with Freedom Just Around the Corner, by Walter McDougall. It is an American history book that runs from 1585 (when England began expanding into America) to 1828 (when Andrew Jackson ran for President). It is the first in a trilogy of American history books McDougall has written in the past years. I received the recommendation from a friend who is actually one of McDougall’s few graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. After reading the preface and first chapter, I can begin to see why my friend is excited about this book. From the preface:
“The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years. If some ghostly ship, some Flying Dutchman, were transported in time from 1600 into the present, the crew would be amazed by our technology and the sheer numbers of people on the globe, but the array of civilizations would be recognizable….. The only continent that would astound the Renaissance time-travelers would be North America, which was primitive and nearly vacant as late as 1607, but which today hosts the mightiest, richest, most dynamic civilization in history–a civilization, moreover, that perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.”
This book was just published in 2004, so you can see what a punch in the face it is to contemporary American academic. American history once ignored or devalued the Native American tribes, but certainly as long as I’ve been in college (2001) and probably much longer, I’ve seen the reaction. That is, whenever the English colonies are brought up, the tremendous crime of taking from the Natives is put in the spotlight. My impression is that McDougall chose to write this American history in order to cut through the trends and reactions, and to simply write what he sees. In the preface and first chapter, he admits the good, bad and quirky aspects of American history and character, and calls out many contemporary historians as either being too self-congratulatory or too critical. I hope it is telling that, in the preface, he states the following:
“I also imagined special features that might justify a new US history. I wanted to pay more attention to all regions and states so that Kansas, for instance, would not exist only when it was “bleeding.” The Midwest, in particular, has received far less attention that it deserves in synthetic histories, while the “new Western history” demands a correction of traditional interpretations of the frontier. I hoped to be genuinely inclusive by making room not only for African, Asian, and Hispanic Americans, but for European ethnic groups such as Germans, Irish, Italian, Slavs, Scandinavians, and Jews. I meant to treat all these as people rather than icons, recognizing that no American is “just” a member of a group, but a person with loyalties to kinfolk, region, occupation, religion, and political party as well as ethnicity.” (xiii) (Bolding is my edit.)
In the first chapter, McDougall set out to introduce “Americans” as fitting four Archetypes introduced by some great American literature. In Melville’s The Confidence-Man, we find the American as hustler/trickster. In Twain’s A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, we see the practical/ingenious American. In Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, we see the American struggling with Freedom versus Individualism, and how they are both challenged by city living (such a strange way for me to look at it, since I came to Chicago for freedom, lost it, then started building myself as an Individual. Finally, William Safire’s Scandalmonger, which sees Americans as a unique, naturally “hardball” political creature.
To wrap this up, I’ll leave you with a sizable chunk from near the end of the first chapter. I liked it a lot.
“What if the United States, as suggested in the preface, is a permanent revolution, a society in constant flux, a polity devoted by general consensus to fleeing as quickly as possible into the future? In that case, we would expect every period of American history to be washed by turgid, overlapping waves of old and new forms of “creative corruption” at the federal, state, and local levels.”
“In a later book, [Samuel] Huntington examined the gap between the ideals of the American creed and the sometimes grotesque realities of American life. This gap is not to be wondered at; it is a natural consequence of ideals themselves. If Americans were dedicated to the proposition that men (and women) are endowed with no rights at all, with life a matter of getting all you can at others’ expense, then no one would accuse them of democracy. But given their high ideals Americans can cope with the gap in any of four ways. he hypocrite ignores the reality. The cynic dismisses ideals as, at best, useful myths. The complacent just admits the gap and moves on. The moralist seeks to narrow it through religious uplift or social reform. But whichever mood may be prevalent, every era of American history is defined by disharmony: “America is not a lie: it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.”
“What is novel about Americans, as their novelists repeatedly teach, is not that they are better or worse than peoples of other places and times (100 percent of whose genes they share), but that they are freer than other peoples to pursue happiness and yet are no happier for it. Therein lies the source of America’s disappointment. Only free people can disappoint and be disappointed by the discovery that worldly ideals cannot be advanced except by worldly means. That raises the historical question: how did it happen that Americans managed to seize such freedom, conceive such ideals, achieve such success, yet grieve over such disappintment? Did they think themselves somehow exempt from the curses of Adam and Eve?”
I have struggled with my relationship with America. As a Persian American, I understood at an early age that American freedom and quality of life is real and valuable. I was just also naive enough to believe it was a simple one-sided story. So I joined the Marines and was certainly willing to fight for these freedoms if necessary. But after four years of seeing the inside of the Corps, and then getting a more full education in American history in college, I became much more skeptical. My patriotism withered away to nothing. But the rampant cynicism amongst many of my friends didn’t make much sense either. America has committed great feats of hypocrisy, but that doesn’t make our freedoms and quality of life any less real: just more limited and nuanced. Furthermore, I don’t take the question of the “good” of America to be merely academic or some cheesy internal search to find out what America “really means” to me. The United States is my community. As for all of us, it is where I live, work, and contribute to others. Especially as a community college instructor, I am plugged in to the ideas that influence our community, and I desperately want my thoughts on the subject better investigated and ordered than they are now. McDougall’s introductory remarks are encouraging, and I’m looking forward to reading this book thoroughly.
But for now, back to grading.
Natural Causes 