A Meditation For The 4th of July

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July 4, 2003

Only in America
By ERIC HOBSBAWM

Looking back on 40 years of visiting and living in the United States, I think I learned as much about the country in the first summer I spent there as in the course of the next decades. With one exception: To know New York, or even Manhattan, one has to live there. For how long? I did so for four months every year between 1984 and 1997, but even though my wife, Marlene, joined me for the whole semester only three times, it was quite enough for both of us to feel like natives rather than visitors. I have spent a lot of time in the U.S.A. teaching, reading in its marvelous libraries, writing, or having a good time, or all together in the Getty Center in its days in Santa Monica, but what I learned from personal acquaintance with America was acquired in the course of a few weeks and months. Were I a de Tocqueville, that would have been quite enough. After all, his Democracy in America, the best book ever written about the U.S.A., was based on a journey of not more than nine months. Alas, I am not de Tocqueville, nor is my interest in the U.S.A. the same as his.

If written today, de Tocqueville's book would certainly be attacked as anti-American, since much of what he said about the U.S.A. was critical. Ever since it was founded, the U.S.A. has been a subject of attraction and fascination for the rest of the world, but also of detraction and disapproval. However, it is only since the start of the cold war that people's attitude to the U.S.A. has been judged essentially in terms of approval or disapproval, and not only by the sort of inhabitants who are also likely to seek out "un-American" behavior in their own fellow citizens, but also internationally. It substituted the question "Are you with the U.S.A.?" for the question "What do you think of the U.S.A.?" What is more, no other country expects or asks such a question about itself. Since America, having won the cold war against the U.S.S.R., implausibly decided on September 11, 2001, that the cause of freedom was again engaged in another life-and-death struggle against another evil, but this time spectacularly ill-defined enemy, any skeptical remarks about the United States and its policy are, once again, likely to meet with outrage.

And yet, how irrelevant, even absurd, is this insistence on approval! Internationally speaking, the U.S.A. was by any standards the success story among 20th-century states. Its economy became the world's largest, both pace- and pattern-setting; its capacity for technological achievement was unique; its research in both natural and social sciences, even its philosophers, became increasingly dominant; and its hegemony in global consumer civilization seemed beyond challenge. It ended the century as the only surviving global power and empire. What is more, as I have written elsewhere, "in some ways the United States represents the best of the 20th century." If opinion is measured not by pollsters but by migrants, almost certainly America would be the preferred destination of most human beings who must, or decide to, move to a country other than their own, certainly of those who know some English. As one of those who chose to work in the U.S.A., I illustrate the point. Admittedly, working in the U.S.A., or liking to live in the U.S.A. -- and especially in New York -- does not imply the wish to become American, although this is still difficult for many inhabitants of the United States to understand. It no longer implies a lasting choice for most people between one's own country and another, as it did before the Second World War, or even until the air-transport revolution in the 1960s, let alone the telephone and e-mail revolution of the 1990s. Binational or even multinational working and even bi- or multicultural lives have become common.

Nor is money the only attraction. The U.S.A. promises greater openness to talent, to energy, to novelty than other worlds. It is also the reminder of an old, if declining, tradition of free and egalitarian intellectual inquiry, as in the great New York Public Library, whose treasures are still, unlike in the other great libraries of the world, open to anyone who walks through its doors on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. On the other hand, the human costs of the system for those outside it or who cannot "make it" were equally evident in New York, at least until they were pushed out of middle-class sight, off the streets or into the unspeakable univers concentrationnaire of the largest jail population, per capita, in the world. When I first went to New York, the Bowery was still a vast human refuse dump or "skid row." In the 1980s it was more evenly distributed through the streets of Manhattan. Behind today's casual mobile-phone calls on the street, I still hear the soliloquies of the unwanted and crazy on the pavements of New York in one of the city's bad decades of inhumanity and brutality. Human wastage is the other face of American capitalism, in a country where "to waste" is the common criminal slang for "to kill."

Yet, unlike other nations, in its national ideology the U.S.A. does not simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective identity except as the best, the greatest country, superior to all others and the acknowledged model for the world. As the football coach said: Winning is not just the most important thing, it is all there is. That is one of the things that makes America such a very strange country for foreigners. Stopping for a brief holiday with the family in a small, poor, linguistically incomprehensible seaside town in Portugal, on the way back from a semester in New England, I still remember the sense of coming home to one's own civilization. Geography had nothing to do with it. When we went on a similar holiday to Portugal a few years later, en route this time from South America, there was no such feeling of a culture gap overcome. Not the least of these cultural peculiarities is the U.S.A.'s own sense of its strangeness ("Only in America ... "), or at least its curiously unfixed sense of self. The question that preoccupies so many American historians of their own country, namely, "What does it mean to be American?," is one that rarely bothered my generation of historians in European countries. Neither national nor personal identity seemed as problematic to visiting Brits, at all events in the 1960s, even those of complex Central European cultural background, as they seemed in local academic discussions. "What is this identity crisis they are all talking about?" Marlene asked me after one of them. She had never heard the term before we arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1967.

Foreign academics who discovered the U.S.A. in the 1960s were probably more immediately aware of its peculiarities than they would be today, for so many of them had not yet been integrated into the omnipresent language of globalized consumer society, which fits in well with the deeply entrenched egocentricity, even solipsism, of American culture. For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian, though curiously legalistic, anarchism has become the core of the value system in the U.S.A. What survives of egalitarianism is chiefly the refusal of voluntary deference to hierarchic superiors, which may account for the -- by our standards -- everyday crudeness, even brutality with which power is used in and by the U.S.A. to establish who can command whom.

It seemed Americans were preoccupied with themselves and their country, in ways in which the inhabitants of other well-established states simply were not with their own. American reality was and remains the overwhelming subject of the creative arts in the U.S.A. The dream of somehow encompassing all of it haunted its creators. Nobody in Europe had set out to write "the great English novel" or "the great French novel," but authors in the United States still try their hand (nowadays in several volumes) at "the great American novel," even if they no longer use the phrase. Actually, the man who came closest to achieving such an aim was not a writer, but an apparently superficial image-maker of astonishingly durable power, of whose significance the British art critic David Sylvester persuaded me in New York in the 1970s. Where else except America could an oeuvre like Andy Warhol's have come into being, an enormously ambitious and specific, unending set of variations on the themes of living in the U.S.A., from its soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles to its mythologies, dreams, nightmares, heroes, and heroines? There is nothing like it in the visual-arts tradition of the old world. But, like the other attempts by the creative spirits of the U.S.A. to seize the totality of their country, Warhol's vision is not that of the successful pursuit of happiness, "the American dream" of American political jargon and psychobabble.

To what extent has the United States changed in my lifetime, or at least in the 40-odd years since I first landed there? New York, as we are constantly told, is not America, and, as Auden said, even those who could never be Americans can see themselves as New Yorkers. As indeed anyone does who comes to the same apartment every year, a vast set of towers overlooking the gradual gentrification of Union Square, to be recognized by the same Albanian doorman, and to negotiate domestic help as in years past with the same Spanish lady, who in her 12 years in the city has never found it necessary to learn English. Like other New Yorkers, Marlene and I would give tips to out-of-town visitors about what was new since the last time they had landed at JFK and where to eat this year, though (apart from a party or two) unlike the permanently resident friends -- the Schiffrins, the Kaufmans, the Katznelsons, the Tillys, the Kramers -- we would not entertain at home. Like a real New Yorker, I would feel the loss of a favorite establishment like that of a relative; I would exchange gossip at the regular lunches of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, with the mixture of writing people, publishers, show persons, professors, and United Nations staff members that makes up the local intellectual scene -- for one of the major attractions of New York is that the life of the mind is not dominated by the academy. In short, there is no other place in the world like the Big Apple. Still, however untypical, New York could not possibly exist anywhere except the U.S.A. Even its most cosmopolitan inhabitants are recognizably American, like our friend the late John Lindenbaum, hematologist in a Harlem hospital and jazz-lover, who, sent to Bangladesh for a project of medical research, had traveled there with a collection of jazz records and his ice-cream scoop. There are a lot more Jews in New York, and, unlike in large stretches of the United States, more people there are aware of the existence of the rest of the world, but what I learned as a New Yorker is not fundamentally at odds with what little I know of the Midwest and California.

Curiously, the experience, what in the '60s they used to call "the vibes," of the U.S.A. has changed much less than that of other countries I have known in the past half-century. There is no comparison between living in the Paris, the Berlin, the London of my youth and those cities today; even Vienna, which deliberately hides its social and political transformation by turning itself into a theme park of a glorious past. Even physically the skyline of London, as it can be seen from where I live on the slopes of Parliament Hill, has changed -- Parliament is now barely visible -- and Paris has not been the same since Messieurs Pompidou and Mitterrand have left their marks on it. And yet, while New York has undergone the same kind of social and economic upheavals as other cities -- deindustrialization, gentrification, a massive influx from the Third World -- it neither feels nor looks like a city transformed. That is surprising when, as every New Yorker knows, the city changes every year. I myself have seen the arrival of fundamental innovations in New York life, such as the Korean fruit-and-vegetable store, the end of such basic New York lower-middle-class institutions as the Gimbel's department stores, and the transformation of Brighton Beach into Little Russia. And yet, New York has remained New York far more than London has remained London. Even the Manhattan skyline is still essentially that of the city of the 1930s, especially now that its most ambitious postwar addition, the World Trade Center, has disappeared.

Is this apparent stability an illusion? After all, the U.S.A. is part of global humanity, whose situation has changed more profoundly and rapidly since 1945 than ever before in recorded history. Those changes there looked less dramatic to us because the sort of prosperous high-tech mass-consumer society that did not arrive in Western Europe until the 1950s was not new in America. Whereas I knew by 1960 that a historic chasm divided the way Britons lived and thought before and after the middle '50s, for the U.S.A. the 1950s were, or at least looked like, just a bigger and better version of the kind of 20th century its more prosperous white citizens had known for two generations, its confidence recovered after the shock of the Great Slump. Seen from the outside, it continued along the same lines as before, though some sections of its citizens -- mainly the college-educated -- began to think differently about it, and, as the countries of what is now the European Union became more modernized, the furniture of life with which European tourists came into contact began to look less "advanced," and even a bit tatty. California did not seem fundamentally different to me driving through it in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s from what it had looked and felt like in 1960, whereas Spain and Sicily did. New York had been a cosmopolitan city of immigrants for all my lifetime; it was London that became one after the 1950s. The details in the great carpet of the U.S.A. have changed, and are constantly changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in the short run.

As a historian I know that behind this apparent shifting stability, large and long-term changes are taking place, perhaps fundamental ones. Nevertheless, they are concealed by the deliberate resistance to change of American public institutions and procedures, and the habits of American life, as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called in more general terms its habitus, or way of doing things. Forced into the straitjacket of an 18th-century Constitution reinforced by two centuries of Talmudic exegesis by the lawyers, the theologians of the republic, the institutions of the U.S.A. are far more frozen into immobility than those of almost all other states. It has so far even postponed such minor changes as the election of an Italian, or Jew, let alone a woman, as head of government. But it has also made the government of the U.S.A. largely immune to great men, or indeed to anybody, taking great decisions, since rapid, effective national decision-making, not least by the president, is almost impossible. The United States, at least in its public life, is a country that is geared to operate with mediocrities, because it has to, and it has been rich and powerful enough to do so. It is the only country in my political lifetime where three able presidents (F.D.R., Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced, at a moment's notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to do the job, without making any noticeable difference to the course of U.S. and world history. Historians who believe in the supremacy of high politics and great individuals have a hard case in America. That has created the foggy mechanisms of real government in Washington, made even more opaque by the sensational resources of corporate and pressure-group money, and the inability of the electoral process to distinguish between the real and the increasingly restricted political country. So, since the end of the U.S.S.R., the U.S.A. has quietly prepared to function as the world's only superpower. The problem is that its situation has no historical precedent, that its political system is geared to the ambitions and reactions of New Hampshire primaries and provincial protectionism, that it has no idea what to do with its power, and that almost certainly the world is too large and complicated to be dominated for any length of time by any single superpower, however great its military and economic resources. Megalomania is the occupational disease of global victors, unless controlled by fear. Nobody controls the U.S.A. today. That is why, as I write my autobiography, its enormous power can and obviously does destabilize the world.

(Unfortunately, nothing that has happened since the above paragraph was originally written calls for a revision of the views expressed in it. The "occupational disease of conquering powers" has been reinforced by the Iraq war. The policies and strategic ambitions of the global dominators have destroyed the genuine "coalitions of the willing" on which U.S. supremacy could rely in the cold war, and even more so in the international mobilizations of the first Persian Gulf war and after 9/11. They have left the U.S.A., unable to win a plurality of free votes in the U.N.'s Security Council, in unprecedented isolation and global unpopularity, surrounded by fear rather than hope. The world has unquestionably been more destabilized not only -- patently -- in the Middle East but everywhere: in Europe, where the European Union is divided and weakened and NATO has crumbled; in East Asia; in what existed of an organized international system, whether of states or nonofficial organizations. As the victorious U.S.A. prepares for the post-Iraq presidential elections, uncertainty surrounds even the public discourse, which veers between the language of ruthless power politics, self-delusion, lies, and Orwellian newspeak.)

Our problem is not that we are being Americanized. In spite of the massive impact of cultural and economic Americanization, the rest of the world, even the capitalist world, has so far been strikingly resistant to following the model of U.S. politics and society. That is probably because America is less of a coherent and therefore exportable social and political model of a capitalist liberal democracy, based on the universal principles of individual freedom, than its patriotic ideology and Constitution suggest. So, far from being a clear example that the rest of the world can imitate, the U.S.A., however powerful and influential, remains an unending process, distorted by big money and public emotion, a system tinkering with institutions, public and private, to make them fit realities unforeseen in the unalterable text of a 1787 Constitution. It simply does not lend itself to copying. Most of us would not want to copy it. Since puberty I have spent more of my time in the U.S.A. than in any country other than Britain. All the same, I am glad that my children did not grow up there, and that I belong to another culture. Still, it is mine also.

Our problem is rather that the U.S. empire does not know what it wants to do or can do with its power, or its limits. It merely insists that those who are not with it are against it. That is the problem of living at the apex of the "American Century." As I am 86 years of age, I am unlikely to see its solution.

Eric Hobsbawm is a fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the New School University. He lives in England. This essay is adapted from Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, to be published in the United States by Pantheon Books in August. Copyright © 2002 by Eric Hobsbawm.

Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education