What A Character!

When this blogger was a callow undergraduate, he studied at the knee and other low joints of Professor Michael McGiffert. During that time, McGiffert was investigating the question of national character and ultimately The Character of Americans: A Book of Readings was the result of his research in 1970. Now, three decades later, the question of national character emerges anew. McGiffert, a colonial historian, moved to the editorship of the William & Mary Quarterly (1972-1997). Some wag described the search for national character being like nailing jelly to the barn door. If this is (fair & balanced) futility, so be it.

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The American Character... Simon Schama Argues It Has A Bright Future
By Louis P. Masur

With Barack Obama's election, the idea of an American national character is back, and it feels more salient than ever. Time and again during the presidential campaign, Obama told us his story: the mixed-race child of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas. He graduated from the Ivy League and was elected a U.S. senator. And then the self-described "mutt" became president. "Only in America," he declared.

Obama's popular narrative, and the way he has told it, promises to revive interest in what scholars term American exceptionalism — the idea that the American story is somehow unique. Attempts to define that quality have led foreigners to these shores, generated countless commentaries, and after World War II helped give rise to an entire academic discipline — American studies. But the topic has been notably out of fashion in the scholarly world. Now, from the well-known historian Simon Schama, we have a new, contrarian view that looks at what's unique in the American character, putting our past in the context of the election of the new president we are just inaugurating.

The discussion of the American character is embedded in the nation's DNA. In the 18th century, J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur famously asked, "What then is the American, this new man?" He was the product of a place where immigrants escaped their past and melted together into a new race of men, the French-American writer answered. In the 19th century, the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville toured the country and coined the word "individualism" to describe what he encountered. Talking to fellow American historians at century's end, Frederick Jackson Turner identified the frontier as the key element in national development.

In the 20th century, a string of books from history, sociology, and political science furthered the discussion, each seeking to map a part of the American character genome: David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (Yale University Press, 1950); Daniel J. Boorstin's The Genius of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1953); David Morris Potter's People of Plenty (University of Chicago Press, 1954); Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, Brace, 1955); Michael G. Kammen's People of Paradox (Knopf, 1972); Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence (Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (Norton, 1979); Robert N. Bellah's Habits of the Heart (University of California Press, 1985); Seymour Martin Lipset's American Exceptionalism (Norton, 1996); and Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Some of those studies probed the dark side of the exceptionalist coin. Instead of assessments of seemingly positive stories like those about the self-made man or the American creed, they identified a wayward gene that manifested itself as pathology, whether racism, violence, or alienation. Such views helped balance more celebratory accounts, but writers who emphasized the underside did not question the exceptionalist paradigm, they reinforced it.

A number of scholars, however, have challenged that notion altogether. Starting in the 1960s, labor and social historians wrote "against exceptionalism" by comparing experiences of the working classes in America and Europe, revealing common interests in the struggle with capitalism. And in the 1980s and 1990s, intellectual historians traced the trans-Atlantic flow of ideas, showing how Americans participated in debates over such topics as the state and social welfare that they neither initiated nor dominated.

More recently, reflecting the transnational, global turn in numerous disciplines, historians have produced an array of sophisticated comparative works that transcend a strictly national framework. Daniel T. Rodgers has given voice to a growing trend in his call for scholars to "re-embed the history of the United States within a world of transnational historical forces." His Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard University Press, 1998) argues that Americans touring Europe encountered ideas and social experiments that they brought back to the United States. With others making a similar argument, exceptionalism as an academic exercise has fallen into decline.

Simon Schama knows transnational history as well as anyone, but he has no interest in abandoning exceptionalism. The American Future: A History (published in Britain by the Bodley Head in September and due out from Ecco in the United States in May), stands firmly in the tradition of foreign writers seeking to diagram American distinctiveness and chart the American character. (Schama has simultaneously presented a four-part BBC documentary series of the same title. It aired in Britain last fall and will be issued on DVD and aired on BBC America in the United States on Inauguration Day.)

Born in London in 1945 and educated at Christ's College, University of Cambridge, Schama not only mentions his literary forebears but also relates to them. He compares his first trans-Atlantic crossing, in 1964, for example, to that of Charles Dickens a century before. Because of a storm, Schama's voyage took longer, but both men were shocked by what they first encountered: Dickens despaired over slavery, and Schama over the continued need to struggle for civil rights.

In the book, Schama narrates his travels over the years (many of them during this year's primary season) to such locales as Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Virginia and sees themes from history refracted in the present. Currently a university professor of art history and history at Columbia University, he identifies four topics that he argues will inform America's future because they have indelibly shaped its past: war, religion, immigration, and abundance.

None of those are new, and they hardly amount to a menu for anything peculiarly American. One could just as easily write about war, religion, immigration, and abundance in France or Russia. But Schama's lyrical writing provides fresh insights, even if his knowledge of American history is scattershot. He devotes pages, for example, to Roger Williams but mentions Billy Graham only in passing. One of his favorite paradigms is to see the United States as split between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses. The Civil War, he offers, bridged the two paths of cultural politics, a Hamiltonian enterprise — nationalistic and corporate — undertaken for a "supremely Jeffersonian cause: the salvation of democracy." Of course that is to mistake results for origins. Had the Confederacy won, it would have marked the triumph of a very different Jeffersonian vision — an agrarian republic rooted in slavery. For today, Schama finds implications in the war in Iraq: "Hamilton resurrexit."

Jefferson, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, is also the unlikely hero of the section on religion. Although spiritual fervor has often divided the nation, religious beliefs are integral to the American desire to create a moral community. What has enabled the nation to survive its paroxysms of undemocratic fanaticism, Schama argues, has been the separation of church and state derived from Jefferson. As a result, Americans are protected from religious coercion, and religious belief flourishes or fades depending only on its capacity to persuade.

"The big American story," Schama realizes, is "the war of toleration against conformity; the war of a faith that commands obedience against a faith that promises liberty." He does not say whether a fundamental change in the American character would occur if the wall between church and state crumbles under, for example, the kind of steady assault it has suffered in recent years. But he does note that the election in 2008, as he was writing, showed signs that "evangelical politics has had its day." In Europe, he says, the state crushes alternative dogmas; in America, the continuing dialogue between faith and freedom allows for pluralist beliefs.

An even bigger story is the making of Americans, the familiar narrative of America as asylum, melting pot, land of opportunity. Schama, who has a knack for apothegms, puts it this way: "In the Old World you knew your place; in the New World you made it." The language of the self-made can be found everywhere, he points out, whether in the words of Thomas Paine or Abraham Lincoln or Barack Obama.

But not everyone in America is welcome to participate in self-fashioning, Schama goes on. There was ambivalence over immigration present at the founding (for example, Benjamin Franklin denounced German newcomers), and it was never resolved. Immigration promoted liberty and prosperity while simultaneously posing a threat to national purity. The cycles of admission versus restriction have most often been tied to economic conditions. "Every time the American economy hits a reef," observes Schama, "the last on the boat are usually those whom nationalist politicians want to throw from the decks." The 1890s saw the establishment of the Immigration Restriction League, anxious about the influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans. Today an official league may not exist, but immigration officials watch out for groups seen as "undesirable."

Diminishing resources are in tension with a vision of plenty, and the book ends with a discussion of water — irrigation, to be precise. Americans in the West have had to face cycles of devastating drought, yet they continue to cultivate golf courses and lawns, despite the lack of water. Those plowing the future, however, have exhibited another component that often turns up on lists of American identity: inventiveness. In Las Vegas, xerigraphic landscaping — using rocks and native plants that require only drip watering — becomes big business.

And so, according to Schama, Americans face the future equipped with historic tendencies that do not determine, but will certainly shape, their course of action. War can preserve liberty or destroy it. Fervor can unite community or divide it into factions. Being American can mean promoting diversity or trampling it. A faith in boundlessness can inspire creative solutions to resource scarcity or leave us locked in a false optimism that it will all work out OK.

Schama's quartet of characteristics is somewhat idiosyncratic, given the vast literature on American exceptionalism, but they overlap with many of the categories others might choose: for example, nature, frontier, democracy, and individualism. The specific labels matter less than the story of American character, a story by turns inspiring and depressing. Schama is attuned to the tragic side, and he writes powerfully about entering an abandoned house on the plains and standing "inside the dead and broken body of the dream." But the American dream will never die, he concludes, because "it's impossible to think of the United States as a dead end. Americans roused can turn on a dime (check out the waiting list for Smart cars), convert indignation into action and before you know it there's a whole new United States in the neighborhood."

The approach of The American Future will no doubt irritate those historians committed to internationalizing the study of American history, but Schama provides an important reminder that Americans continue to sketch the future according to patterns of belief inscribed in their past. The strength of The American Future is not history but biography, the way it grounds ideas in the lives of people struggling to make sense of the nation and to transform it.

Schama is at his best writing about Montgomery C. Meigs, the quartermaster general of the Union Army, who described Civil War as "a great and holy war" for American democracy, or about the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who, when asked by Hubert H. Humphrey what she wanted, answered: "Don't you know? The Kingdom of Jesus; that's what I want."

Schama reminds us that, to the extent there is an American identity, it has been forged through words, whether Jefferson's or Hamer's, and images, whether John Gast's 1872 "American Progress" or Dorothea Lange's 1936 "Migrant Mother." Inexplicably, Schama — author of The Power of Art (Ecco, 2006) and Rembrandt's Eyes (Knopf, 1999) and a former art critic for The New Yorker who unpacks paintings and photographs as well as anyone — gives short shrift to visuals in the book. Many art historians view American art as part of the exceptionalist story — exceptionally inferior — and Schama may have fallen victim to that prejudice.

Exceptionalism is above all else the story we choose to tell about ourselves — not some organic, immutable structure. And in telling it, over and over, at times we even make it so. To think about American exceptionalism as a genre of storytelling may revitalize studies of national character without glorifying the concept of nation. What are the stories that people relate about themselves and their nation? How are those stories contested and how do they change over time? How has the American story influenced other narratives and, in turn, been shaped by them?

Focusing on individual narratives builds upon the call of Thomas Bender, a professor of history at New York University — in the collection he edited, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (University of California Press, 2002) — that we "explore those stories of our past, those experiences at scales other than the nation, that have been forgotten, that have been obscured by the emphasis upon the centrality of the nation." At the same time, it reaffirms an observation made by Henry Adams more than a hundred years ago: "Of all historical problems," he wrote, "the nature of a national character is the most difficult and the most important."

That these stories, both local and national, carry great power goes without question. Otherwise, how to explain the continuing faith in the rags-to-riches myth despite a huge increase in inequality? How to explain belief in American democracy when so many people are disenfranchised politically from voting and socially from earning a living wage? How to explain devotion to a providential America when much of the world sees the United States as satanic, not holy?

Barack Obama won the presidency through his words, through the story he tells about himself and the country, a story that resonated with voters and has revived faith in a laudable national character. In his book, writing in September 2008, Schama predicted that the next president of the United States would be "the most compelling storyteller." That was wishful thinking from a distinguished narrative historian who has taught in the United States for nearly three decades. Yet it turned out to be right. America is nothing if it is not a compelling story. New plot lines will emerge, but we've known the central character for a very long time. ♥

[Louis P. Masur is director of the American-studies program and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Institutions and Values, at Trinity College in Connecticut, and author of The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America (Bloomsbury Press, 2008) and Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen's American Vision (forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2009). Masur holds a Ph.D., Princeton (1985); an M.A., Princeton (1982); and a B.A., SUNY-Buffalo.]

Copyright © 2009 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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