“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” So said the British writer D.H. Lawrence (who spent some time among us) a century ago, in his provocative and polemical book about our writers, “Studies in Classic American Literature.” Around the same time, the poet William Carlos Williams offered an equally quirky account of American history and literature titled “In the American Grain.” Both are worth considering as we try to figure out who exactly we are.
Lawrence’s diagnosis certainly touched – and touches – a nerve, and with the recent reassertion of Trumpism, it seems as relevant as ever. After all, community, social harmony, democratic consensus, real opportunity, and freedom from our gun culture and mass shootings are not high on the Trumpist agenda. Restoring a white-dominated, Christian nationalist, plutocratic, deeply inegalitarian society by playing on base prejudice is.
But what is American “character,” exactly? What are our greatest defining features, virtues, and flaws? Are they reducible to a few compatible if not interlocking generalizations?
The answer certainly isn’t reducible to Lawrence’s quip, plausible as it is. All things considered we are an exceptionally violent people. Canadians also own a lot of guns, and yet somehow they don’t use them to shoot each other at nearly our rate. But when we talk about national character (as we Americans like to do) in a highly diverse nation (ethnically, religiously, as well as socio-economically) we are necessarily talking about something vaguer and harder to identify than the character of, say, the Swiss, the British, or the Japanese. In those cases, certain obvious stereotypes apply – generalities that are not universal across the relevant population, but still have meaning. In the American case, given our polyglot origins and different arrival dates on these shores, we’re looking for attributes that transcend all, or at least most, of those differences. (And cue Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance!)
It matters who we are. And it matters who we believe we are and what we tell ourselves: the moral mirror we hold up to ourselves. Almost needless to say, we are not as good as we think. Our Broadway musicals, especially from the mid-20th century, are among such mirrors: glorious entertainments that confirm our delusions of innocence and national virtue. Hollywood (especially before the 1960s cultural revolutions) is often worse.
Where did we go wrong? First there was the white European “discovery” of America, quickly followed by the brutal conquest of the indigenous peoples and the importation of enslaved Africans. That led to the gradual domestication of nature and the settlement of the West (see, for example, “Virgin Land” by Henry Nash Smith, from 1950). Christianity prevailed over other creeds, even as it warred with itself. There was a time when Catholics were victims of broad prejudice, along with African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Irish, Italians, and Jews. We defined ourselves less by our unity than by our disunity and tribal snobbery.
What have we managed to produce in such a civilization? Jazz and other great musical traditions. Baseball, a sport unique in human history, I believe, for its beauty, difficulty, complexity, and also for its astonishing ability (at least in the 20th century) to unify us across all those differences.
We also have a wealth of great literature, and (not wholly unrelated to that) a unique form of democracy, based on a constitution that has great virtues and glaring flaws (starting with the Electoral College and the Senate). There is the vital independent sector we’ve erected through private philanthropy, mostly to compensate for the ravages caused by our concentrated (and world-astonishing) national prosperity.
We didn’t invent women’s rights, gay rights, the racial struggle for civil rights, or the global environmental movement – but we helped them along, I want to say significantly. Or at least, a minority of us did – which brings us back to the fact of the deep fissure between two American characters, one forward-looking and outward looking (especially toward Europe), the other inward, provincial, almost solipsistic, and decidedly Trumpian. What transcends that barrier just might be negligible. If you’re looking for a dramatic portrayal of those two characters, may I suggest one of the best (and most underrated) Hollywood films: “The Misfits,” from 1961.
Again: What defines us? “Practicality,” many would say, is an important part of the answer. We are doers and makers and inventors, and in some realms, such as science and technology, we’re explorers. But practicality is merely rationality and “ingenuity” in pursuing ends. It doesn’t address which ends we pursue, or how wisely or fairly we pursue them. The Germans are practical too. We are not deep thinkers, for the most part. We are not especially self-critical, to put it mildly.
One can also point to our great universities as civilizational achievements. Yet we are also, paradoxically or not, a highly anti-intellectual culture. And this is not just because we don’t value intellectuals or what they produce. (The British, the French, and the Germans publish and read popular magazines in the field of philosophy; in the United States such journals are not only nonexistent but unimaginable). More importantly, it’s our indifference to broad and great education for a mass democracy, which is about intellectual and class mobility, bridges and pathways to higher levels of achievement, understanding of the world, and cultural engagement for all citizens or potential citizens.
We mostly fail at that. Our universities and intellectual life are robust, but cut off from the rest of the culture, thriving in their bubbles, but not sufficiently nurturing or nurtured by the rest of American society. Indeed, one of the troubling facts about the last election is the widely recognized fault line that has opened between the more- and less-educated.
It's a terrible thing in a democracy to demonize learning. And from the standpoint of those who feel left-behind (who are typically not the most left-behind, but the middle- and lower middle-classes) it places the blame for their plight in exactly the wrong places: on new immigrants, and on the educated elites in universities and the media, rather than on the bankers and billionaires and tech bro’s and power-brokers and lobbyists who are their true class enemies.
In fact, we don’t like to talk about class at all, and that’s part of the problem. It’s considered impolite. Which is like saying that, when you talk about politics, whatever you do, don’t mention politics. We prefer to talk about tribes and culture wars. Concomitantly, we hold blinkered and naïve views of capitalism and its conceptual counterpart, socialism – beginning with the crude notion that they are binary rather than poles on a spectrum of democratic possibilities.
We are, in short, ideologically illiterate as a country, and that ignorance seems almost ingrained in the American character. Hence the decades and centuries pile up while we grope toward basic forms of justice: racial equality, gender equality, respect for the natural environment as a necessary feature of any society and for future generations. And we ignore, or are innocent of, the fact – and I do think it’s a fact – that a more mobile and egalitarian society, one that values diversity, values equity, and values inclusion, is not just a more democratic one but also a more prosperous one. But I digress here.
Our essential shallowness, I want to say, is essential to our character. So is our optimism and our basic decency toward one another and the rest of the world – some of the time. And if our government is less decent than we are, then we have a deeper problem with our political system. (Don’t get me started.)
I remain an American. Not necessarily or unreservedly a “proud” American or a “loyal” American; I’m also what Stalin called a “rootless cosmopolitan,” and if I’m proud of anything, it’s that. But while I recognize certain core facts about human nature, I’m not sure why anyone should be proud of anything. I’m not proud of what I haven’t chosen, such as being born here.
That said, I am subject to the same limitations of human nature that afflict us all. I feel pride; and in rare instances, despite Dr. Martin Luther King’s warning that it’s “too great a burden to bear,” I feel hatred. Despite severe disillusionment with many of my fellow Americans, I refuse to abandon my values, and they are inevitably American values.
Steve Schmidt, a conservative and staunch anti-Trumpist, once said:
I think that what makes the country exceptional is that we’re made up of all the peoples of the world… and we still have work to do. But that collection of people – Americans – we have fed more people, clothed more people, liberated more people, cured more people, and done more general good in the world than all the other countries in the world put together since the beginning of time…
With one eye closed, that is an America I can still see, and one I still love. I don’t think Trump and his supporters can wreck it forever, and I hope to live to see the restoration of something we can be proud (or proud-ish) to call American character.