Is America an experiment?

Public Interest, Fall, 1998 by Wilfred M. McClay

That impression follows one even into the more famous venues. Go to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Faneuil Hall or the Old North Church in Boston, the Old Senate Chamber at the State House in Annapolis. All are lovely, well-kept sites. Yet one is struck not by their grandeur but their tininess, their almost self-effacing modesty. Even the most jaded among us may feel compelled to pause for a moment and ponder the astounding fact that a nation so colossal could have grown from seeds so small. When one thinks about the chaotic and tumultuous social history of Jamestown and early Virginia, or when one contemplates the half-mad audacity of the New England Puritans, who were convinced that their lonely adventure huddled together in a remote and frigid wilderness was a divinely appointed mission of world-historical importance, one does not sense historical inevitability or destiny. Far from it. The longer and more deeply one studies the American past, the easier it is to imagine that matters could have turned out differently.

Yet it would be a mistake to see the American enterprise - and it would be a long time before it had sufficient coherence to be called anything like an enterprise - as a quirky, sui generis thing, independent of the great movements of Western history. Lewis Mumford once rightly observed that "the settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe," an insight that neatly compresses a great deal of history into a single phrase. Nevertheless, there has always been a strong tendency, perhaps never stronger than in the present day, to detach our discussions of the American past from discussions of what we call Western civilization, thereby neglecting the specifically American slant upon, and contribution to, that larger subject. It is almost as if we presume that the relationship between the great traditions of European thought and the realities of modern American life is so clear-cut - or so hopelessly severed - as to need no comment.

Palefaces and redskins

Here I speak from some experience, though one could hardly call it typical. I did my own undergraduate work at St. John's College in Annapolis, a wonderful institution dedicated to the ideal of education as a sustained engagement with the Great Books of the Western World. We read, with varying degrees of care, almost all of the principal works of the European philosophical tradition, from Plato to Nietzsche. We learned a smattering of ancient Greek, enough to struggle through a lexicon-aided translation of Aristotle's Physics and St. John's Gospel. We studied the unfolding of Western scientific and mathematical thought, from Euclid and Democritus to Einstein and Lobachevski. But what we did not do, to any significant extent, was study the works of American authors and thinkers.

Not until I spent a post-collegiate year teaching high-school history and literature, including American literature, did I rediscover the classic works of American literature. And it was literally a life-changing experience. When I again read the important American authors of the past two centuries - Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Emerson, Stowe, Whitman, Poe, Twain, Henry Adams, William James, Henry James, Dickinson, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Cather, Mencken, O'Neill, O'Connor, Frost, and so on - I felt as if I had come home to something and been reunited with a longlost band of brothers and sisters. I revered the books I had read at St. John's. But the American authors spoke more directly to my condition. Their questions were my questions, their anxieties mine, their strengths mine - and perhaps also their weaknesses.

Without knowing it, I had stumbled onto one of the central themes of American history. For no question has bemused and bedeviled American writers from the nation's beginnings more persistently than the question of how America was related, intellectually and culturally, to Europe. In declaring political independence, had it declared something approaching cultural independence? Or was it still mired down in a kind of colonial mentality, even as its political and social institutions, and its galloping commercial and industrial economy, were vaulting ahead into previously unimagined territory? One sees this dichotomy all the time, an opposition between what Philip Rahv called palefaces and redskins - palefaces being writers who attempted to produce a high-toned American literature, worthy of comparison in both form and content with the great literatures of Europe; and redskins being those who believed that it was the destiny of American culture to produce something dramatically different, something indigenous, something as bold and distinctive as the facts of American social and political democracy.

The core conviction of the redskin author was well captured by Ralph Waldo Emerson when he complained that "we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe." These were "courtly" muses, a modifier meant to remind his listeners of the fiercely anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic premises undergirding American political life. But the thrust of his remarks was to urge would-be American writers to find their own way, to treat their European heritage not as a sacred legacy but as an exploitable (and dispensable) resource. And, in a different but complementary way, the influential American historian Frederick Jackson Turner propounded a theory of American origins that discounted the "germs" of European culture and, instead, found the genius of American democracy arising out of the life of the American frontier.