California dreamin'; the trip West freed my father from the constraints of class and custom - excerpt from "More Like Us: An American Plan for American Recovery"

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1988 by James Fallows

The trip West freed my father from the constraints of class and custom. James Fallows, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, reports for The Atlantic from Yokohama, Japan. This article is adapted from his book More Like Us: An American Plan for American Recovery to be published by Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston. (c)1988 by James Follows. Reprinted with permission.

In the summer of 1955, my father took the Greyhound bus from the East Coast to Michigan to buy a new can He went to the main Ford factory, in Dearborn, and put down $1,800 in cash. He left in a cream-colored Mercury station wagon with wood-look side panels and a streamlined modern shape. Then he drove nonstop back to Philadelphia, where we were waiting for him.

I was five years old that summer, impatient to turn six. There were reports that an antipolio vaccine was almost ready, available any week now. But it hadn't come out, and my mother was always sticking my arms into sweaters on summer evenings, bundling me and my sister and brother in towels the instant we stepped out of our wading pool, waiting and praying for the summer polio season to be over. I was sitting on the porch steps of my grandmother's house, kicking my feet back and forth, listening to my mother and grandmother reassure each other about the fever I'd just had-"I'm sure it's nothing"-when my father appeared, in the car, at the end of the street.

The new car was barely visible through the thick summer foliage of the trees, but as it came into view it looked impossibly glamorous. When he came to the curb I ran out to greet him, he swung me up over his head and back down to the ground, and my sister and I hung onto his hands as we walked into the house. My father had just turned 30, my mother was 27, and they were about to take their three small children off to start a new life.

By now I recognize that the essentials of our story look entirely cliched: upward mobility, a family that suffered reverses during the Depression, the postwar trek west. That they are cliched is the point: my family's story is directly connected to the classic pattern of American mobility.

People are so used to hearing that America is an "open" and "mobile" society that it can be hard to take these concepts seriously, or to imagine that openness really makes a difference in how America functions. But in fact, the constant possibility of changing your luck and starting your life over is the trait that makes America most different from other societies, especially from today's workhorse competitors around the Pacific Rim. Japan has succeeded by organizing people to do their best. Its society is strongest when everyone knows his proper place. America is strongest when people do not know their proper place and feel free to invent new roles for themselves. Other societies have ways of holding themselves together that America will always lack-most of all, the sense ofracial unity that is so pronounced in Japan and Korea and so inconceivable in the United States. Our unique advantage has been the ability to get surprising results from ordinary people by putting them in situations where old rules and limits don't apply. That's the meaning of immigration, of the frontier, of leaving the farm for the big city, of going to college or night school to make a new start. If Americans lose that sense of possibility and believe that they belong in predictable, limited, class-bound roles, we will have given up what makes us special. We'll have lost the quality that allowed this untraditional society, made of people from all over the world, to work together and flourish. The importance of American mobility is no mere abstraction to me. It's the meaning of my family's life.

The Old World

After we'd settled in California, my mother always acted as if she'd come from some sort of dignified eastern background, but she'd had a very hard life as a child. Her father, Joseph Mackenzie, owned and managed a small ceramics works in New Jersey, not far from the sign that still says TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES. One of her uncles ran a small steel plant, producing its exclusive "Mackenite Metal." One of her maiden aunts was a schoolteacher who had been to France in the 1930s, had a grand piano in her apartment, became a naive fellow-traveler of the Communist party, and always tried to set an example of the high-toned life. My mother's father had graduated from Brown and was a dashing, handsome figure. But he was killed in a car crash in 1930 when he was 29 and my mother was 3. The family business suffered, and my mother was farmed out to relatives and shuffled around from house to house while she grew up. Her mother went through two unhappy marriages and fed the family during the Depression by selling the Volume Library, encyclopedia door to door. It took a hard-nosed character to talk people into laying out money for encyclopedias during the 1930s. My grandmother thrived in the work and retained her toughness long after the Depression ended. All the children in the family eventually went to college. My mother did well on a competitive examination and won a scholarship to Jackson College, the women's affiliate of Tufts. Both of her brothers finished graduate school, one becoming a veterinarian and the other a successful businessman.