The Contents of Our Character

From the December 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 7)

Ever since Adolph Hitler and his cronies wrecked the legitimacy of assessing the traits of peoples, writers have been properly wary of embracing too tightly the belief that nations have "character." Yet, despite the mischief that some have made of it, a common-sense perception exists that different societies are fundamentally distinctive. National character feels right, even if definitive proof is difficult to come by.

We Americans treasure what has come to be called "American exceptionalism"those features of who we are that we believe distinguish us from others: those nasty un-Americans. Dismiss any biological basis, any American gene; we have been melted in the same pot.

In recommending books that reveal this character one is tempted to name two distinctively American popular genres and leave it at that: science fiction and Westernsliteratures that look forward and back. These literatures enshrine the American reverence for technology and for the land, and both within the context of a rugged individualism.

Beyond those categories, three volumes stand out for me as guides to what it means to be an American: for good and for ill.

Perhaps we should junk our current citizenship tests, and merely insist that all prospective citizens read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Each applicant could be required to explain how Huck Finn moved them. Any number of explanations would validate one's Americanism. Set within a crucial period of American history, capturing the American tragedies of slavery and racial bigotry, depicting the importance of both community and indi vidual initiative, and set on the intersection of regional cultures of the Midwest, South, and West, Huck Finn confronts the reader with the questions of what American society is and what it should and could be. Further, if one believes that one cannot truly understand a people until one can laugh at their jokes and cry at their sorrows, Huck Finn, alternatively raucously funny and mordantly sad, provides a test for becoming an American in one's emotional response.

My second selection is a bit of a cheat. Trying to decide whether to chose Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) or his lecture/essay "Civil Disobedience" (1848) was eased by the fact that I have an edition that includes both. As readers of REASON recognize, the latter is a grand, radical libertarian paean to freedoman American political tract that stands up against Marx and Engel's contemporaneous Communist Manifesto . The former defines individualism in practice. If we do not choose to retreat to our own Walden, we experience the awareness vicariously through Thoreau's clean prose and wild life. Could such an essay be written anywhere but America? Our wilderness is our freedom.

As a practicing sociologist, I cannot resist including a volume by a colleague: Joseph

Gusfield's classic and spirited study, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Tem perance Movement (1963). Gusfield takes as his case the battle over Prohibition laws: a lengthy struggle, unimaginable in many other industrial nations. For Gusfield, temperance is not really about alcohol, but about class, ethnicity, gender, and moral discipline. Lines are drawn between female, rural, Protestant residents of Anglo-English descent and more recent migrants to these shores: Catholics, urbanites, males, and "ethnics." The battle is not over the bottle, but over the ballot and the economy. Significantly, Prohibition was enacted at about the time that immigration was sharply curtailed: The first experiment lasted barely a decade, while the latter exercise in exclusion lasted 40 years. The battles over immigration are as American as the battle over sla very. The Statue of Liberty may reflect a cherished American ideal, but statues don't vote or march.

Gary Alan Fine ([e-mail]) is a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia and author of Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work (University of California Press, 1995).

Joseph Epstein

Democracy in America, the first book I would have our new American read, is one that surprises me afresh whenever I return to it by its powers of penetrating beyond the surface of social and political life. It was published in 1835, when its author was 30, and is based on infor mation and observations he acquired when sent to this country to study penal reform in 1831, when he was 26. Tocqueville, though not himself an immigrant, provides a matchless model for anyone newly arrived in our country of the possibilities of astute social observation. Henry James advised that one try to be a person on whom nothing is lost. The young Alexis de Tocqueville was such a person and Democracy in America proves it beyond any question.

Chapter 19 of Part II of Tocqueville's book begins: "The first thing that strikes one in the United States is the innumerable crowd of those striving to escape from their original social condition; and the second is the rarity, in a land where all are actively ambitious, of any lofty ambition." Ambition, or perhaps following Tocqueville one does better to say "personal aspira tion," which for so long has been at the heart of American life, dictates my choice of a second book for my new immigrant: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). What Fitzgerald's novel ought to make plain to the new American is that Americans, at their best, have been a nation of dreamers. Yet he or she should also know that these dreams frequently carry a price. Poor Jay Gatsby's dream of recapturing and revising the past may not qualify as a "lofty ambi tion" in the Tocquevillian sense, but it has its own kind of grandeur. "Gatsby," this novel's penultimate paragraph reads, "believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no mattertomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning"

The third book I would recommend is Independence Day , a novel by Richard Ford that is less than a year old and that I myself have not even finished reading. But unless Ford blows it badly, his book seems to me to fit in handsomely with my other two suggestions, in being a work about American ambition, aspiration, and dreams. Its unlikely hero is a divorced father of two, of all unromantic things a real estate salesman, and the book is about what America does to dreamsnot all of it, by any means, very nice, but much of it useful to know. It is a novel about life in this country at a time when the notion of progress that has for so long propelled so many American actions and beliefs has to be significantly qualified without being altogether jettisoned. To an attentive immigrantor, for that matter, American-bornreader it has a vast amount of important information about the way Americans live now: about our hopes and fears and what it means to be an American at the end of the 20th century.

Joseph Epstein is editor of The American Scholar.

Charles Paul Freund

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