The Contents of Our Character

From the December 1995 issue

(Page 4 of 7)

Contributing Editor Steven Hayward ([e-mail]) is research and editorial director for the Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco­based think tank.

John Hood

New Americans deserve to know what they've gotten themselves intonot simply a country with defined borders and a common national culture, but a two-centuries-old experiment whose boundaries have yet to be determined and for which tumultuous change is itself a tradi tion. The American Experiment is unique in world history, but its goal is to satisfy a universal desire for human freedom and dignity. To a great and unprecedented extent, the experiment has proved a success. But the intervening struggle has often been a difficult one. New Americans who in the future may well be called upon to defend and expand the freedom that is their bequest todayneed to learn more about it.

The novels that make up James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales (1823­41) are an excellent introduction to the important American heroic concepts of personal freedom, audacity, and individual responsibility. That America is a frontier society has long been (cor rectly) taken as a given, and used by the modern left to justify abandonment of the country's original political and economic principlessince, they say, the frontier no longer exists. That is absurd, of course, as any biotechnology executive or cybersurfing teenager can attest.

The Tales also help to chronicle the days of rebellion against oppressive government, an American Revolution that didn't just end with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. Conten tious debates continued about how far government power should extend over money, trade, and the freedom of millions of human beings, culminating in 19th-century war and tragedy. At the same time, entrepreneurs such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, James J. Hill, and John Rockefeller faced enormous challenges and government-erected hurdlesin the form of subsi dized and protected competitorsin their efforts to build a modern industrial economy. On these two subjects, I'd put a good history of the Civil War (say, by Shelby Foote) and the thin but indispensable volume Entrepreneurs vs. the State by Burton W. Folsom Jr. (1987) on any new American's reading list. (Folsom's book is also available in a 1991 expanded version titled The Myth of the Robber Barons.)

The 20th century has seen great tragedy as well as great accomplishment. For many Americans, the promise of freedom remains unfulfilled. Nevertheless, the amount of progress would be hard to overstate. Henry Grady Weaver, in his classic 1947 work The Mainspring of Human Progress, explains how the concept of freedom created the American society so many immigrants seek to join: "Why did men, women, and children eke out their meager existence for 6,000 years [of recorded history], toiling desperately from dawn to darkbarefoot, half-naked, unwashed, unshaved, uncombed, with lousy hair, mangy skins, and rotting teeththen suddenly, in one place on earth there is an abundance of things such as rayon underwear, nylon hose, shower baths, safety razors, ice cream sodas, lipsticks, and permanent waves?" Immigrants, perhaps more so than natives, intuitively understand why Weaver's simple question is so provocative. When they can answer the question as easily, their journey to America will be truly complete.

Contributing Editor John Hood ([e-mail]) is on leave from the John Locke Foundation, a state policy think tank in North Carolina, and is a Bradley Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Marcus Klein

America is the one nation in the world that is defined not for its immigrants but by them and not simply as they might contribute one ingredient or another to the great American bouilla baisse, but by record of the adventure in itself of their finding a place in 20th-century America. It is an odd but demonstrable fact that in modern times the most subtle of definitions of American tradition and culture have come from the pens of those who have had that adventure or from their first-generation American children. Therefore for the new immigrant the most instructive books might well be accounts of his predecessors, and among such accounts it would likely be works of fiction that would be most instructive because fiction allows for complicated and sometimes contradictory feeling, for tentativeness of discovery and judgment.

For a hundred years and more the immigrant to America has been confronted by a country that is at once beckoning and hostile, at once welcoming and demeaning, at once a guarantor of liberties and a restrictor of the same, and which at once promises material opportunity and denies the same. Add to such bafflement of day-to-day life the drag, moral and familial, of the culture that is being abandoned and the sheer necessity of surviving in the newthere is material here for a rich and enlightening literature.

The new immigrant might well consider Abraham Cahan's novel of 1917, The Rise of David Levinsky. The title character, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, works hard and rises to become a wonderfully successful businessman, and does not thereby lose his soul. David Levinsky is a very long novel that is instructive because it is true to its ambiguities. Levinsky becomes sly and occasionally is brutal in his rise to riches, as is not an unlikely price of character for the sake of success in America, while at the end he is nevertheless faithful to his beginnings, balancing pride and guilt, with no clear end to his adventure in sight.

No end, in fact, to this literature that records the making of Americans, and therefore the making of America. But one might make special mention of Henry Roth's novel of 1934, Call It Sleep, which illuminates the adventure by presenting it through the eyes of a child.

For that matter the black experience in modern America is not essentially different from that of the immigrant, and an account of it might provide him with another kind of illumination. The novel he should look at, without doubt, is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, published in 1952. While it is an angry novel, it, too, struggles with the guilt of abandonment of a prior culture. "I yam what I yam," says the hero, to speak of more than his dietary traditions. But America none theless is this hero's fatality, and his adventure consists of his becoming the American. "Who knows," this narrator famously says to white America, "but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you." Which is what our new immigrant will be doing, too.

Marcus Klein is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo and author of, most recently, Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes: American Matters 1870­1900 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).

Linda Chavez

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