What is an American?

Part One

Along the Natchez Trace, close to where it reaches its terminus near Nashville, there used to be a tiny wayside inn, comprised of two rough log cabins, and popularly known by a distortion of the owner’s name, Robert Evans Griner – hence, Grinder’s Stand. It was here, on a moonless, early autumn evening that a traveler arrived in an evident state of discomposure – muttering wildly to himself and pacing aimlessly around the property. After taking a small supper, he paced for a while longer around his room before finally laying down upon some bearskins tossed on the floor. The appearance of rest was shattered, however, around three in the morning by several gunshots. When servants arrived, they discovered that the man had shot himself three times – once in the forehead, and twice in the abdomen. Whether due to the tentativeness of the attempt, or the hardiness of his constitution, he lingered for several hours in agonizing pain, before succumbing to his wounds at last around daybreak. This was how Meriwether Lewis, the famed explorer and captain of the Corps of Discovery, met his end.

The story of what brought Lewis to this pass is a complicated one, and will probably never emerge entirely out of the mists of conjecture. He had struggled with drinking for years, and was just then under the burden of crushing debts. Disappointments in love, as well as frustrations stemming from his role as Governor of the Louisiana Territory, have both been alleged as causes of his distress. Numerous friends, including Thomas Jefferson, noted the streak of melancholy that had always marked his character. Yet once we have adduced all these possible influences upon his suicide, a poignant mystery continues to hang over the event.

This was a man who had traveled over an entire continent, who cast his nation’s first eyes upon its grandeur and its fecundity. His journals bear unmistakable witness to his sensitivity to the land’s beauty, as well as to its commercial potential. A man of a staggering variety of talents – botanist, physician, soldier, pathfinder, hunter – Lewis was undoubtedly one of the greatest men this country has ever produced. So as he labored westward, it was with a mind entirely alert to the vast possibilities of the terrain he discovered, a certain intuition of the scope for empire revealing itself through every new vista. It is impossible to believe that, as he wrapped his hands around the pistol on that dark October night, some trace of those intuitions did not momentarily return to him in memories - some image of the perilous rapids or the barren mountains he had crossed, some recollection of the doggedness with which he had stared down hostile tribes. And yet he pulled the trigger anyway. He had marveled at our country’s immensity, and the immensity of its promise; had foreseen the global prominence glistening on the other side of the land’s mastery. But it was not enough.

I find myself in recent times thinking more and more about that terrible evening; about that obscure wayside inn, and the heroic, destitute man who stopped there, and never left. Because it seems like we modern Americans, his distant descendants, find ourselves in a position more than analogous to his own. We have inherited the land he mapped. We have realized the empire he envisioned. And we have discovered that it is not enough. Having accumulated greater wealth than any nation before, having attained a greater influence over world affairs than any nation before, America stands at this moment of her apparent zenith wracked with discontent, and displaying ever more extravagant symptoms of her own suicidality – a cultural war waged on her own heritage, a demographic war waged through immigration on her own population, a political war waged on the very fundaments of civilized society. Partisan divisions and hatreds - some with deep roots, others relentlessly exacerbated by the most feckless figures in our public life - have led more than one observer to suggest that a separation of the American people may now be inevitable, the only question being how much blood will be shed prior to the partition. In so many of the policies and trends giving impetus to our public affairs, America in recent times has had the appearance of a nation that no longer has the will to live.

The recent election has done much to alter that mood, but elections can only solve a certain range of problems, and one cannot help feeling that underneath the renewed sense of patriotism rippling across large portions of the American public, unresolved questions about our national identity continue to lurk and cast doubt on our future. We know that in the case of individuals contemplating suicide, the despair of their condition often results from a crisis of identity, from an inability to understand who they are or what they are about in the world. Likewise, the desperate condition of our national character in recent years suggests that we have lost the ability to tell ourselves who we are, and that the accounts that once sufficed in the past no longer satisfy. To know who I am, I must know the story I belong to, the story that tells me where I come from, and where I am destined to go. But for us, the past has become occluded by guilt, the future obscured by anxiety, and so we sit in the present haunted by questions that seem to have no answer.

It is not true that such questions only arise in an age of crisis. To the contrary, a vigorous civilization is one that is relentlessly reflecting on the core of its common existence. It is the intractability of those questions that marks our crisis, the fact that no answers readily suggest themselves anymore or command consent among a considerable majority of the American people. Only by facing up to this destitution can we hope to discover anything resembling a satisfactory account of our national identity for our own times. Bald assertions about the goodness of our traditions or our history cannot suffice, because our crisis is precisely a crisis of history and tradition. If these came down to us in a flourishing condition, we would not be so befuddled by these questions. The last thing in the world that will serve to guide us in such an age as this is mere jingoism, or national chauvinism. Resort to such impulses supposes we can securely erect our self-image upon a spiritual terrain trembling beneath us.

So let us dismiss, once and for all, the notion of a “propositional nation,” or “nation as idea,” which, like some great nebulous plushie, has coddled and deluded the minds of more thoughtful Americans than it would be to our national credit to admit. The notion that an American is one who subscribes the our “values,” or who assents to the assertions contained in our founding documents, cannot bear serious scrutiny. As many have pointed out, it carries the unavoidable implication that a Laplander or a Filipino moved by the opening of the Declaration of Independence is somehow more of an American than a Texan working the same ranch that his ancestors have worked for two centuries, and who might not have ever read a word of Jefferson. But the real problem with the concept of the “nation as idea” lies not in a misunderstanding of what a nation is, but of what an idea is. Ideas, concepts, values – these are not clear and stable signs, that retain their unambiguous reference from age to age. Ideas emerge out of the lived lives of a people, prescinding from a host of particularities to mark out an uncertain field of common discourse. As a people’s way of life alters, the meaning of the ideas and concepts they employ alters with it, until one single word, spoken by one single citizen, might depart drastically in significance from the way his grandfather might have used it.

Consider only the opening of the Declaration, which is typically appealed to as one of the sources for the propositions that make us a “propositional nation.” That document states that men are endowed by God with a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But now, only consider how completely and irretrievably the understanding of liberty which informed the men who signed that document has been transformed into one they would not recognize, and certainly not endorse. The idea of liberty as they conceived of it had an aristocratic provenance – it was connected to notions of dignity, of an abhorrence to subservience. It was opposed to “arbitrary rule,” and so had an unmistakably public denotation. Only contrast that with the most common modern conception of liberty, which more or less amounts to the private right of every individual to act just as they please, whatever the consequences for the public might be. This is not just a variation in the idea of liberty; it is almost a perfect antithesis. The proposition in the Declaration no longer means the same thing to us as it did to its authors because the words used to articulate that proposition no longer mean the same thing. Pretending that we can discover a stable national identity in “ideas” only invites a host of questions about what exactly those ideas mean, and our inability to concur on the answer to that question only serves to recapitulate our inability to say clearly, what is an American?

Wrestling with this question means starting with something far more substantial than “ideas.” We must start in fact with the most solid thing we share together, and the thing which in a sense is least liable to debate or controversy. We must start with the land. As simplistic as it might sound, an American is, in the first place, a person who inhabits the land that has come to be known as America, by generations of people living here who have called themselves Americans. It is a land of great variety, and of consequent sectional peculiarities, but it serves as one soil underneath all of our feet. An American is one who shares this earth with other Americans, who lives alongside other Americans, and makes a common life with them. By starting from the land, we give ourselves the best opportunity to answer the question in a manner that encompasses the greatest number of people.

Among those with whom we share the land are those who have tread it before us, who were born here and made their lives here. The very delineation of the land as that particularly belonging to Americans has a pedigree; as I have said, the land is America because generations who lived here have regarded themselves as Americans. So, with the land comes a story, and to be an American is to find oneself enmeshed within that story. This does not require us to interpret that story as one long hagiography, or prohibit us from exerting all our powers to ensure that subsequent chapters do not read far differently than their antecedents. It is only to say that inclusion in our national identity – in any national identity – demands of us the humility to acknowledge that our lives are not entirely our own, that those who already inhabited the land bequeathed to us much that we have come to rely on, and so some measure of gratitude is bound up with any proper relation to our country. Such an acknowledgement allows full scope to critique and reform, but bars us from making a full repudiation.

And yet the spirit of repudiation is precisely the one that has come to rule over our times – a repudiation of our history as one long black legend of rapine; a repudiation of our social order as one vast engine of oppression. Statues thrown down, history books rewritten, ancestors universally slandered and reviled – all of this is the work of a generation that refuses to acknowledge their intrinsic part in the drama of the American story. It is impossible for any healthy national identity to emerge from such a spirit. Those who revolt against all civic orders, by principle, are excluded from all civic community, by necessity. It is not just that the repudiator cannot be our countryman; he cannot be a countryman, anywhere, by definition, by virtue of his own principles. He is one who finds cause for resentment everywhere, and a place to call home nowhere. The repudiator cannot be an American, any more than he can be a German or a Peruvian. By rejecting the fundamental gratitude which binds an individual to their home, they have rejected the only sound basis for membership in the civic order.

Repudiating this spirit of repudiation, therefore, and taking up our parts in the story of the land that began well before our own times - which requires nothing more of us than an assent to reality – we ask who were those personae who acted their parts in the half-written plot that has been left to us? And the evident answer we must give in the first place are those native tribes who inhabited the forest, plains, and deserts of this continent before the coming of the European. Of course, it is only with the coming of the European that the story of the native truly comes to light, and that record is made of their customs, their beliefs and, most importantly, of the extraordinary personalities that bear the unmistakable stamp of their tenor of life. Enough emerges out of that record for us to identify the decisive feature of that tenor of life: it is migration, or the life of unsettlement. The constant and relentless movement of tribes which continued into the period of contact with Europeans, and which undoubtedly marked the history of the natives from the day they crossed the Bering Straits, defined the whole of their experience on this continent. Even among those tribes of the east who appeared more settled – the Iroquois in the north, for instance, or the Creek in the South – the rudimentary nature of their settlements provides clear evidence that they only recently and tentatively emerged out of the welter of movement.

The force which drove this constant movement and interchange of territory was obviously war – the universal, unrelenting, unmerciful slaughter and displacement of one people by another, which framed every last thought of a native from the moment of birth to that of their typically violent death. It is war that is the truly decisive force in the native experience, that gave impetus to the entire manner in which they conceived of the existence and the destiny of man. Courage in battle was the sum of virtue to a man, and to distinguish oneself in an encounter with the enemy was nearly the entirety of the aspirations inculcated in one of their youth. The life they lived adhered closely to the heroic code that we encounter now only in the epic literature of ages past – a life that admitted no compromise in the matter of honor, that always placed honor above mere existence, and so could never regard the world as anything other than the fleeting lists upon which the mettle of a man is tested. It is not without cause that European travelers among the tribes often commented on the resemblance of certain natives to figures they recalled from their study of the Greeks and the Romans; the Shawnee or the Cheyenne brave lived more intimately, knew more viscerally, that dictum Diomedes received from his father – to excel all other men – than any scholar tucked away in the library of Harvard, translating the Greek of Homer. To say that the native lived by a heroic code is not to varnish the brutality and the savagery so endemic to their way of life; rather, it is to remind ourselves of the extent to which the warrior virtues are bound up with those harsh conditions. The fact remains that this variety of human experience enters into the American story in its most distilled and pronounced fashion by way of the land’s natives.

It is in the horse culture of the plains tribes – the Blackfeet, the Cheyenne, and particularly, the Lakota – that the essence of the unsettled life reached its apotheosis. Traversing a vast, unbounded plain in uncertain pursuit of game, pausing in no one place for more than a week at a time and yet bearing an intimate knowledge and affection for the entirety of the territory encompassed by these migrations, prepared at every moment to confront hostile warriors for the stakes of your family’s lives – these were the patterns at the heart of the plains experience, and the course of life that determined the mentality of those who experienced it. We can catch a sense of this ethos in the photographs of Edward Curtis, who recorded the last, flickering shadows of its essence. We see in his pictures groups of warriors accoutered in all their superstitious paraphernalia, crossing and recrossing the country just as their will leads them and as their prowess as warriors enables them, seeking for nothing in those enormous tracts of land other than the opportunity to make a good death. This is the world of the Kit Fox Society, whose members recited the simple but sublime creed, “I am a Kit Fox, I am supposed to die. If there is anything difficult, if there is anything dangerous, that is mine to do.” It is the world of the Dog Soldiers, who rode forward on the battle field to find the most exposed and perilous position, and then tethered themselves to that spot. This was the course of life on the plains, a course of life entirely incompatible with civilization, and yet providing scope for virtues that must forever remain foreign to civilized life.

What we regard as the American frontier, then, was no tabula rasa, no empty space awaiting the determinate imprint of the European settler, but a plane of endeavor already defined by the mentality arising out of the patterns of unsettled life. The Europeans who entered that plane were often transformed in accordance with that mentality. Icons of the west, like Bill Hickock and Billy the Kid, were creatures of the same patterns of unsettlement as the natives, and lived according to the same heroic code, according to which death is an ever-present destiny that can only be reckoned with and not avoided. That is why such figures have attained a status resembling epic heroes in the American consciousness, because, by forging ahead of their society into the uninhabited expanses of the continent, they found themselves tracing biographies that summoned memories of that same society’s earliest moral aspirations. Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis, so interesting, and so apt an identification of one of the key sources for the American character, remains a critically incomplete account of just how the frontier acted upon the American psyche. For what the continued openness of the frontier represented was not primarily an opportunity to struggle forward, to progress into the future, but rather, the chance to return to the heroic age of gold, to the virtues of Leonidas and Horatius, and the scope for striving that could never be experienced by dwellers along the coast. Yet those same coastal dwellers, by virtue of inhabiting the same land out of which the frontier opened, inherited the legends and the ethos of the unsettled tenor of life that unfolded there.

The paradoxical nature of that inheritance cannot be overstated, since the people among whom it was received were more committed to the patterns of settled life than any of their predecessors. It is to those patterns, and their effect upon the American character, that we will turn next.

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