By Patty Smith As an American literature teacher, I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be American and how America is reflected in and defined by its texts. I ask my students to think too, about the idea of the American Dream which is, it seems to me, a crucial concept that influences both what it means to be American and what constitutes America at its core. When we ask the questions— What makes American literature American? — we’re also looking to define what makes us unique, what characteristics separate us from other countries and people. I posted elsewhere on this blog one answer to that question about what distinguishes American literature, an answer from writer Russell Banks who said that the ideas of “race” and “space” are what differentiate American literature from all other literature — and I like that explanation. Certainly, race, while not a uniquely American issue, has played out in a fairly unique way in our country and is reflected as such in our literature. And the idea of space is what launched the American Dream in the first place—back first when St. Jean de Crèvecoeur wrote “Letters from An American Farmer.” He wrote about the vastness of the land, asking “Who can tell how far it extends? Who can tell the millions of men whom it will feed and contain?” The endless space offered possibilities that just didn’t exist in Europe. In America, there was always somewhere else you could go, someone else you could be. Europeans who emigrated here didn’t find, “as in Europe, a crouded [sic] society, where every place is over-stocked; he does not feel that perpetual collision of parties, that difficulty of beginning, that contention which oversets so many.” Now my students will often immediately point out that while de Crèvecoeur was so cheerfully optimistic about America and its future, he seems to have forgotten or ignored two facts: 1) there were already people living here when Europeans arrived; 2) there were also already enslaved people living on this continent, too, by the time de Crèvecoeur was writing. And here we have the conundrum of what has continued to be true about America until today — that it was a place of inconceivable space, lending itself to a new way of life for many people, a place where, it seemed in de Crèvecouer’s day,“There [was] room for everybody”— and simultaneously, where certain people were already overlooked and/or killed and for whom, one might argue, there was in fact not nearly enough room. Of course, this conundrum is carried right over to the Declaration of Independence, which states that “all men are created equal” when we know some were more “equal” than others. What are we to make of this document, then? What are we to think of these words? Are they insincere? Hypocritical? President Barack Obama referred to them just the other night in his speech at the Democratic National Convention. He said: “We don’t look to be ruled. Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that We the People, can form a more perfect union.” Our “birthright,” President Obama went on to say, “[…] the capacity to shape our own destiny [is] what drove patriots to choose revolution over tyranny.” And that capacity to shape our own destiny is at the root of our collective American identity and the American Dream.
And yet. And yet. I hear the naysayers among you. I hear my own internal voice that reminds me we’ve not got it right yet. There is too much that is wrong with America. I read the words of Langston Hughes written in 1938 —- Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-- Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kinds connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. (It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe. (There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in his “homeland of the free.”) Hughes goes on to define the voice(s) speaking in the poem, “the poor white…the Negro bearing slavery’s scars…the red man driven from the land…” In rather prescient terms he says he is also “the young man, full of strength and hope, tangled in that ancient endless chain of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!” We might start to raise our clenched fists. We might think yeah! We might think, as Donald Trump has recently suggested, that America is failing, that we need to make it great again. We might think that our founding fathers were a bunch of lying white men. And yet. And yet. The words contained in the Declaration of Independence, these self-evident truths, do encapsulate some particularly American characteristics, I think, and serve to form the basis of our quintessential American-ness. Even in their failure to address everyone, even in their disregard for non-white men, those very words “all men are created equal” along with the subsequent explanation of our natural rights and our need to choose “revolution over tyranny” have gone a long way to shape our national identity.
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August 2016
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