A few years after American Independence a French aristocrat called Crèvecœur who’d settled in New York published a book called Letters from An American Farmer. It was the first European bestseller from the American continent. Its most quoted line: “What then is the American, this new man?”
Thankfully, the Crèvecœur-in-Wonderland question continues to be asked 250 years later. It has always been more important than the answer. The clue is in the asking. It doesn’t preclude all sorts of possibilities. The more the better in an e pluribus unum sort of way, with more emphasis on “out of the many” than on the “one.” Pluralism before doctrine, unless by “one” we mean union out of pluralism. That’s the originalist meaning of the motto, though it’s just as often misinterpreted as a backdoor to Leviathan: my unum or the highway, that sort of thing.
So what is the American, this eternal adolescent? There is no single answer to what cannot be defined, what should not be defined. The moment we answer the question with any kind of finality, the moment we say an American is this, that or the other, we are asking an un-American question, because the assertion bears the exclusionary gruff of the border guard and the supremacist whiff of the purity test.
We’ve been there, to be sure. Our entire history starting from colonial days has been an eyegouging match between xenophobia and pluralism. Philadelphia mayor and slave-owner Isaac Norris in 1724 called Germans “the very scum of mankind.” Our beloved Benjamin Franklin, lightning rod of the American Enlightenment, called our less beloved current president’s ancestors “Palatine Boors” whose women were so ugly “that it wou’d require great Portions [money] to induce Englishmen to marry them.”
I’d say it went downhill from there, but by then we’d long been raking blood and bones by the mass grave from the bottom of the Middle Passage’s ships. Neither July 4 nor the 1788 Constitution improved matters, instead enshrining slavery in law, disenfranchising three-quarters of the population, then tolerating immigrants as subservient labor only to turn them over to Know-Nothing campaigns–the first magazoids–anti-Catholicism, and a variety of migration bans against “Orientals” to the near-total immigration ban between the 1920s and 1960s to today’s ICE-picking pogroms of Browns and Muslims.
On the other hand, the people who want the question answered about what makes an American never quite win, never fully get the answer they demand, even if it may seem so in periodic binges of xenophobic bacchanals. The more the question is asked, the more Americans there are to defy any one-size-fits-all response. An American is an Old Faithful of paradoxes, of diversity, of definition-defying multinational characters. An American is whatever an American chooses to be, whatever an American identifies as, because that, too, is our ultimate freedom.
Yes, that includes women identifying as men or as nothing at all, Shintos identifying as Jews, Blacks identifying as whites and vice versa, and yes, Christy, Nebraskans identifying as Chinese. If you can pull it off, who am I, who is anyone, to presume to deny you the freedom? None of it is any less bizarre than, say, an Arab identifying as an American, as in my case. Biology, you say? Sure. No one disputes the absurdities of those who “identify” differently as performative wokism, in which case it’s nothing less obscene than blackface. But I’m referring to the sincere, the biological iconoclast, the genuinely dysphoric or even the confused. Their ambiguity–their difference, as that is all it is–is not ours to judge, ridicule or punish. They are ambiguous only in our eyes, not theirs, and it is theirs that matter. With liberty and justice for all, y’all.
So you do not get to define me, and I have no interest in defining you. This goes for race, ethnicity, political party, gender, and of course religion. As Jefferson put it, “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god.” I apply the same math to chromosomes. But the moment you start wanting to answer the question, as for example when you claim that America is a Christian nation founded on the belief in one God sanctifying only marriages between one man and one woman (ye gods!), you’ve not only lost me, you’ve lost America. You’ve missed the point.
We are not a nation that judges identity and belonging by a political test any more than by a racial or religious test, as–unfortunately–do Israel and Saudi Arabia, to take two nations where regressive sectarian laws still prevail (though it is easy peasy to become a Muslim. Not so with Judaism, or Catholicism for that matter, assuming you want to be a gainfully employed citizen of the Vatican). But millions among us want to take us back to exactly that, not just with religious tests. They want to diminish us to a narrow definition of what and who we ought to be. They want to melt us into an identity not necessarily of our choosing or making.
Which is why when Crèvecœur first described the “melting” of identities and Israel Zangwill coined the image of a melting pot with his 1908 play of the same name, they, too, were missing the point. One of Zangwill’s characters describes it as “the great Alchemist” melting and fusing migrants “with his purging flame.” Henry Ford literally recreated the pot in his Ford English School graduation ceremonies where he had migrant workers in their colorful diversities descend into a giant cauldron from one end and emerge uniformed as “Americans” from the other. All that is to me a creepy form of ethnic bleaching in the name of social conformism. It is identity communism blackfaced as unum in the Leviathan sense.
The melting pot cogs us into human widgets. It makes us means to an end no longer our own. It assumes with double-sided paternalism that there is a definable, definite American identity, and that the more established migrants of former generations get to define it for new migrants–as it never was for them. It erases the open-ended frontier of identity, which Frederick Jackson Turner never closed, replacing it with that unacceptable oxymoron: the boundaries of American possibilities. There’s a reason that, Philip Roth’s bloop single aside, the great American novel has never been written. It cannot be.
What, then, is the American? She/he/they are the pluribus–the many–within everyone’s reach, the pluralism of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the scintillas across Gatsby’s bay, the tragedies of Dreiser and the paradoxes of James Baldwin’s mountain, they are the exuberance of Augie March, the “Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” and the undefined and star-spangled alienation of Don DeLillo. What enriches us from all these American gospels is that there is no unum, because like all things sanctified and deified it is unattainable, and it would be dull as hell.
No. The American is not so dull, nor so fearful of embracing the only thing that defines us: the unanswered question. And as long as there is no answer, those who aspire to Americanism will always have a chance.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
Atwp says
An American are the descendants of Native Americans that were slaughtered by the white man.
Jake From State Farm says
I was watching a documentary about our founding awhile ago.
They asked the same question and I liked it so much I wrote it down…… The answer given was
“An American is not defined primarily by blood, language, religion, or geography, but by a commitment to a shared civic experiment: the belief that free individuals, possessing equal dignity, can govern themselves through law, reason, and mutual responsibility while preserving the liberty of others. To be American is to inherit both the promise and the unfinished work of that experiment.”
Not as long winded as your article but says the same thing without all the BS and your slanted view of politics.
Deborah Coffey says
OMG! Pierre, you just made my 4th of July a happy one. This piece is brilliant. For one thing, what it shouts out to me is “Long live DEI” because America should be for anyone who sincerely wants it to be a “place to call home.” Thank you.
Stephen Jan Playe says
Thank you for, as always, making us think.
Happy 4th, Pierre.