The United States has all of the complexities of all the other nations in the world, and also many of its own...
~ Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans
Reading about American history and culture is forever fascinating. Of late I've been focused on learning about various immigrant groups, from monumental ones like the English and the Africans (explained so well by David Hackett Fischer in his books Albion's Seed and African Founders) to relatively unknown ones like the French Huguenots who migrated to Boston, New York, and South Carolina in the 1690s and the Canary Islanders who settled in southern Louisiana under Spanish rule from 1778 to 1783. America has experienced dozens of such migrant streams, each consisting of atypically adventurous people and each adding its distinctive flavor to the gumbo of American culture. Indeed, as Walt Whitman observed in his 1855 poem Great Are the Myths, America is "the nation of clusters of equal nations"; Frederick Douglass echoed Whitman in his 1869 speech Our Composite Nation; and Albert Murray renewed these insights in his 1970 book The Omni-Americans, wherein he argued that American culture is inherently composite, pluralistic, mulatto.
Not infrequently one hears wistful calls for America to be a more tolerant and kindly place, typically along the lines of a nice Scandinavian country like Denmark. While I'm all in favor of moderation and brotherhood, my impression of Denmark (never having visited!) is that it is free to be so nice because it lacks some of the complexities we have in America. For instance, with only six million people (the same as here in Colorado), most of whose ancestors have lived there for a thousand years or more, Denmark is likely less ethnically composite today than America was even in 1776, let alone in 2025. Once you tack on the vast geography of America, its regional and local diversity, its numerous cities (42 of which are larger than Copenhagen), its many levels of governance (50 states, 3000+ counties, myriad towns and townships, etc.), its ultra-dynamic economy, its countless businesses winking in and out of existence, its outsized role in world affairs, its freewheeling, rebellious, and often troubled history, and so on, you realize that wishing America to be more like Denmark is a pipe dream.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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