Because today is Constitution Day, I figured it would appropriate to share a few reflections on what it is to be an American. Apparently that's a thing these days! But in fact it's been a thing since at least 1781, when J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur published his essay What Is an American.
Coincidently, before learning that this is a hot topic, my recent reading had already included a book by John Kouwenhoven entitled The Beer Can by the Highway: Essays on What's American about America, first published in 1961. Kouwenhoven's work is mentioned with fair frequency by Albert Murray, whose own insights are quite relevant to the matter at hand.
The results of a recent YouGov poll indicate that people think the most important factors in considering whether someone is an American are obeying U.S. laws, supporting the U.S. Constitution, and believing in the principles of the Declaration of Independence. That's not a bad start because the Declaration and the Constitution are the intellectual heritage of all Americans, but it seems to me (and seemed to Kouwenhoven and Murray) that American identity goes deeper than that.
Murray held that "the basic elements of American behavior" are "improvisation, frontier experience, resilience"; it is this attitude of affirmation in the face of adversity that has brought about "the orchestration of a veritable jam session of dissonant colonial voices into a constitutional democracy" (isn't that a beautiful image?). Similarly, Kouwenhoven wrote that America is not a finished product but an ever-changing process of aliveness: a flexible way of handling experience rather than a fixed and immutable ideal (not even the ideal expressed in the Declaration, which you'll note is all about the pursuit of happiness rather than a particular outcome that applies to everyone). The music of America is, as Whitman put it in one of the central poems of Leaves of Grass, the song of the open road.
Indeed, it strikes me that we Americans are not an ethnos - not a people in the sense that the Danes or Egyptians or Koreans or Ukrainians are a people. Aside from the long-suffering American Indians, no American's ancestors were here more than 400 years years ago; and most Americans' ancestors are a mongrel mix of folks from all over the planet. As Murray once put it, Americans are citizens of the world because the world came to America; or as Kouwenhoven once put it, Americans aren't rooted in one place or ethnicity but culturally are perpetually on the move down Walt Whitman's open road, or perhaps Mark Twain's ever-flowing Mississippi River.
Because old man river just keeps rolling along, immigrants the world over are forever welcome to put in and paddle downstream as they add their thoughts, commitments, art, music, foods, deeds, and lifeways to the great stream that is American culture and the American future.
Yes, America has great ideals and foundations, but it's our never-ending process of living up to those ideals and building atop those foundations that makes American identity so distinctive in world history. Or so it seems to me.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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