RESILIENT AMERICA

In this book, I ask:

Has the United States peaked and entered national decline? Or do Americans' often pessimistic and despondent perceptions of their country and the related intensity of their debates indicate continuing civic health?

Decline or unabated continuity? As an immigrant and American by choice, I am heavily invested in the answers to these questions.

I came to the United States in April 1960 from Argentina, where I had spent the previous dozen years in a first emigration venture from Europe. I landed in Miami and traveled North on a Greyhound bus through a sea of Confederate flags in the Southern States. I didn't know that all those flags reflected a last spasm of segregation. I assumed mere nostalgia for Gone with the Wind. Nor did I understand for a long time much else in the unfolding landscape. I knew next to nothing about America, though having seen a couple of hundred Hollywood movies I thought I knew plenty.

Within months, I had a solid job teaching French and Spanish at a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania. I shared an office with a young history professor, a Midwesterner, tall, craggy, lean, and rather dour. He turned out to be liberal, but this meant nothing to me. I simply assumed that a nation so successful couldn't produce anything but sound thinkers. He and I got along quite well, but throughout our conversations he astonished me by informing me that I had made a big mistake in settling in this country, where no hope existed, where injustice prevailed, where the rich oppressed the poor, and where the American Dream had died.

I listened, but my brief experiences told me otherwise. I saw people designated as poor, but they drove cars and had TVs. I had never driven, let alone owned car, nor had I seen a TV set -- all normal conditions outside of the United States at that time. As for the American Dream dying, my classes were full of first-college-generation sons of semi-literate coal miners and steel workers. True, blacks were heavily discriminated against in 1960, but I had no experience of their lives. Nor could I then fathom the mysterious American women, so different in their assertive independence from any I had known. In other countries, a man was lion-king by birthright and women treated him as such (but smirked discretely, I am sure).

Subsequently, and often throughout the years, I kept hearing from the right and the left alike about the decline of America's morality, standards, prospects, and of access to justice and opportunity. Liberals supported the views of my history professor informant. Conservatives provided a counterpoint. Liberals assailed the lack of change in American society, conservatives its uncontrollable acceleration. I continue to listen in some disbelief. As an immigrant, I see a different United States.

Meaning of decline. Because much of this book revolves around claims of American decline, I need to define that term. Decline relative to what? To its own past standards and performance? To its own myths? Or to outside forces, like a rising China? From our myths, we can decline only in our imagination. Whether we have declined relative to our past constitutes the central question of this inquiry. As for China and other rising powers, they ascend on their own, not at our expense. When we equate the ascent of others with a presumed American decline, we engage in attitudes new to our national character. That character is another principal concern of my inquiry.

We also need to ask: How pertinent today are discussions of decline to increasing millions of educated young Americans? Does a debate about decline reverberate with them, or does it only speak to seasoned citizens with rearview mirrors to a romanticized past? How long before a less insular, more globalizing view of America prevails?

The critics. Critics of America's condition motivate this book. They are millions and they come in many more than 31 flavors. They fall into two categories: the dyspeptic and the idealistic. The former simply don't like present America and relish our pratfalls. The latter seek a more perfect country and bewail our faults. Significantly, I find no immigrants among the critics, because immigrants see the United States in the context of their prior lives -- in my case, in many countries.

Leftist academics deconstruct American culture and history. But they deal in abstractions and have no consequences on public opinion. My inquiry concerns critics who worry about America more viscerally. David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter and creator of the TV show The Wire, represents the earthy flavor: "The Wire is going into the archive as an artifact of where we were as a country when we fell on our a-- and became a second-rate society," and "...While the American empire slipped off its pedestal, what the f--- were we paying attention to?" Admittedly, it takes a sturdy Pollyannaish streak to remain optimistic when reading the daily news. But critics have specialized in apocalyptic rhetoric long before now and a historical horizon helps.

Throughout the early Republic, the United States countenanced a financial system unbelievable today. No national currency existed. States authorized banks, but didn't control their actions. On the eve of the Civil War, 1,562 banks were issuing some 7,000 utterly confusing bank notes. Counterfeiters thrived. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Lincoln administration decided to issue a national currency, backed by the nation's credit. Like most innovations, this one generated fierce debate in the U.S. Congress. Representative Owen Lovejoy described the proposed currency as "legislative legerdemain" and exclaimed, "There is no precipice, there is no chasm, there is no possible, yawning bottomless gulf before this nation, so terrible, so appalling, so ruinous, as this same bill that is before us." What Jeremiah today can match that flight! Like so much of the alarmist rhetoric we hear, Lovejoy's vision fizzled, as the greenbacks in our pockets prove a hundred fifty years later.

We should hear all the critics, but also challenge their views when evidence counters them. I listen and remain optimistic about America.

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Continuity and Recurrence

What have I learned these years in America? Well, plenty. Mainly, that the more it seems to change, the more it actually continues and recurs. In this constancy I recognize the essence of the American story. In unimaginable contrast to the country I encountered in 1960, by 1975 America had reached a nadir of discouragement, demoralization, disorientation and loss of faith. It sagged under the unprecedented. The Vietnam War lost, the President resigning in disgrace, all authority -- civil, religious, and educational -- questioned, traditional morality in disarray ("if it feels good, do it"), "massage parlors" everywhere, uncertain, hirsute men reeling under the impact of feminism, Americans meandered spiritually and psychologically.

Observing their behaviors ten years later, one wouldn't know that these were the same people. In 1894, the state of the American psyche was similar to that of 1975. Within ten years, responding to Teddy Roosevelt's sunny energy and optimism, but more importantly reflecting a vernacular resilience, the country had returned to its natural can-do, risk-accepting self. The Great Depression taught the same lesson. In its wake most Americans adapted resiliently, accepting an evolved relationship with the government. Otherwise they continued to hew to the center, practiced their religion, engaged in community activities, volunteered as before, accepted risk mostly cheerfully, or at least stoically, and invested with enthusiasm when they could.

Continuity. John Winthrop's vision of America's future in the early seventeenth century ("The eyes of all people are upon us" -- my italics) and William Penn's of its moral and political foundations in the latter part of it ("For we put the power in the people") still live in the character of today's Americans. Many among us still believe that we serve as a model to the world, and we still agree with Penn's democratic instincts. Of course, we cannot overlook Benjamin Franklin, that archetype in whom we find so many current American traits. He has become a caricature, a logo for savings-and-loan banks -- "a penny saved." Yet consider what his biographer Walter Isaacson says about Franklin's social philosophy:

...he exalted hard work, individual enterprise, frugality, self-reliance. On the other hand, he also pushed for civic cooperation, social compassion, and voluntary community improvement schemes. He was equally distrustful of the elite and rabble, of ceding power to a well-born establishment or to an unruly mob. With his shopkeeper's values, he cringed at class warfare. Bred into his bones was a belief in social mobility and the bootstrap values of rising through hard work.

Much different from Americans we know today? Nor can we avoid the deep insights of Alexis de Tocqueville, observing the young Republic. I return regularly to the thoughts of these and other significant thinkers. I read their reflections and observations and think, "How like today!"

To be sure, like other normal humans, Americans also cheat, lie, discriminate and engage in crime, as has man ever since the beginning. As in Argentina, I met Americans who broke their word. The hallowed citizen-soldier in the Continental army, initially recruited mostly from the independent yeomanry of New England, indulged in drunkenness, debauchery, and, yes, crime. This country's continuity includes not only the positive, but also smug comfort with personal ignorance, latent racism and an undiminished inclination to violence, out of all proportion to the degree of civilization attained by the United States.

We can trace positive, as well as unlovely aspects of the national character from the earliest settlers to the present. One cannot usefully judge the national condition as a snapshot, fixed in a moment chosen by the viewer. Instead, one needs to see it in context, as a movie, from its beginnings, evolving and projecting into the future. Any frame merely succeeds the preceding, followed by the next in the developing story line.

Recurrence. The country's formative influences reach back to its colonial beginnings and grow and recur to this day: the immigrant, the frontier, the British cultural roots, individualism and communitarianism, energy-generating optimism, idealism and moralism, resilience and adaptability, avoidance of extremes and persistent gravitating to the middle -- and, lamentably, attachment to ignorance and to violence. These recurrences affirm the steadiness of the national character.

The immigrant, of course. For nearly four centuries now, settlers, colonists, and immigrants, arriving in successive waves, have shaped the national character. Most understood the American promise instinctively and lived it enthusiastically, integrating the melting pot. Their unceasing influx has provided renewal and continuity, compensating for self-doubts and flagging commitment of many native-born. Immigrants reinvigorate individualism and the vitality and elasticity of the national character. Like incoming tides, they flush out cultural pollutants and energize and revitalize society's self-assurance.

Admittedly fairly exceptional, Raul Ocazionez typifies the energies that an immigrant brings to us. A young, educated Colombian, he immigrated in 1981 to study computers, hoping to start a business. After earning a master's degree from the University of San Francisco and working for others for a few years, he saw an opportunity. Of California's fifty-eight county governments, only the six largest had satisfactory computer services. The remaining lagged. When he approached the underserved counties, offering to provide high-grade services, he encountered a receptive demand. He founded Informatix, in 1986, to serve a neglected market niche. Since then, he has expanded steadily, providing government in California and other states with cutting-edge computer capabilities.

Raul credits his success to the American environment. Its respect for the law gave him assurance; the community gave him support in exchange for his efforts. He couldn't count on either in Colombia. His story, one of millions over the centuries, abounds in American character traits and behaviors. He accepted risks, improved himself, acted on his ambition, participated in the community and worked quite hard. Countless others have performed and succeeded on more modest scales. Some failed, because the stress and intensity of the American competitive experience doesn't fit everyone's temperament.

The frontier conditions. No longer geographical, the frontier, now cultural and psychological, still prevails, more perhaps for the immigrant than for the native-born. It imprinted my immigrant beginnings and my increasing Americanization, but it continues to etch us all deeply. The longer I live in the United States, the more I see the frontier as a major leitmotif explaining the American character. In the next chapter, I examine how the frontier lives on in present-day America and how it continues to mark us.

The effects of British culture. "There ought to be a law" and "I have my rights!" are expressions I never heard before coming to the United States. Though at the beginning of the twenty-first century only twenty percent of Americans descend from English stock, the culture of their British ancestors anchors ethically our life. I observe delightedly that, from it, a majority of today's Americans have established a personal trust in the law and regard for the rights of each other; that from its vernacular we have learned concepts such as "fairness" (a term not fully translatable into other languages). If we read at all, we read Shakespeare, not Cervantes, Moliere, Goethe, Dante, or Pushkin. We speak in Shakespearean metaphors ("A plague on both your houses!" and scores of others).

Proponents of multiculturalism deny the importance and current pertinence of our English roots. But I would not have immigrated if English cultural concepts had not formed and continued to support the ethos of the United States. This country would have been just like any other -- some good, some, or much, not so good; none special, or "exceptional," as many Americans like to think of it. Why would millions bother to emigrate if their home countries honored law, equal rights, and opportunities for all citizens, or if an open economic system, also anchored in British eighteenth century thought, prevailed in their home-lands?

The early settlers came from a mainly Cromwellian England, where citizens had fought for their legal rights in a manner unprecedented in the rest of Europe. They had, after all, even beheaded their king for it, in 1649. Other waves of colonists and immigrants came from societies with no tradition of personal rights, or of law applying equally to all. French Huguenots fled religious persecution; Germans, during the colonial period, escaped petty despotisms. Delicately, almost subliminally, our British roots seduce the immigrant into becoming American by conveying respect for human dignity and the trusty supremacy of the law. In my commitment to these ideas, I have come to think of myself as an honorary Anglo-Saxon.

The community and the individual. The act of emigrating dissolves one's social bonds. Upon arrival in a new society, constituting new bonds becomes an unspoken but essential priority. Hence, from its beginnings, life in America tells the story of an organized, dynamic reciprocity between individual and community, as the individual seeks to establish a place in society. My friend Allen Mead Ferguson, of Richmond, Virginia, embodies reciprocity between individual and community. A robust ex-Marine, his expansive, ever-cheerful temper easily triggers eruptions of uproarious laughter. As I examine his life, I see a self-made American who acted within his character and interacted with his community, giving to it and receiving from it.

Allen's father taught him that he would meet givers and takers and admonished him to be a giver, because self-esteem comes from giving. As a young man, responding to a strand running deeply in the national character, Allen decided that ultimately he wanted to be an owner, as "this is the essence of America, if one wants to take the risks." He joined a small investment banking firm and grew to become its CEO and principal owner. He credits his success to having given of what he calls the "four w's." Giving wisdom, by sharing what one knows. Giving work, by not sparing efforts in one's gainful employment, but also by participating in community endeavors, in which he sponsored and led much fund-raising. Giving wealth, through one's philanthropy, returning to the community part of what one has earned from it. Giving wit, by keeping one's good humor when contributing to the common endeavor (he dispenses plenty of that!). He gave, but he received -- wealth (material and spiritual), goodwill in many forms, the approval and recognition of his peers, and an awareness of adding to and improving one's community.

As with Raul Ocazionez, in Allen Ferguson I chose an admittedly fairly uncommon individual. Nevertheless, most of us would recognize Allen's career as classically American in its intimate reciprocity with his community. As Benjamin Franklin would have it, "When you're good to others, you are best to yourself."

Optimism, idealism and moralism describe much of the American universe. Idealistic faith in the better part of human nature, optimistically overcoming repeated bitter and potentially shattering experiences, gives rise to numberless consequences. A deep moral streak influences individual and collective decisions to a degree unknown elsewhere. Eastside College Preparatory School, in East Palo Alto, California -- one among a myriad of similar stories -- illustrates the full gamut of idealism, optimism, and moral concern in the American character.

While an undergraduate at Stanford University, Chris Bischof volunteered his time (a profoundly American trait) to tutor high school students in the area. In East Palo Alto, at that time a very poor, racially mixed, socially troubled community, he learned that 65 percent of the children were not graduating from high school. Believing that they could succeed if given proper support, in 1991 he started "Shoot for the Stars," an after-school academic enrichment program for middle-school students. He used basketball as an incentive and gave students 90 minutes of tutoring in exchange for 90 minutes of basketball coaching.

The program's success encouraged him to found, in 1996, at age 26, Eastside College Preparatory School, with eight students, using rooms borrowed from local nonprofits. A decade later, the school had about 200 students on its own modern, attractive campus that transformed the atmosphere of the community. Twenty teachers shared instruction with Bischof, now the school's principal. Classes run from eight a.m. to five p.m., with many students electing to stay later to do homework and other projects. The school offers music, drama, mock trial, studio art, and award-winning photography and journalism programs, as well as boys and girls' basketball, soccer, track, and volleyball. Bischof still coaches basketball. All of the students in the school's first five graduating classes have gone on to college.

So what of idealism, energetic optimism, and moral motivation in this, to me, so typical an American story? Like most Stanford graduates, Bischof could have gone on to a money-making career. Instead, his moral drive turned him to help the disadvantaged. Bischof's motivation infected donors -- foundations, private individuals, and corporations -- without whom the school would not have developed. Collectively, they provide an annual operating budget in excess of three million dollars. What motivates them?

We need to discount the obvious mandates of foundations. Cynics may credit corporate morality to a desire for good public relations, but Americans expect morality to motivate decisions across the board. Whatever our prompting, we tend toward philanthropy, personally and collectively, reflecting a native optimism about the potential to alter history through changes and improvements. Instances of this moral drive contrast with a morose and cynical view of societal possibilities that prevails in most of the rest of the world. Energetic, often idealistic America stands as a universe apart, even when it fails to live up to its better ideals.

Resilience and adaptability. During my first three years in the United States, the country seemed idyllic while under the surface grievances ripened. Then the improbable Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy and the boils began to erupt. Long suppressed grievances of the black minority exploded in riots, the Vietnam War provoked domestic violence, crime increased and moral authority retreated. Sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, but also domestic terrorism came to the fore. Strident voices of the under- and over privileged questioned the legitimacy of the Republic. I wondered what had become of that optimistic, idealistic, moralistic America into which I had just recently immigrated.

But in a few years I began to notice that friends and acquaintances, male and female, who had dabbled in drugs and more than dabbled in random sex, started to marry. They began to live mostly monogamous, responsible lives. They procreated and raised their children under mostly traditional moral precepts. They paid taxes, they voted, some even conservative. Over a relatively short time, these rooted behaviors revived all over the land. What happened?

Well, Americans don't stray easily from the center. The frights of the frontier, which stimulated cooperation, the British egalitarian propensity for compromise, and the land's generous capacity for prosperity, encompassed much of the American experience. All encouraged the culture to oscillate narrowly close to the center and the national character adopted this range early on. Like a powerful magnet, the center generates resilience and adaptability.

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