One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming

Epilogue: What Does It Mean to Be an American?

Epilogue What Does It Mean to Be an American? I f science has undermined ideas of race, if intermarriage has blurred the meaning of ethnicity, if immigration has changed the geographic origins of the population, if America no longer can be described as black and white, if the vocabulary of group identity has been rendered obsolete, what, then, has happened to the idea of nationality? What does it mean to be an American? The term is actually very old. American was used in the sixteenth century to refer to the inhabitants of the North American continent.1 Over time, its meaning became less, not more, precise , and since the early days of the republic it has always posed something of a puzzle. Americans, it has been said, are made, not born. In a technical sense, this is not true because anyone born in this nation automatically is a citizen. But in a looser sense it expresses something distinctive about the nation’s identity. American did not emerge from ancient ties to place or reflect a singular ethnic or racial origin. As a political, rather than a geographic, identity American was constructed as a result of revolution and the act of creating a new nation. From the beginning , it designated women and men of diverse backgrounds. Some came from families resident on the North American continent for many decades; others had arrived in recent years. On this continent, they lived in colonies distinct in geography and economy; they thought of themselves as from Virginia or Massachusetts. It is telling that they called their creation, the United States of America. Until the Civil War, the United States was a plural noun—“The United States are,” not “The United States is.” The new nation’s official motto—E Pluribus Unum translates to From Many, One—referred to the creation of one nation from thirteen independent colonies; on the Great Shield, thirteen arrows fill the quiver, thirteen stripes cross the flag, and thirteen stars dot the constellation.2 It took weeks to travel between colonies or for information to circulate among them. Yet, at a point in the late eighteenth century, 217 these geographically dispersed colonists fought a revolutionary war together and in its course and afterwards called themselves Americans. What did they mean? There was a protean quality to national identity. It was never static. Massive waves of immigration, internal migration, war, economic transformation , and the extension of civil and political citizenship forced continual renegotiation of its meaning. In the era with which this book starts—the early twentieth century—immigration, industrialization, and the acquisition of empire forced the question to the forefront of the public agenda; less than two decades later World War made it even more urgent . The same can be said for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and for similar reasons. Once again, events on the ground have shaken old certainties and demanded that we reformulate one of the principal ideas that structure thinking about public life. For all the concern with the question, answers by and large have been partial and unsystematic. They have reflected the aspect of the term American of concern to individual observers—today, for instance, the obsession is multiculturalism—and a voice that looks outward or downward from positions of intellectual, cultural, or political authority. But American is a multivocal idea, one understood fully only as a collage of the view from various angles, the result of close attention paid to what the several parties to the conversation have to say. As a concept, in other words, American is multidimensional. Four dimensions—source, voice, metric, and location—together constitute the elements necessary for understanding what it means to be an American at any particular moment in the nation’s history. Source refers to what prompts concern with the question in the first place. In general, it is either large numbers of immigrants from new places or threat, usually war, homegrown “radicalism,” or a combination of the two. Voice calls attention to whose definition is reported, insiders (authorities) or outsiders (immigrants, American Indians, for instance). When a new immigration wave destabilizes the definition of American , the voice of insiders is sometimes generous, welcoming newcomers, expanding the idea of American to embrace multiple ethnicities; but sometimes it is hostile, drawing a tighter circle around an imagined idea of a pure America. Or, as happens most frequently, it may include both. When, however, the nation is threatened and authorities fear...