Born in the U.S.A.: Birth, Commemoration, and American Public Memory

Introduction: Locating the Birthplace in American Public Memory

P 1 INTRODUCTION Locating the Birthplace in American Public Memory SETH C. BRUGGEMAN Does it matter where we are born? Does “the accent of one’s birthplace,” as the early modern pundit François de La Rochefoucauld put it, “[persist ] in the mind and heart as much as in one’s speech?” Or does our obsession with origins amount to a fool’s quest? Are we, like Herman Melville’s wayward patriot, Israel Potter, condemned to discover that the birthplaces we cherish exist in memory alone?1 The essayists in this volume neither test La Rochefoucauld’s maxim nor tend Potter’s homesickness . Rather our purpose here is to suggest that both typify a preoccupation with birthplaces that has figured prominently in the American commemorative landscape. That it has is evident in the phalanx of bronze placards, granite obelisks, and historic homes that preside over the nation’s hallowed birth sites. For nearly two hundred years in some cases, birthplace monuments have enshrined nativity alongside patriotism and valor as among the key pillars of America’s historical imagination . Our task, then, is to ask why this is and to inquire after the cultural significance of the birthplace monument in American memory. One need not look much further than the world of American electoral politics to understand why ours is a task worth undertaking. Consider , for instance, Jerome R. Corsi’s Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President (2011), which in June 2011 ranked sixth on the New York Times’s list of best-selling hardcover nonfiction. Corsi’s book is, at its core, a book about birthplaces. It contends that persistent doubts concerning the site of President Obama’s birth and the legality of his citizenship demand that his presidency be invalidated. But Corsi’s screed is only the latest in a battle first joined during the heady run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Readers now may be surprised to recall that the presidential birthplace wars did not at first concern Obama alone, but also entangled his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain. Starting in 2008, bloggers claimed that McCain was not a natural-born citizen because he was born in a small town just outside the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, 2 p SETH C. BRUGGEMAN where the Navy stationed his father in 1936. His birthplace, they argued, disqualified McCain for the American presidency. A bipartisan spate of agitated senators responded swiftly to these charges by signing a joint resolution declaring their full confidence that McCain was a perfectly natural American and, given his impressive record of national service, perhaps even more so than most. Thus defended, John McCain cast his birthplace controversy into the wake of an otherwise ill-fated campaign.2 Obama was not so fortunate. Questions about his birthplace drew a considerably more virulent attack by those among his detractors who sought to leverage racism and xenophobia against the possibility of an African American president. Conspiracy theorists argued throughout 2008 that Obama had fabricated evidence of his 1961 birth in Honolulu, Hawaii. These so-called Birthers, for whom Corsi has become a prominent mouthpiece, alleged that Obama was actually born near his father’s home in what is now Kenya, but which was then still a British colony. The Birthers still propose that Obama is doubly disqualified for the presidency on account of geography and British nationality laws. For its part, the Obama campaign stifled any reasonable doubt by circulating a copy of his birth certificate online in June 2008. And yet the controversy persisted well into Obama’s presidency. As late as July 2009, mainstream news outlets including CNN, MSNBC, and NBC Nightly News continued to entertain the possibility of Obama’s unnatural citizenship. The Obama administration relented in April 2011 and, despite criticism from supporters who warned against bowing to the fringe, published the president’s long-form birth certificate. Corsi’s book appeared on shelves less than a month later.3 Partisan muckraking on both ends of the political spectrum has been a matter of course in American history. The dogged persistence of Obama’s birth debate, however, signals something different. It demonstrates just how obsessed Americans are with origins. Where a person is born concerns us. Our preoccupation with presidential nativity is particularly telling because it reveals just how much authority we grant birthplaces in determining who is and who is not properly...