by Simon Schama
But right now Chuck Alaman is an optimist. The mere fact of the Obama candidacy, with roots in Muslim Kenya and Christian Kansas, is a source of marvel to him; a vindication of America, whatever the outcome of the presidential election. “Did you know,” he asks, “that the first Muslim member of Congress, Keith Ellison [also an African American] from Minnesota mind, took the oath on Jefferson’s Koran?” I confess I didn’t even know that Jefferson had a Koran. But Chuck was right. The Virginian had bought the two-volume London translation of George Sale in 1765 and into the Monticello library it went, used, it is sometimes said, for his research in comparative law rather than theology. Though there is no reason why Jefferson should have had any less interest in Mohammed as a moral teacher than Jesus. When the news spread in March 2007 that a Congressman was indeed going to swear his loyalty oath on the Koran, it was no time before a fellow House member, one Virgil Goode, warned that it was the Beginning of the End of America and felt emboldened to add that “we will have millions more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt strict immigration policies.”
For most everyone else, the uncontroversial moment of Congressman Ellison’s swearing-in suggests all that is right about the United States when much is wrong. Best of all, the congressman’s mother, Cilida, when asked how much that day meant to her, offered the perfect reply. “I’m a Catholic. I go to Mass every day.”
PART FOUR
IV: AMERICAN PLENTY
33. Running on empty?
I wasn’t on the flatboard before the truck roared off; I lurched, a rider grabbed me, and I sat down. Somebody passed a bottle of rotgut, the bottom of it. I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air of Nebraska. “Whooee, here we go!” yelled a kid in a baseball cap, and they gunned up the truck to seventy and passed everybody on the road. We been riding this sonofabitch since Des Moines. These guys never stop. Every now and then you have to yell for pisscall, otherwise you have to piss off the air, and hang on, brother, hang on.”
I looked at the company. There were two young farmer boys from North Dakota in red baseball caps, which is the standard North Dakota farmer-boy hat, and they were headed for the harvests; their old men had given them leave to hit the road for a summer. There were two young city boys from Columbus, Ohio, high-school football players, chewing gum, winking, singing in the breeze, and they said they were hitchhiking around the United States for the summer. “We’re going to LA!” they yelled.
“What are you going to do there?”
“Hell, we don’t know. Who cares?”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
In 1958, that was the way I saw America from afar, willing the number 226 to take a wrong turn down Cricklewood Lane and end up in Oklahoma: corn as high as an elephant’s eye (I’d seen the show); a cloudless blue bowl of a sky; the whip-poor-wills doing whatever it was that whip-poor-wills did; prairie chickens ditto; a straight old empty road heading west to happiness. Whooee!
I was right. If you want one word to describe the American state of mind, it would be: “boundless”; the beckoning road trip, the shaking loose of fetters. Natural limits—mountains, rivers—have been there to be wondered at and then, in short order, crossed, forded, mapped, left behind. The country was invented to slip the bounds of parish, manor, estate; all the ancient jurisdictions of the Old World that cramped free movement. (In eighteenth-century France, for example, seasonal migrants needed papers signed by their parish priest to avoid the attention of the police.) America was about casting off the security of a nervously watchful church and state. Beginning with the moment you stepped on board and stared at the gray seawater out beyond the harbor, America told you to embrace the peril of unbounded space for the chance of starting over. In the Old World you knew your place; in the New World you made it. So American liberty has always been the liberty to move on. Whatever ails you, whatever has failed; whenever calamity dogs your heels or your allotted patch feels too small for your dreams, there’s always the wide blue yonder, the prairie just over the next hill, waiting for your cattle or your hoe. Say howdy, give it a good poke, and up will pop your very own piece of plenty: a crop of corn, a magic glint in the stream, a gush of black gold. Come sundown you can rock on the porch and survey your little kingdom, the kingdom of the common man; your heart’s content.
It was when eighteenth-century British governments decided that the line of the Allegheny Mountains would be the western limit of their American empire, any greater extent being expensively indefensible, that it doomed itself, irreversibly, to destruction. America has always been about the forward propulsion that will beat the confinement of the regulating state every time. Benjamin Franklin did his best to explain to friends and Parliament that the sovereign fact about America was territorial magnitude. It was, he wrote to his philosophical Scottish friend Lord Kames, “an immense country, favoured by Nature with all the advantages of climate, soil, great navigable rivers and lakes etc. and must become a great country, populous and mighty and will in less time than generally conceived, be able to shake off the shackles imposed on her.” “There appears everywhere an unaccountable penchant in all our people to move westward,” he wrote on another occasion, seeing in his mind’s eye, even as he sat in his London house, the ax and the hoe, trees falling; deep woods cleared; the land put under the plow; river valleys opening for traffic. But the lords of mercantile empire in London could not see it. For theirs was a calculus of national profits divided by the costs of defense and revenue collection. They were not much interested in the settlement business, except as a source of raw materials and a mart for British manufactures; and perhaps a sponge to draw up the “viler sort” of their own islands.
Continental North America was, then, a convenience (as distinct from the sugar islands of the Caribbean, which were a necessity). But if its value was not to be made worthless by the costs of perpetual warfare, it needed to stand on a fiscally defensible frontier. Nervousness about overreach elsewhere in the British Empire—in India in particular—affected decisions about America. In the official mind, pioneering was another name for strategic irresponsibility. But even as it tried to hold the line, the far-off government had no choice but to encourage some settlement on the western frontier, if only to preempt the French and protect the borders of British America from their soldiers and Indian allies. The snag was that there was always another interior line—the Mississippi, for example—which if taken and fortified by the enemy might yet put a chokehold on British America.
So British policy on the western frontier wavered between confinement and permissiveness. But in the end, American perception of territorial conservatism triggered the first revolution of disaffected real-estate agents who believed that the market for prime land must overcome geopolitical timidity. To map the backcountry had been to spin an investment. Washington’s first career was as a land surveyor, and he had an almost mystical faith in the Ohio Valley as the crucible of American continental empire. For Franklin the Ohio Valley meant men and money, lots of both, and a nice cut for him.
In 1782, after the fighting had ended and backcountry land was open for sale, Franklin published Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, in which the cautionary note surrendered to the shameless come-on. After grandly disabusing potential immigrants of the easy availability of “profitable offices” and the myth, apparently widespread, that land and Negroes were given away free, Franklin made his beguiling pitch. “What are the advantages they may reasonably expect?” he asks. The first is that “Land being cheap in that Country, from the vast Forests still void of inhabitants, and not likely to be occupied in an Age to come, insomuch that the Propriety of an hundred acres of fertile soil full of Wood may be obtained near the Frontiers, in many places for Eight or Ten Guineas, hearty young Labouring Men who understand the Husbandry of Corn and Cattle…may easily establish themselves there. A little Money sav’d of the good Wages they receive there, while they work for others, enables them to buy the Land and begin their P
lantation in which they are assisted by the Good Will of their Neighbours, and some Credit. Multitudes of poor People from England, Ireland, Scotland and Germany, have by this means in a few years become wealthy Farmers who, in their own Countries, where all the Lands are fully occupied…could never have emerged from the poor Condition where they were born.” To move west, Franklin implied, is to make money fast. He “personally knew” several people who bought large tracts of land on the western frontier of Pennsylvania for £10 per hundred acres and who, as the farmland boundary pushed west, sold the same land for £3 an acre: an American killing!
A generation later, in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville judged this “restless spirit” the great American peculiarity. No matter how prosperous the times, or how well the citizen might be doing, standing pat on what one had was out of the question for a true American. Dreading the possibility of loss, Americans were “forever brooding over advantages they do not possess,” compelled to find an expeditious way to something still better. Passive contentment was apparently not an American option. Tocqueville saw with his usual astuteness the tension in American life between settlement and stir-crazy impatience to be Getting On. They were, and are, two impulses in contention. On the one hand, there was the direction towards which the wagons rolled, the log cabin in the clearing; which as the land was opened and tilled, would give way to a picket-fenced yard and farmhouse. On the other hand, there was the irrepressible itch to be up and Improving. From the unresolved tension between the two instincts, Tocqueville thought, could come social madness: happiness as a malevolent will-o’-the-wisp, forever capering before the breathlessly pursuing Americans who were trying to catch it. How else to explain irrational habits that barely raised an eyebrow in America? “In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and sells it before the roof is on and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing…he settles in a place which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days’ vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast expanse of the United States and he will travel 1,500 miles in a few days to shake off his happiness. Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which is forever on the wing.”
But America couldn’t help itself. It was always moving toward Gatsby’s “orgastic future,” signaled by the green light at the end of the dock. “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further…And one fine morning—” Fitzgerald’s boat, in the end is “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” But that end note of pessimism is tellingly misread by most of the high-school students assigned the book, at least according to the New York Times. In February 2008, the paper reported from a class of first-generation immigrant students at Boston Latin School, most of whom took the green light not as a tantalizing mirage, the glow that lit Gatsby’s doom, but something like the opposite: a beacon of hope; their very own go signal. Jinghzao Wang, fourteen and a first-generation immigrant, told the Times that she had adopted Fitzgerald’s green light as a symbol of her determination to get into Harvard.
You can see her point. No one has yet won an election in the United States by lecturing America about limits, even if common sense suggests such homilies may be overdue. In 1893, the Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner noted that the superintendent of the U.S. Census had declared that since the “unsettled” area of the country was so broken, there could hardly be said, for the purposes of the census, to be a frontier any longer. Turner took that as momentous, the end of the “first epoch” in American history. It was, he lamented, an end of repeated beginnings, since with each westward push, American society had had to start all over, thus giving the nation its bracing sense of perpetual youth. But all was not entirely lost. Three years later, in 1896, in an essay called “The Problem of the West,” Turner prophesied that some sort of robust American response to the closing of the frontier would shape what he called a “new Americanism”: a “drastic assertion of national government and imperial expansion under a popular hero.” The frontier had given birth to democracy. Would its closing give birth to something more startling? “The forces of reorganization are turbulent,” he wrote darkly, “and the nation seems like a witches’ kettle.”
Each time the United States has experienced an unaccustomed sense of claustrophobia, new versions of frontier reinvigoration have been sold to the electors as national tonic. In the 1890s, Teddy Roosevelt’s muscular imperialism, the answer to Turner’s prayers, was meant to get the country out of its end-of-frontier funk. And if the moving frontier could no longer generate democracy in, say, Montana or New Mexico, then perhaps it could do so in Slovakia, Latvia, or Cuba. That at any rate was the hope of Wilsonian internationalism; the irrepressible urge to pioneer through politics. In 1960, in the midst of the cold war, experienced once more as a constriction of national energy, Kennedy’s inaugural speech promised another breakout. America’s back was no longer against any sort of wall, Berlin or otherwise. It was Up and Doing; it would “go anywhere” and “pay any price” to defend freedom. Anywhere came to include the Newest Frontier of the moon, on which the astronauts of Apollos 15 to 17 took the ultimately meaningless road trip, cruising about the lunar surface in their big-wheeled buggy looking for cool rocks.
The great exception to the obligations of optimism was Jimmy Carter. His fate in the election of 1980 against the unshakably sunny Ronald Reagan became an object lesson in the penalties of candor. Carter gave no fewer than four television speeches on the subject of energy, which, prophetically, he saw as the arbiter of security. From April 1977 to his most dramatic speech in mid-July 1979 setting out a national energy policy designed to reduce dependence on foreign oil by a quota on imports, conservation, and tax incentives for investment in alternative fuels, his television audience went south (eighty million to thirty million). Press reaction to the extraordinary speech of 15 July, in which the born-again Baptist read admonitions to himself from perplexed citizens before he asked America to face the facts about oil dependence, was hostile. The LA Times took the president to task for “scolding his fellow citizens like a pastor his profligate flock.” William Buckley’s National Review drolly confessed its surprise to discover that God was a member of the Carter Cabinet. On the other hand, popular reaction to the speech as measured by opinion polls was positive, the president’s ratings rising by 11 percent. The several disasters that overwhelmed the Carter presidency—not least the Iran hostage crisis, severe inflation, the gradual but unmistakable collapse of the president’s own capacity to call on the country in ways that would balance frankness with optimism—all put the prescient courage and clarity of his energy policy under a cloud. In retrospect it became just another item on the preacher’s sin list for which the solution was collective repentance.
Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, was no breast-beater. His solution was to displace the responsibility for America’s economic predicament from the shortsighted habits of business and consumers that had troubled Carter onto the lumbering leviathan of government: the “problem” not the “answer,” as he memorably said. Instead of Carter’s interventionism in the name of the common good, what was needed, Reagan proclaimed, was for government to get out of the way; to deregulate the energy industry and get as much hydrocarbon fuel out of the ground as possible, as quickly as may be. America would deliver; America always had. The people ate it up. Watching the two together on television was like beholding a happy elderly parrot, crest cocked to one side, confront a gloomy creature of the deep, the fish lips parting occasionally to reveal a frightening grin. A parrot-fish of course is what Americans needed but, obliged to choose, they had little hesitation. Just six states plus the District of Columbia withstood the landslide to fall in Carter’s column.
The next
time that a candidate was brave or foolhardy enough to suggest that perhaps the United States was getting to the end of plenty, and that there was a price to be paid for both the use and the depletion of fossil fuels, he too paid a price at the polls. The contrast could not have been more glaring. Both George Bush and Dick Cheney came out of the oil industry; both were skeptics of global-warming science; both thought there was no energy shortage, even in the age of the SUV, that could not be put right by getting rid of George H. W. Bush’s ban on drilling offshore and in environmentally sensitive regions, and developing nuclear power as fast as possible (an option Carter too had recommended). Al Gore, on the other hand, was cast by his opponents as a false prophet of energy apocalypse, warning of the wrath to come if America did not mend its profligate ways. The more strenuously “ozone man” lectured the country, the funnier the joke was supposed to be. And once the Bush–Cheney administration was installed in power in 2001, it lost no time in repudiating the Kyoto accords on measures to combat climate change, and deregulating the energy industry as completely as possible. A task force on energy policy was convened under the chairmanship of Vice President Cheney. Its proceedings remained secret, and as soon as the suspicion was raised in the press that many of its personnel and those it consulted were heavily skewed toward executives from the industry, a decision was made to keep their identity private. Invoking executive privilege, Cheney resisted all demands from Congress and suits from environmental organizations to disclose names. When, in 2007, the Washington Post revealed the identity of forty of those consulted, few were surprised to discover that they included executives from Exxon and Mobil, a drilling friend of Cheney’s from Wyoming, and Kenneth Lay, the CEO of Enron.