by Simon Schama
The American story has always been a dialogue between Jefferson’s unbounded faith in heroic individualism and the obligations of mutual community voiced by Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But the supremacy of self-interest, of which corporatism was its manifestation writ monstrous, is for the moment at any rate well and truly over, the casualty of its wildest ride. The Enron and Madoff frauds, both breathtaking in scale; the criminally tardy response of government to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the abandonment of the people of New Orleans to their fate for days on end; the shaming sense that the American people were sold a bill of goods in Iraq, and that the country’s “reconstruction” was merely an opportunity for outsourced freebooting have buried the era of “best of luck, pal.” Instead, an alternative America has been recovered, one that was actually there all along. In this America, “government” is no longer the enemy of freedom but its guardian, no longer the bogeyman of enterprise but its honest conscience and forthright guide, no longer shrouded in furtive entanglements but vigorously transparent. A government that need not blush at its claim to be “for, of, and by the people.”
And in this recovered United States, the matters that have threaded through American history in the pages of this book—the judgment of right and sufficient cause for war, the assertion of natural resources as public trust rather than sold property, the culturally inclusive nation, the bravely stubborn Jeffersonian belief that a moral society is also a tolerant one—will all be brought into the light of day, irrespective of how pressing the needs of economic rescue and repair become. Indeed it is at just such moments that the opportunity for righting a course can best be tackled. Whatever the American future might look like, it had better not resemble the version that has brought it down in the first place. Nor will it be. There are times in the Republic’s history when it might suffice for the country to be constituted from a free but random agglomeration of individuals all looking out for themselves, the result being, somehow, by some social alchemy, a shared common fortune. But this is not one of them. In shared misfortune, the need to look out for one another seems at the very least unsentimental, a necessary condition of society holding together. American independence will not be jeopardized by American interdependence.
That’s what the man in the red plaid shirt said he wanted from his government, his president, when he spoke to the Democratic Convention just before Obama’s acceptance of the nomination. His face was pink, his passion was high, and he came from Marion, Indiana—a state that symbolized just how far things had come in America, by going for Obama in the election. He had been, he said, a lifelong Republican and had assumed, in his modest way, that the American way would allow him, as Jefferson had promised, his usual allowance of happiness: steady job, mortgage affordable on one income, decent health care. And then the consumer electronics plant closed and he was laid off with just ninety days’ severance pay. He had been outsourced. It was the end of his America. Dismay turned to despair and then to anger. And in the city that had lynched blacks in 1930, the churchgoing Republican decided that his kind of American, his kind of president, was the African American candidate for the White House. And so he stood up before the Cecil B. DeMille fake-antique columns that were the backdrop for the revival of republican civism and said so. His name was Barney Smith, and what he wanted, he said, was a president who would “put Barney Smith before Smith Barney.”
You have to hope that Barney gets what he wants; not least because a collapse of General Motors would leave Marion, Indiana—a city where unemployment of the eighteen-to twenty-five-year-olds and of older people is already running at near 25 percent—on the floor. But perhaps Barney Smith will have celebrated at least an election in which politics conceived of as business as usual—negative campaigning, the pornography of patriotic paranoia—abjectly failed to deliver and the country was instantly the better for it. Washington on the night of 4 November, around eight in the evening, at any rate, was eerily quiet. Traffic was sparse; foot traffic in the rainy streets meager. There was little sign of people on their way to election-night parties; not a single placard or poster as the polls shut. The capital had shut its eyes, crossed its fingers tight enough to constrict its blood flow, and held its breath. Early data began to chatter in from exit polling and in the states across the Potomac that mattered, John McCain’s numbers rose and rose; the silence in the city was so thick, you could cut it. Nothing by way of saying “it’s the rural counties, south and west” made much difference; the intestinal knots got knottier.
Until somewhere around midnight, when at a fell swoop, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio all went blue, and a great cork popped from the pent-up city. Block parties improvised, Washingtonians usually not given to dancing in the streets did just that. Hip-hop and salsa ruled on the damp sidewalks of Adams Morgan. All around the cities of the United States, an effusion of relief and almost incredulous glee poured through crowds, as if the country that had not quite dared to believe that it could be possible for someone so unlike the usual specifications for occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would nonetheless be taking up residence there, come 20 January. At long last, the ignominious betrayal of the American promise, inherent in slavery, had been effaced; the moral vileness of segregation wiped clean. Perfect strangers in Washington coffee shops and diners high-fived and hugged. Around the world, disbelief was swamped by joyous relief. The America the world wanted but assumed it had forever lost had returned. The Statue of Liberty was no longer a bad joke. Conceding, John McCain looked happy for the first time since he accepted the Republican nomination and went out of his way to garland the victor with heartfelt appreciation, as if he had been secretly wanting to do that for some time. Even the incumbent, whose presidency was being repudiated, understood that America had suddenly become better for what had happened and had the decency, in so many words, to say so.
At the Lincoln Memorial the following morning, every so often, people would arrive with bunches of flowers and set them at the foot of the statue. Some were paying homage to the memory of Martin Luther King and the day when his rhetoric rang out down the Mall like a great cathedral bell, calling to God for a time he said when the promise of America would finally be redeemed. Some were certainly acknowledging the stand Lincoln himself had taken and the mortal price he and the country had paid for it. Altogether, there was a mysterious but unmistakably budding sense of reconnection; a country remade through a simple, majestic act of popular will.
Acknowledging the magnitude of the disaster that has overcome the economy, and the frightening scale of what needs to be accomplished to restore even a semblance of normality to its prospects, I remain convinced that the American future, shaped by the epic of its past, will turn fair once again. On a London street six weeks after the election, a tall young man approached me, smiling. He was film-star handsome, in a purely American way: square jawed and open faced. He reminded me he had been my student many years before, at Harvard, right at the outset of the Reagan presidency. He had done all the things, chalked up all the points he had needed to be an American success. The doors of corporate law had been thrown open. He could be a deal maker. But, he said, he was going into government; into one of the institutions that would determine where the country’s money went. He felt good about that, and so did I, since, anecdotally, I am hearing this news from all over the place: an unapologetic return by smart women and men, in their thirties, taking pay cuts to work for the people’s government. It is as if a call had been answered, even though no one has yet thought to make it; a call to service that has been made so often in the American past and will be again, if the republic stays true to itself. So how bad can the American future be, when it is in their strong, young, hardworking hands?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Part One: American War
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Part Two: American Fevor
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Part Three: What Is an American?
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