“The most evil nation on earth!” At a dinner in Lahore earlier this year I was
shocked at the casual anti-Americanism of the conversation. Sophisticated
people who knew America and Americans well took it as second nature to
excoriate the place. When I expressed surprise, I was told that America was
polluting Pakistan’s culture, undermining its democracy and fomenting the
Taliban by bombing Pashtun villages. Yes, I said, but could they not
distinguish between the misdeeds of a particular president and the ideals
that America still represented? Not any more, came the reply.
Simon Schama’s book is a brilliant antidote to anti-Americanism. Written,
perhaps recklessly, in the hope that America might transform its world image
by electing Barack Obama, it is a searchlight sweeping the horizon of
American history. It picks out incidents, movements, ideas and, above all,
people, warts and all. If, like much of Schama’s work, its ending seems
uncertain, so is America’s. Here is an unashamed paean of praise for the
world’s most successful nation.
Schama’s America is built on four abstract nouns — belligerence, fervour,
ethnicity and plenty — each viewed as part history, part anecdote and part
(less satisfactory) research for a television series. Each scene is brought
alive by the author’s gift for narrative. We move easily from the frozen
wastes of the Iowa caucuses, cradle of US democracy, to another cradle, the
heights of Arlington, Virginia. Here one of Schama’s cascade of characters,
the civil-war officer Montgomery Meigs, furiously buries dead Union soldiers
in the garden of the Washington mansion belonging to his old West Point
friend, Robert E Lee. Lee had become a Confederate and thus a traitor.
The great struggle between Hamilton and Jefferson, between a “caesarist”
military republic and a volunteer democracy defending “an empire of
liberty”, lives on for Schama in the conflict between the neo-conservatives
and old army men such as General Ricardo Sanchez, “bristling with hostility”
against his former bosses in the Pentagon. To his delight, there are still
Meigses in the American army, still expressing a fierce independence on the
subject of Bosnia and the Iraq war. They are still teaching courses at
Georgetown University on “Why presidents go to war and why they don’t have
to”.
For all the isolationism of the early settlers, militarism remains a potent
strand inAmericanism, whether in clearing the continent of Britons, French,
Indians and Mexicans, or in the imperial interventionism of Teddy Roosevelt.
Both have been reborn in the ideological “new frontier” of Kennedy and
George W Bush, of “go anywhere, pay any price to defend freedom”. All over
America, you still see flags, uniforms, army bases and a near-religious
reverence for military virtues.
Next comes fervour, the fervour that impregnates Obama’s Iowa speeches with
historical significance, as it does the sermons of dapper Pastor Johnny of
1st Baptist Church Atlanta, answering to “a lonely middle-class America
heartsick at the loss of community”. The preacher’s fundamentalist eloquence
and the “craving for castigation among the BMW classes” harks back to the
early Ranters and No-Hellers, to the fervour that led Roger Williams to
found 17th-century Providence on Rhode Island, as intolerant of intolerance
as the Salem inquisition.
The same fervour fuelled the apostles of slavery in the south, as it did their
abolitionist opponents in the north. It certainly fuelled the itinerant
black woman preacher Jarena Lee, as she set up her stall in markets and
chapels and preached 692 sermons in 1835 alone. She was stoned and beaten up
for her sins, or her virtues, according to taste. In America, fervour and
reason are in constant contention.
After the fervour is the melting pot. What really is an American? Schama’s has
often been a ferocious racist. Though he omits the Utah Mormons, he is aware
of a nation whose leading inhabitants felt themselves perpetually “chosen”,
for not being German, Irish, Catholic, Jewish, Indian or Mexican, anyone
that might threaten the dream of liberty (or rather “my” liberty).
The statue of that name may have welcomed “the wretched refuse of the teeming
shore”, but it was always last year’s refuse, not this year’s one, which was
usually dismissed as “diseased madmen, tubercular paupers and sinister
agitators”. Through most of America’s history, “only those who didn’t need
to become Americans in the first place would actually be welcomed”.
Benjamin Franklin may be the ideal Enlightenment European/American, but he was
also the “founding father of American paranoia”, who saw in unrestrained
immigration the seeds of America’s self-destruction. He wanted to “exclude
all blacks and tawneys” and opposed “the Palatine boors [Germans], suffer’d
to swarm into our settlements and, by herding together, establish their own
language and manners to the exclusion of ours”.
Yet it was an Anglo-American, Andrew Jackson, who pioneered ethnic
extermination in expelling the Cherokee from the southeast, dumping
survivors in the dust bowls of the great plains — to Schama “the most
morally repugnant moment in American history”. It was America that murdered
Chinese navvies after they had built the railways, and that carried their
bones in truckloads back for burial. It was America that lauded slavery and
segregation deep into the 20th century.
To every one of these defects Schama has an antidote, as if the American story
were one long rolling paradox. Racism was the inevitable by-product of being
the world’s melting pot and, despite its poison, “immigration triumphed as
one of the great motifs of American history”. It remains the dream of the
oppressed everywhere. As he says, the entire population of Myanmar “would
fetch up in New York harbour tomorrow if its government allowed it”. The
same was, until recently, true of China, not to mention Latin America.
This book is a celebration of what the late Arthur Schlesinger regarded as the
self-correcting genius of the American constitution. Somehow everything
comes right in the democratic wash. For every imperialist Teddy Roosevelt
there is an isolationist Mark Twain. For every hysterical ranter there is a
reasoning Jefferson. For every Ku Klux Klan savage there is a Fannie Lou
singing This Little Light of Mine at the back of the integrationist bus.
Schama can be irritating. His narrative jumps about in time and he has an
aversion to dates so ubiquitous as to question the authenticity of some of
his stories. His urge to boast about his meetings with prime ministers and
presidents intrudes uncomfortably on the tale.
But his prose is unfailingly entertaining. His hero, America, is vindicated by
history as a place of everlasting optimism. To Schama, as to Tom Paine, it
remains “the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious
liberty”, where the “misery-stricken of the world will no longer be the
defenceless creatures of the mighty”. Whatever their suffering, they suffer
in a landscape of hope, for their children if not for them.
And I have no doubt that when the monstrous errors of the war on terror have
passed, my Pakistani friends will be sending their children to American
universities, reading American books, watching American films and expecting
American power to rescue them from the latest folly they have, for the most
part, brought on themselves.
Available at the Sunday Times BooksFirst
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What I should have liked to read from Mr Schama is that the American fall from intended paradise was forced upon the country by the British in the War of 1812. That was the end of the American dream and the beginning of the nation's direction by Boston and New York.
Roger Houghton, Mui Wo, Hong Kong