America in context

The American Identity

"American" is an inclusive term and we apply it generously, because becoming an American is about embracing a set of ideals and pursuing a way of life, rather than embodying a particular ethnic group, religion, or culture. And though we are a mobile society, a connection or bond to place, often the neighborhood or town in which we grew up, is important to us.

The American Identity
Marc Pachter

The political activity that pervades the United States must be seen in order to be understood. No sooner do you set foot upon American ground than you are stunned by a kind of tumult. ... It is impossible to spend more effort in the pursuit of happiness. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy America

Attempts to define the nature of American society often begin with a quotation from Alexis de Tocquevilles 19th century masterpiece, Democracy in America. It is remarkable that a book written about a country thought to be perpetually changing, relentlessly modern, and completely without a sense of tradition could be produced over 150 years ago and still seem so right as a current description. It is even more surprising that Tocquevilles study of a people principally rural, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon (and enslaved African American) could have anything to say to or about the urban, industrial, multicultural nation that hundreds of millions restlessly inhabit today.

If observations rendered in the first half of the 19th century are still applicable to the United States of the [early 21st century], it is reasonable to assume that there exists an enduring "core" nature of American society. But to understand it, one has to distinguish Americas sense of nationhood from that of traditional societies, which draw their identity from bonds of faith, ethnicity, and memory. To speak of an American identity requires that we reexamine what it is that holds a national community together and what it is that constitutes a national culture.

Being fully American, as the United States defines its citizens, does not presuppose an ancestral linkage to the nation or to its predominant ethnic cultures or religious traditions. Americans, as individuals, participate in a multitude of historic cultures, but what they share with one another is something quite different. At the heart of their nationhood is an enduring social contract and the energetic process it sets in motion. It is the task of this essay to capture the sense of that contract and the evolution of that process.

Choice and Responsibility

Membership in the national community demands only the decision to become American, a political decision that contains within it a moral dimension as well. All Americans, including the native born, are assumed to be Americans by choice, not merely by historical legacy. A passion for "choice" may, in fact, be the central thrust and value of the society. It is the active mode of freedom and assumes not only an absence of political or economic restraint, but an opportunity to select from a rich menu of possibilities. At its most trivial, the culture indulges this value in the proliferation of an endless and often meaningless variety of consumer options.

At a deeper level there is, in the love of choice, a memory of the chance to escape the dead end of lives in ancestral cultures and to create in a New World the life one chooses to live. Many Americans repeat this pattern of migration, literally, by moving to the western states, or symbolically, in their professional or social lives, looking for new starts, for second chances. And while the tragic experience of Native Americans and African Americans has long mocked the national ethos of choice, they too have come to demand a right to shape their own destinies and to share in the possibilities assumed to be an American birthright.

America believes in self-creation and celebrates the "self-made man," and now "the self-made woman." At the heart of this faith is the conviction that inherited circumstances and forebears are far less important than the direction one chooses for oneself and the effort one invests in that choice. Americas heroes "come from nowhere" and "make it on their own." … Except for the stubborn and heretical barriers of race, to be discussed later, Americans assume of themselves and of others that their origins may enrich their lives but do not shape their destinies.

Though liberating as an assumption and an ideal, this concept of social and economic free will also places on the individual the burden of responsibility for his or her own fate. In a society that is in a perpetual state of becoming, there are no social or economic absolutes and no allowance for the inability to improve ones life, for whatever reason. When ambition is frustrated and prosperity denied, Americans see a perversion of the natural order of things.

Although a passion for choice is the engine of American individualism, it also provides a corrective to selfish behavior. From the vantage point of more traditional societies, Americans may seem to be a nation of atomized individuals in social free-fall; but, in fact, they have not eliminated a sense of social obligation. They have merely replaced its hereditary base.

Americans are joiners and volunteers and philanthropists. They embrace a series of obligations and responsibilities freely chosen, and thereby harness their individualism to social purpose. If Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans marvel at the lack of a sense of extended family, ancestral ties, and class allegiance in the United States, so do Americans marvel at what they see as the ungenerous reluctance of members of traditional cultures to embrace nonreligious or nonfamilial opportunities for volunteerism and to provide financial support for good causes.

Eclecticism As A Value

American society has married an ethic of choice to an endless variety of traditions, ideas, and opportunities. The mix of peoples and customs encountered in American daily life and the dramatic interruption most communities have experienced in their emigration from their homelands has led to a practice of sampling and borrowing and intermingling of styles, rituals, and, above all, foods. This eclecticism, which may seem messy to more historically unified cultures, becomes in America a value and a signpost of vitality. It is what gives national shape, ultimately, to much of the countrys art and literature. Americas artists, writers, and architects have taken as their prerogative picking and choosing among elements in foreign and domestic cultures and combining them into a new American whole.

The dynamic at the heart of Americas system of values, beliefs, and identity found its most lyrical early expression in the "inalienable rights" of all human beings, which the Declaration of Independence [in 1776] listed as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It was not happiness that the author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, claimed for his countrymen and all humanity, but its "pursuit." From the start, there has been very little utopianism in the American political mainstream, little sense of an ideal State or an ideal human condition to be constructed through social planning. It is, instead, the very condition of striving, of becoming, the experience of unfettered living, that excites the national imagination. The words that move Americans are revealing: "freedom," "mobility," "individualism," "opportunity," "energy," "pragmatism," "progress," "renewal," "competition." These are not dry, descriptive words; they speak to the American spirit.

Bill Clinton, in his successful 1992 presidential campaign, chose as his rallying cry one of the most evocative words in the American vocabulary: "change." Part of the attraction of change in American culture is rooted in the hope that every change will bring improvement. But the optimistic expectation that change represents progress ipso facto is far less important than a strong tendency to dislike and even to fear permanence in authority or policy. During the debate over the approval of the proposed Constitution, Thomas Jefferson warned that even permitting a president more than one four-year term, without guaranteed rotation, might lead to his becoming a virtual "officer for life." Jeffersons concern was based on the fundamental American assumption that sovereignty rests in the people and is only temporarily and conditionally bestowed on the officeholder.

Limits On Authority

The churning, antagonistic nature of the American process is meant to provide a guarantee against entrenchment. No party or individual can be trusted with authority for too long a period. People are corruptible; policies grow stale. When one party occupies the White House too long, a restlessness rises in the electorate. No one set of ideas or leaders will hold their allegiance over time. It is the dynamic of the system itself that brings Americans what they need and trust: a balancing of forces, a monitoring of truth through challenge and exposure, a reminder of the conceits and danger of power, of the benefits of change and growth and experimentation, and, not least, of the charm of starting afresh.

Paradoxically, then, America achieves its continuity through an insistence on change, and its stability through the incorporation of conflict. This is not simply the habit of a raucous electoral tradition, but a strategy built into the very framework of government. The historian Michael Kammen has described the system set in motion in 1789 by the framers of the Constitution as one of "conflict within consensus." As another historian, Marcus Cunliffe, puts it: "They built friction into the document, intentionally, as a safeguard against corruption and dictatorship."

This is certainly not a formula for efficiency. While American technology and management celebrate the ideal of efficiency, the nation as a political culture nurtures a profound distrust of long-term planning, of the concentration of power, of too-smooth national decision making. The constitutional government deliberately frustrates unified action through the separation of powers and a system of checks and balances. This political system can and does lead to conflict, frustration, and occasional gridlock in the absence of statesmanlike compromise or of the compatibility of political philosophy across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. But it also achieves a virtual guarantee against the usurpation of authority.

The political system promotes as well the balancing act of federal, state, and municipal authority, which leads to a strong reluctance at the national level to mandate policy in many areas. The United States has no one educational system, no ministry of culture, and, so far, no health system directly administered from Washington. Policy on these and other issues emerges principally through persuasion, coordination, coalition building, and negotiation across parties, constituencies, interest groups, and regions. A very strong role is played by the large private sector, which reflects the released energy of an open marketplace of ideas, programs, and resources; another significant actor is the suspicious press.

Equality Vs. Freedom

Despite the tradition of restrained government, many Americans over the past century have proposed a new view of the States role. If a society needs only to be released from the yoke of government to enjoy the benefits of freedom, then the task of political reform is complete when the worst tendencies of government are offset and social energies are released. But this assumes that the underlying political, social, and economic realities allow for equal participation in the full benefits of freedom, or, conversely, that only certain members of society qualify as active participants. Generations of American reformers have demanded that their society acknowledge those it has excluded and then use government as a guarantor of their freedom to share in the American promise. They have consistently been challenged by others, who fear the empowerment of government as an assault on freedom. In the end, the question for American democracy has been easy to pose but very difficult to answer: What is the relationship between equality and freedom?

By the standards of the 18th century, the new nation had radicalized the idea of political consent by vesting final authority in the people, all of whom, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, were "created equal." But actual participation in the new political community of the United States was constrained in ways modern Americans would find intolerable and even inconceivable.

The Civil War of the 1860s corrected the obscenity of slavery in a free society and was followed by the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which extended political rights to half the African-American population. The female half had to await the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which finally swept into the political community the largest group of disenfranchised Americans.

Political rights were further reinforced legislatively with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But even after several years of deliberate, targeted enforcement of basic political rights and the insistent demands of the civil rights movement, the most basic question of the nature of equality as a precondition of freedom remained unresolved in American culture (at mid-century). Fair and equal access to political rights, whenever finally resolved, would not itself guarantee for everyone full participation in the promise of American life. Any argument that this inequality of circumstance was due to "innate" limitations among the excluded communities and categories of Americans threatened the very idea of American individualism. The very idea that an individual could be boxed in by his or her fate, playing out narrow dramas of class, race and gender, was abhorrent. If it was a matter, instead, of artificial barriers set up by society, some argued—particularly racism, but also sexism and social and economic factors—then the question became, what is the responsibility of the nation?

Reformers have generally argued their case for intervention within the framework of the American dynamic. Government was introduced as an active player in the economic life of the nation during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century and then, in Franklin Delano Roosevelts New Deal Administration [in mid century], as itself a counterbalance to social and economic forces that threatened the fairness of the society. In the latter half of the 20th century, the social policy setting became even more activist in seeking to affect the terms on which Americans prepare, compete, and interact. More recently, social policy has reflected the fundamental question about the role of government: how best, and how much, to regulate economic and social arrangements in a society that prizes, indeed was founded on the principle of individual freedom and to celebrate individual intitiative, spark and autonomy.

When most Americans speak of equality, they mean equality of opportunity, not of outcome. From the first, Americans have rarely argued for or demonstrated a commitment to a society with equality of property or condition. Part of the American dream is the belief, the "value," that individuals, differing as they do in initiative, energy, and talent, should enjoy the disparate fruits of their effort. There are meant to be no guarantees of equal results. Most Americans do not want a level society; they do, however, want a level playing field.

Or do they? It is a perpetual dilemma in American life that generalizations about the goals, values, and circumstances of the society break down when confronted by the stubborn heritage of a racial divide. But it is also true that Americans have long used acrimonious self-criticism, passionate rhetoric, and the clash of social forces to propel themselves forward. The jeremiads warning of the decline of individual communities or of the nation as a whole date back to the era of the Puritans, serving then, as in every succeeding era, as an incentive to change and action and as a measure of American impatience and stubborn expectations.

What is demanded by the mainstream activism of the late 20th [and early 21st] century is a fulfillment of the logic of American democracy. The question is not only political and economic, but cultural as well. Even if the expressed values of the society defined being American as participating in a social contract rather than a particular heritage, the assumption persisted that the true, the essential, American came of a certain racial and cultural background (Anglo-Saxon, later broadened to European), faith (Protestant, broadened, after years of hostility, to include Catholic and, even more reluctantly, Jewish), and, for purposes of political and economic status, gender (male). The early 20th-century idea of the melting pot asserted, at least for certain communities, that they did not have to be born to a particular heritage but were expected to become American culturally no less than politically-to lose, in effect, their marks of difference from the majority of Americans.

The argument for the recognition of the diversity of cultures and backgrounds as being fundamental, not only to American reality but to American ideals, has forced the society to debate anew the implications of its unusual notion of national community as process and interaction. From the 1960s, advocates of diversity have vied to create an apt metaphor for American society that would include rather than exclude or melt down. Each generation of Americans has pushed the notion of the American blend of opinions, peoples, faiths, cultures, and, most recently, languages to the point where many have feared that the center would no longer hold. So far the record of national cohesion gives hope for the future, but that future is far from being universally understood as guaranteed in the face of concerns among some members of the majority communities that the national fabric is unraveling and among some members of minority communities that they will never be genuinely welcomed into the American mix.

Testing Of Values

In other respects as well, the current [debate about] American values represents not their repudiation but a testing of their application to widened circumstances. The growth of an American womens movement is a reminder that biology was assumed to exempt half of all Americans from political and then professional and economic inclusion in the dynamic of national life. The barrier of gender has not yet completely fallen, but it is under continuous attack. Also caught up in the continuing revolution in American expectations are fundamental social constructs like that of the family, which are continually susceptible to the ethic of choice and self-realization. As early as the 19th century, Americans transformed marriage traditions to allow the free choice of partners. This notion expanded over time to include the right to choose to live together "without benefit of clergy" or to marry and then divorce, and increasingly, even to a debate concerning the definition of what constitutes a family within or outside of legal frameworks. Increasingly, relations between children and parents and between younger and older generations test the boundaries of authority and consent to an extent unimaginable in earlier eras.

These are current American tendencies, but they are also, to a somewhat lesser extent, tendencies of all industrial democratic cultures. Americans must begin to wonder how much the culture that once defined them as unique has become, in at least some of its aspects, the culture of global modernism. It has been a shock to see (several Asian countries) hailed as the nations of the 21st century because of their technological and industrial advancement; to see West Europeans identified with the notion of a grand union of states and a dynamic commonwealth; and to see the emerging, if tortured, democracies of Central and Eastern Europe become identified with the aspirations of an excited electorate.

But for all that, Americans can see the advantage they have in their long history of political openness and change, tolerance of conflict, entrepreneurial energy, and cultural mix. Their flexible history can serve as a formula for stability during the ongoing shocks of global modernism, confirming rather than undermining national traditions.

About the Author:

Marc Pachter is director of the Smithsonian Institutions National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Previously deputy assistant secretary for external affairs for the Smithsonian, Pachter has written and edited several books and been involved in numerous radio and television programs about U.S. cultural and historical issues. This article is reprinted and abridged from Identities in North America, The Search for Community, edited by Robert L. Earle and John D. Wirth. Copyright © 1995 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press,www.sup.org.

Additional Readings:

The United States in 2005: Who We Are Today. An Electronic Journal of the U.S. Department of State, December 2004