In the WSJ, Walter Russel Mead, discusses the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the argument among Americans, about who are the real Americans and what it takes to be one. Mead, who refers to himself as a “Global View columnist, participated in two events where American identity was at the center of the discussions.
#1: a conversation with Prof. Robert P. George at an event sponsored by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
#2: a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival with Monticello’s president, Jane Kamensky, and David French of the NYT, moderated by NPR’s Jenn White.
According to Mr. Mead, he pushed back at each event against assertions that America is best understood as a “creedal nation” and “that the Declaration is the definitive statement of the American creed.” As weighty and world altering as the Declaration was, it is a document that is more complicated than being only a set of ideas, writes Mead.
Mr. Mead, who grew up in the Carolinas, never thought of an American identity or anybody else’s as creedal, nor, he continues, did he meet anybody who thought that way.
We were Americans not because we believed a set of ideas. We felt American the way Turks feel Turkish and the French feel French.
A popular phrase today is “heritage American” identity. Even in his childhood, Mead understood there was no single American race or ethnicity. The 1950s American South was no person’s idea of a global melting pot, but “black people had been around as long as whites and were as American as anybody else.” Somewhere north of Richmond, recalls Mead, were people called Yankees …
… very unlike us God-fearing and patriotic Southerners, but Americans all the same.
Ricky Ricardo on “I Love Lucy” had an accent, but Ricky and Lucy were as American as Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. My American homeland was a complicated place with a lot of different kinds of people in it.
Supporters of the creedal nation theory came at Mr. Mead during the two afore-mentioned events brandishing copies of the Declaration. Mead acknowledges respecting their sentiments but maintaining his dissent.
The Declaration isn’t a set of propositions in political science issued by an academic committee. It was issued “in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies.”
“When in the Course of human events,” the Declaration reads, “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . .” The existence of an American people was as self-evident to the Founders as the principles the Declaration enumerates. When it came time to write the Constitution, it was “We the People” who established it.
Tribes
America have always been a tribe of tribes, writes Mead.
American and Jewish identity follow similar paths. Judaism has its creeds and values, but the Jewish people are anything but a consensus-minded group of true believers.
Homogeneity has never been the point. Arguing over the meaning of Jewish identity is a characteristic element of Jewish culture. Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism, was an atheist who once proposed a mass conversion of Austrian Jews to Catholicism. But Herzl was a Jew all the same.
The Point of the Civil War
To Mead’s thinking, American identity works along the same lines. Some Americans embrace the credal theory and others embrace cultural theory. Many Americans embrace our country’s complexity and diversity. Others rather not.
The whole point of the Civil War was that even after attempting to establish a rival nation based on the negation of the promise of equality in the Declaration, Jefferson Davis remained an American, like it or not.
The Founders expressed the aspirations of the American people in imperishable language, Mead reminds WSJ readers.
E pluribus unum: We are one people with many roots. Long may we squabble over the meaning of America; the freedom to differ helps define who we are.
