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Chapter I

The Rhetorical Construction

of a National Identity in the United States

Is there an American identity? This is obviously an intricate question. First of all, the terms are far from unequivocal. In this context, the adjective ‘American’ is meant to signify ‘of or relating to the United States’ and not to the American continent at large. However, a quick look at the title of the books quoted in this section speaks volumes about the frequency with which this metonymic substitution occurs. Needless to say, the identification of the whole continent with the cultural and social features commonly associated with the United States represents a hardly innocent mechanism. Quite the contrary, it betrays a hegemonic ideology of domination much in keeping with certain North American–even the term ‘North American,’ though more specific, may be rather problematic–imperialistic attitudes that will be discussed below.

The question of what a nation is seems itself controversial to say the least. In the Introduction to his edited volume Nation and Narration, postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha defines ‘nation’ as a construction, the conglomerate of myriad narratives regarding space, race, political affiliation, or justice, among other features (1990). Bhabha acknowledges his debt to Benedict Anderson and his coined concept of “imagined communities.” In Imagined Communities (1983), Anderson characterizes the nation as an imagined political community with sovereignty and finite, clearly-established boundaries. In other words, in the mind of the members of any given nation there exists an image of communion, regardless of the fact that they will never be in direct contact with the vast majority of their fellow citizens. Indeed, no amount of actual exploitation or inequality within that community erases the sense of horizontal comradeship projected by the nation.

Due to historical and geographical factors, the process of formation of the imagined community has been particularly conflictive in the United States. As part of its relentless progress, the country has been constantly metamorphosing. From an initial lack of unity and national feeling, a series of common interests would eventually foster a desire to make the original thirteen colonies strike as one, to adopt John Adams’ famous metaphor. But after the foundation of the United States, there still remained a long and conflicting journey toward the current fifty-state, multicultural nation. A process of unification that has rivaled the territorial annexation of the areas that compose modern US is the (ongoing) process of inclusion of its inhabitants.

Interestingly, Bhabha and Anderson’s approaches discard any determinism in the process of national constitution. Essentially, the nation is an abstraction, groups of people who do not know each other acting “as if they share a common substance,” as rhetoric and public culture professors Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites remark (2007: 99). But the result of this fiction is not innocuous: as Alys Eve Weinbaum reviews, according to some critical schools of thought, the nation “cohere[s] through ideological pressures that masquerade as ‘natural’ but are in fact self-interested, self-consolidating, and ultimately driven by capitalist and imperialist attitudes” (2007: 166). That nations are hardly essential entities is even more explicit when attending to the fact that a nation can be constructed retrospectively, as Garry Wills shows in his interpretation of Abraham Lincoln as the father of the narrative of July 4, 1776–instead of the passing of the Constitution–as founding moment (Wald 1995: 47). Likewise, such an anti-essentialist view would picture the inherited notions of America and the United States as the product of historical struggles won by some and lost by others.

Some considerations should be addressed to the qualified noun in the phrase ‘American identity,’ since ‘identity’ is not an easily definable term either. It appears commonly used as roughly a synonym for ‘character,’ and thus one may speak about the ‘national character’ of a particular population. For the sake of simplicity, this is mainly the usage it will receive in my work. Any modern notion of identity has necessarily to attend to the postmodern conception of the decentered and fragmented individual. In this context, Carla Kaplan understands identity as a construction, a performance, an “unending linguistic process of becoming” (2007: 125; emphasis in the original). This research project will show that ‘US identity’ is likewise a complex process integrated by different competing forces rather than a fixed essence. In accordance with this approach to the question of identity, I agree with Priscilla Wald’s useful description of national cultural identity as the “shared symbolic systems defined in relation to national frontiers–and in the terms of personhood articulated through narratives of that identity” (1995: 307).

In fact, in the context of the United States, its people and its history, it arguably makes more sense to talk about several ‘national identities’ that are performed instead of one single ‘national identity’ that is acquired and transmitted. At any rate, the realization that identity is not a natural given does not obscure the fact that people still present “a desire for identity” (Kaplan, C. 2007: 126; emphasis in the original). Indeed, this chapter will account for that urge in the inhabitants of the United States. As a matter of fact, the search for a national identity has been considered one of the features of the US character, regardless of the extent to which such identity may be different from others. It is the quest, even the recurrent obsession of thinkers and artists in the United States to define Americanness, which allegedly differentiates American culture from others.

This chapter does not aim to provide a detailed account of the history and society of the nation. Rather, it offers a series of images of America that have forged a narrative crucial to an understanding of US culture. Such images, transformed into symbols and myths, have been a recurrent source of national pride and anxiety, both fictional and real (but usually unattainable) ideals to live up to. Walter P. Metzger warns his colleagues about the risk, when writing about national character, of either relying too much on generalizations and topics, or dealing “with cultural facts and character traits as though they were freely interchangeable” (1968: 152). I will try to follow his advice. However, what really interests me is that, even though Metzger highlights the difficulties of the process, he does not deny the usefulness of defining national character. As the main body of my project will prove, Richard Ford’s narrative contributes to a tradition of fiction writers whose work is driven by the quest for American identity.

The main part of this chapter will be devoted to a review of the rhetorical creation of the American personhood as carried out by the hegemony, i.e., as white, male, native-born with Anglo-Saxon descent, and heterosexual.¹ There is a clear justification for this focus. Namely, that the protagonist of the novels analyzed in this book, Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, largely responds to this mainstream symbolization of Americanness. But this does not mean that alternative versions of being American will be excluded. On the contrary, they will be referred to in order to challenge and enrich the study of the American Adam as epitomized by Frank, just like their presence in Ford’s literary world enhances its complexity and provides new perspectives on ‘What is to be American?’

E Pluribus Unum

America has been seen, first and foremost, as an idea. Literary critic and historian Leslie A. Fiedler puts it nicely when he remembers that America has existed for centuries at the same time as “the dream of Europe and a fact of history” (1960: xxii), an idea that also structures postmodern thinker Jean Baudrillard’s 1986 study America. This conception echoes Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s formulation of the American identity as “a rhetorical (rather than a historical) issue,” as Sacvan Bercovitch summarizes it (1975: 132). Indeed, the United States is made up, a construction, and as such can be attacked through its symbols. The documents of the Revolutionary era–the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution–, the flag, the national anthem, and several public speeches are all that unite the citizens of the nation. The deconstruction (or destruction) of this kind of symbols, either linguistic or physical–as the 9/11 terrorists clearly understood–, exposes the importance and, at the same time, the thinness of America as an idea. It is little surprise that, for Priscilla Wald, the United States is a nation founded in language. In her elegant phrasing, “America was a story that needed telling” (1995: 106). And as any student of literature would realize, the plot depends on who the narrator is.

The hegemony in charge of the creation and spreading of the rhetorical construction of the United States can be roughly identified with the WASP elite,² a term that accounts for features of race (White), ethnicity or stock (Anglo-Saxon), and religion (Protestant). Apparently, an ‘M’ accounting for gender exclusivity in the acronym was not even necessary: ‘Male’ was understood. The WASP masternarrative is articulated around a number of myths, which, as Roland Barthes cautions, are a fiction aimed at “giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal” (1972: 142). These myths can be summed up as different incarnations of the Enlightened principles promoted by the Founding Fathers–those that have defined the United States as a nation: freedom, equality, property. Some of the myths derived from these principles are personal, individualized, such as the American Adam (no Eve in sight) or the pioneer (discovering and settling lands usually already populated), while others stem from the conjunction of the material reality of the land and a specific ideology, such as social and geographical mobility, freedom, and rugged individualism. Of course, these images do not emerge spontaneously but respond to various historical circumstances that have been used as the basis for American Exceptionalism. Although this is a controversial topic, even the most important names in a type of scholarship that has never had much prestige within American Studies acknowledge certain uniqueness in the American experience. Thus, Marxist scholar Michael Denning (1986) summarizes the main factors that, according to European Marxist philosophers, have signaled the exceptional nature of the United States: “The absence of feudalism, the free land of the frontier, the appearance of greater prosperity and mobility, the centrality of race and ethnicity, and the ideological power of ‘Americanism’” (361).

A number of problems, however, arise from the notion of American Exceptionalism. Not the most trivial is the realization that, as George Lipsitz asserts, every nation promotes one version or another of such Exceptionalism as part of its nation-building or nation-reinforcing process. National leaders invariably partake in “attributing a unique character and destiny to the national project as a way of making actions taken in their own self-interest seem predestined, necessary, and even inevitable” (2001: 17). The very notion of a sovereign state implies an unequivocal appeal to freedom, much as freedom has constantly been described as an attribute of the US character. Moreover, Lipsitz denounces that the notion of Exceptionalism has been followed by scholars such as Leo Marx as a dogma that presumes its existence instead of proving it (2001: 72). As a matter of fact, American Exceptionalism may be a source of anxiety for the nation and its population. The deeds of God’s chosen people cannot but fall short of expectations when confronted with the always complex contingencies of history. Even the greatest Americans understood this, which led, in Marcus’s phrasing, to the national drama represented by the betrayal of the American idea–a drama that has acted at the same time as the engine of American history (2006: 11). As Marcus aptly sums it up, the United States is so big that it demands its inhabitants to do big things (2000: 107).

Apart from purely historical circumstances, a wide range of elements contribute to the formation of a national identity and its cohesion and perpetuation through time: from the constitution of a national literary canon to the promotion of spelling and grammar texts that emphasize some linguistic idiosyncrasy of the peoples of the nation, to patriotic songs or the consecration of symbols such as the flag or the national anthem. These last elements, interestingly, give the people the opportunity to ‘perform’ citizenship. At this point, it may be useful to recover ‘performance’ as an important concept in cultural studies. Two theorists whose research has partially revolved around the exploration of performativity and its limits are Judith Butler and Homi K. Bhabha. Feminist scholar Judith Butler’s study on gender as performance, Gender Trouble (1990), convincingly argues that gender is not a biologically-derived but a socially-constructed category, recreated through iteration. Although Butler’s approach has been subsequently revised and contested by a number of critics–including Butler herself–for its failing to acknowledge the complexity of power relations inherent to any act of gender performance,³ Gender Trouble has remained particularly successful within the application of performativity to different areas of humanities and social sciences.⁴

On the other hand, the work of postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha becomes more relevant to an analysis of performance in the construction of national identities. In “Of Mimicry and Man” (1984), Bhabha makes use of ‘mimicry’ to explain the flawed colonial process of mimesis in which the colonized subject repeats the behavior of the colonizer, and in doing so, disrupts the authority of colonial discourse by–sometimes unintentionally–exposing its artificiality. Related concepts from Bhabha’s always complex interrogations of identity are the–equally valuable to this volume–notions of ‘hybridity’ and the ‘stereotype,’ which delve into the questioning of the dominant culture. Grosso modo, Bhabha describes ‘hybridity’ in a colonial context as the process through which “other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority” (1985: 156). In other words, Bhabha’s interest is drawn to the convergence of elements from antagonistic narratives–Western and Eastern, colonizer and colonized–and its destabilizing result: the terrorizing of authority “with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery” (1985: 157; emphasis in the original). Meanwhile, Bhabha’s approach to the stereotype highlights an ambivalent and contradictory phenomenon. Although the place of the Other is fixed and unchangeable in the dominant discourse, it must be compulsively repeated so as to ensure that it remains an easily identifiable element. Thus, Bhabha’s view of stereotypes can be linked to performance in that both work through repetition.

Taking into account the nature and scope of my work, I assert that there are valid reasons to apply the principles of performativity to the study of cultural or national identity.⁵ Gender, race, class, and nationality are all constructions that can be performed, while gender, racial, class, or nationality acts themselves constitute the identity they are meant to express. In fact, they are almost always interconnected categories, and I would argue that gender, racial, and class roles are a fundamental part of the construction of a national identity, as my project will show.

Among the many rhetorical constructs relevant to an understating of the United States reviewed in this chapter, one of the most celebrated individual myths is the (very obviously gendered) American Adam–a new personhood that allegedly responds to the reality of the New World. Eighteenth-century French-American author Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur offered one of the first and most extensive formulations of the new man, free from the past, bred in the American continent.⁶ By the invisible power “of the laws and that of their industry,” Americans “are melted into a new race” destined to “cause great changes in the world.” Crèvecoeur’s formulation of the American identity finds its particularities in the fact that his American Adam is free because he works hard–but for himself: “Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labor; his labor is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest” (1999: 188-89; emphasis in the original). US literature is largely responsible for, and offers valuable insight into, the construction of the American Adam. Although one is tempted to assume that literary authors of the United States might have tried to depict a new American personhood, Toni Morrison is more to the point as she is specific about what that personhood comprises: “For the most part, the literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man” (1992: 14-15; emphasis in the original). This restrictive conception of personhood explains why African-American activist Malcolm X identified in his country an American Nightmare instead of an American Dream (Campbell and Kean 1997: 89).

Just like the American Revolution is a product of the ideas of the Age of Reason, the consolidation of the American Adam myth takes place in the context of the eighteenth-century confidence in man. The Lockean principle of natural rights–life, liberty, and property–will be basically transplanted by Thomas Jefferson–an Enlightened American if ever there was one, Benjamin Franklin aside–into the selfevident truths stated in the Declaration of Independence. However, the supposedly egalitarian spirit of this narrative should not hide the fact that the American Revolution was integrated from top to bottom by, and it aimed to preserve the interests of, planters and merchants–even though the power of the Republic would emanate from the governed. The rights defended by the Declaration of Independence (especially ‘property’), however natural they may sound according to the Enlightened rhetoric, solely express the law of nations formulated by privileged individuals. Actually, as Priscilla Wald (1995) asserts, it is difficult to ignore “the interconnections of freedom, property, and self-ownership” that have ruled American liberal thought to the point of equating ‘being’ with ‘having’ in the articulation of US personhood (311).

One of the most compelling eulogies of the new man America was destined to breed is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar.” This essay becomes a celebration of everything new and fresh, of endless imagination, freedom from the past and communion with nature, and at the same time, a condemnation of old ideas and received, mediated knowledge. Emerson’s spirit will be evoked by Walt Whitman, one of many US poets inspired by Transcendentalist thought. In his poem “Song of Myself,” he advises, “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand …. nor look through the eyes of the dead …. nor feed on the spectres in books” (1986: 26). It is the ideal of the American Scholar that John Jay Chapman seems to have in mind in his description of the tension between independent thought and the pressure of the opinion of the collective, graphically described as the “familiar moral terrorism of any majority, even a majority of two persons against one” (Ricks and Vance 1992: 360). This assertion sounds, of course, like an instance of an American phenomenon widely criticized by other nineteenth-century artists and philosophers like Mark Twain or Henry David Thoreau: the mob–i.e., the group of people who lose their individuality when they act as a crowd.

As a prevention against the dehumanized mob, the rhetoric of the United States offers the figure of the American as the quintessential self-reliant citizen. In “The Conservation of Races,” African-American intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois defines an American as someone reared “under the individualistic philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and the laissez-faire philosophy of Adam Smith” (2006: 6). Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatly mythologized presidents of the nation, advocated that true Americans did not vow blind allegiance to one or the other political affiliation, but they stood with what was “RIGHT” (therefore linking Americanness with a superior moral quality) (Wald 1995: 51). That inherent rightness of the individual had been asserted in the previous decade by Henry David Thoreau, who praised the person as a moral agent: “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right” (1993: 281). Leslie Fiedler may be referring to this thought when he links the United States with the myth of “The Good Bad Boy” as epitomized by the likes of Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, or Sal Paradise/Jack Kerouac: a young white male “crude and unruly in his beginnings, but endowed by his creator with an instinctive sense of what is right” (1960: 268).⁷ Actually, this higher discerning quality allegedly found in the American may be linked with American pragmatism. More of a practice than a proper philosophy, pragmatism stems from the commonlaw way of thinking described by conservative historian Daniel Boorstin, and privileges the wisdom provided by individual cases over any strong theoretical principle. The basic tenets of such a procedure are, along with an enlightened public policy, reason and natural justice, qualities that apparently abounded in the North American subcontinent (Boorstin 1965: 41-42).

As with many of the aspects, myths and ideals discussed in this chapter, there have been two sides to individualism in the United States. Sociologist Nathan Glazer (1992) identifies, on the one hand, individualism as selfishness and eagerness for power; and on the other hand, as the self-reliance and independence from government control epitomized by the pioneer spirit (293). Among an array of American myths, Daniel Boorstin signals “the loner moving west across the land” as the most idiosyncratic (1965: 51). The indisputable power of this image discloses its origin. Individualism flourished in an ideal context: the Romantic ethos of the democratic period, as expressed by the authors related to the movement that pushed individualism to the extreme: Transcendentalism. Often considered the only philosophical movement ever created in the United States, Transcendentalism was unequivocally optimistic in its principles. Although more movement than philosophy for some critics, Transcendentalism and the ideas it promoted are reflected in the works of some of the most important literary authors of the United States. In the words of professor Lawrence Buell, it contributed, in the post-Puritan, post-pioneer, utilitarian US, to a better climate for literature and the arts, defending a non-dogmatic experimentalism in which proficiency in traditional forms of expression was not as important as artistic energy and innovation (2006: xviii).

Transcendentalism, which derives from Unitarianism, defended the innocence of the soul and the intrinsic perfectibility of the world–as long as there is a context of liberty. In the United States, this optimism reached its peak in the 1850s, a decade that witnessed the flourishing of a myriad of reforming movements and social causes like the emancipation of slaves or the women’s rights movement–especially in New England, where Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, or Margaret Fuller, among others, were born. In his Introduction to one of the novels that better captured the period, Henry James’ The Bostonians, R.D. Gooder proverbially describes Transcendentalism as “puritanism with the devil left out” (1984: xiv). Thoreau and Emerson insisted on the importance of self-regeneration rather than political action as the key to the improvement of society (Diggins 1992: 459). It is little wonder that one of the most-often quoted essays written by Transcendentalism’s key figure, Ralph Waldo Emerson, is titled “Self-Reliance”–an important feature of the American Way of Life. In this text, Emerson shows a non-conformist spirit akin to the one discernible in “The American Scholar.” As the title suggests, he praises “the great man... who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” (1951: 38). The self-reliant American, in a word, represents an attempt to escape the complacency of the community and a eulogy of self-sufficiency much in keeping with Transcendentalists’ radical individualism.

Paradoxical though it may seem, the nation has tended to emulate the allegedly individualistic character of its citizens. As a result, the United States is self-fashioned as a nation isolated from world politics.⁸ The Monroe Doctrine, established by Quincy Adams in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, stated that European powers could no longer interfere with the American continent. Interestingly, the US preserved through this policy its independence from European affairs while it ensured the rest of the American continent as its area of interest. ‘America for the Americans’ was the motto that epitomized this position. This doctrine and its consequences have been criticized as a thinly disguised imperialistic attitude.⁹ Although imperialism may apparently be against the origins and principles of the foundation of the United States, Alys Eve Weinbaum argues that “nation-building and imperialism ought to be seen as closely and historically allied” since both are focused on a “continuing reorganization of space, bodies and identities” (2007: 165). Imperialistic tendencies give rise to a problematic “complicity between the good life at home and criminal behavior elsewhere in the world” (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 193). Similarly, George Lipsitz denounces that Western world consumers–with US citizens at the head–enjoy lower prices because of the exploitation of workers in El Salvador, China or Bangladesh (2001: 13).

The logical next step in the Monroe Doctrine would be the notion of American Manifest Destiny, a blending of ideas present in the continent’s imagery since the pilgrims’ period and first articulated by John L. O’Sullivan, founding editor of Democratic Review (Boorstin 1965: 273). In a combination of American Exceptionalism and the natural right to freedom, it was established that America’s destiny–decided by God–was to expand westward. This rhetorical construction echoes Puritan minister John Winthrop’s famous formulation of the original pilgrim community as “a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people... upon us” (1999: 26). A narrative alluded to by virtually every president of the United States, American Manifest Destiny found in Abraham Lincoln one of its greatest promoters: ‘Honest Abe’ acknowledged the special role of America as “the last best, hope of earth” (quoted in Carroll and Noble 1984: 222). The prophetic nature of America as a New Jerusalem was highlighted by the New England clergy and implies, in Bercovitch’s explanation, that “to be an American is to assume a prophetic identity; to have been an American is to offer a completed action that makes destiny manifest” (1975: 99, 121).

Of course, the belief in US’s self-improvement that guided the nation throughout the nineteenth century was not completely free from stains. Slavery was likely the most difficult to ignore. A seed of moral uneasiness for the country, slavery was then opposed by an increasingly large number of abolitionist associations. Moreover, the ‘peculiar institution’ represents the most salient example of the United States as a racialized nation. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986) argue that “US society is racially structured from top to bottom” (54)–an interpretation that uncovers racism as a key social mechanism aimed at maintaining the status quo (Lipsitz 2001: 78). Black people, objects of institutionalized racism in the United States, are the most obvious example of a racialized group, but not the only one. Thus, the social construction of the Indian from the time of the first New England settlers deemed Natives as evil within the specific context of economic growth and competition over land (Takaki 1993: 39). Similarly, Asian Americans were commonly considered an unassimilable ethnic group and labeled as “forever foreign” (Weinbaum 2007: 169). With these circumstances in mind, a question ensues: who is included in and excluded from the Constitution’s ‘We the People’?

As Carroll and Noble agree, “the Constitution institutionalized the political power of the white male establishment” (1984: 129). The birth of the United States as a nation ignored the status of Native Americans, Africans and their descendants, women, and subsequently, Asian Americans or Latinos/as. For instance, legal decisions like the 1854 People v. Hall case are used by Ethnic Studies professor Ronald Takaki to prove that blacks, Natives, and Chinese people shared a common marginalized racial status in the United States (1993: 206).¹⁰ Long before the large wave of late-nineteenth-century immigration from Europe, New England towns represented a prime example of exclusionary sites in America. Preaching freedom and freedom of speech was not always an easy task during the seventeenth century, as Salem pastor Roger Williams realized after being expelled to Rhode Island–a destiny shared by religious leader and advocate of Antinomianism Anne Hutchinson, who dared to question Puritans’ tendency to decide what was good and what was evil.

It is no wonder that New England communities are described by urban historian Carl Abbott as “closed corporations, freely governed by their ‘members’ but unwelcoming to outsiders” (1992: 118). This is the spirit that made possible the infamous Salem trials, which epitomized a typically American battle between freedom and fear (particularly, fear of difference). In fact, Williams and Hutchinson (like those representatives of an alternative Americanness who will be commented on below) offer a version of freedom with a notable tradition in the United States: freedom as dissent. In this same vein, the tradition of the Puritan Jeremiad implies a denunciation of social maladies. The spirit of the Revolution is indebted to this tradition. In fact, this revolutionary character may be seen as the source of the violent American experience described by social and literary commentators. Thus, according to D. H. Lawrence, the American spirit tends to rebel and fight, and in his analysis of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, he detects an idiosyncratic notion of democracy that implies violence (1951: 63). Another literary critic and historian, Leslie Fiedler, offers a similar assessment. To him, terror and violence, whose location gradually transferred from nature to society, characteristically belong to the literature of the United States. Quoting the words of author Nathaniel West, he admonishes readers that “in America violence is idiomatic, in America violence is daily” (1960: 463).

Suburban life may be the latest incarnation of the US unwelcoming spirit, a place where, journalist Bill Geist amusingly warns, “if you’re walking in your residential neighborhood and not wearing a Walkman and a jogging suit, you’re subject to suspicion. People call the cops” (2003: 154). For commentators like philosopher Horace Kallen, the exclusionary rhetoric of the hegemony in the US is radically anti-American as it ignores the democratic principles the nation is allegedly built upon. Focusing on immigrants, Kallen goes to the extent of maintaining that their presence did not transform the United States; rather, it was the nation that changed its principles so that immigrants could no longer be linked to the American Way of Life (Wald 1995: 243-44). In dealing with immigrants, this exclusionary narrative draws attention to a (constructed) common past of ‘the People’ as white in order to reinforce an exclusive national identity. The access to that common past is banned either to immigrants and non-WASP groups in general. A clear example of how that exclusionary discourse works comes from the mid-nineteenth century, when Judge Roger B. Taney resorted to Manifest Destiny rhetoric in order to assign Indian Removal a character of inevitability (Wald 1995: 43).

The exclusionary narrative within the land of the free–summarized by Lauren Berlant (1993) as “the continued and linked virulence of racism, misogyny, heterosexism, economic privilege, and politics in America” (549)–may well be the most salient of several contradictory features and competing forces in the history of the United States. I have stated above that US hegemonic forces have universalized the self by providing it with the features of the dominant class–namely, the WASP culture. This illusion of a universal national identity has been challenged by scholars and artists who belong to marginalized minority groups, such as Gloria Anzaldúa or Audre Lorde. They represent different instances of a pluralistic and multicultural view of a country of new subjectivities, speaking from marginal positions and giving voice to difference and otherness. Anzaldúa is the founder of Border Theory, which focuses on the marginal person living in between different worlds: “As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out.... As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me.... I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos” (2007: 102-03). Both Anzaldúa and Lorde transcend the classic opposition ‘male vs. female’ in their understanding that an analysis of social relations of power cannot ignore categories like class or sexuality.

These scholars of an alternative Americanness try to subvert the ideological construction of the Other–from black slaves to Chicanos/as to Muslim culture–as a threat to the ‘civilization’ symbolized by the United States. Other foci of resistance would range from First Lady-to-be Abigail Adams’ modest attempts to convince her husband that the logic of Revolutionary rhetoric should also apply to women, to the political activism of W. E. B. Du Bois, who converted slaves into the ‘real’ Americans, while masters acted as the un-American who put national principles (particularly, freedom) at risk (Wald 1995: 17, 89). Abraham Lincoln’s view would be similar to that of Du Bois: an understanding of the narrative of the birth of the United States as an evolution from subjugation to liberty logically implies that slavery represents an un-American institution (Wald 1995: 50). Even some racist mores worked unintentionally toward this positive description of non-WASP groups. For example, those who considered the black population to be a tabula rasa over which whites could impose values and norms, were inadvertently evoking the symbol of America as an unwritten Paradise assigned a meaning by the pilgrims. Consequently, they were identifying blacks with America itself.

The contradictions in the construction of a national identity in the United States are many and varied. D. H. Lawrence reminds readers that the same Benjamin Franklin who sprinkled his texts with moral lessons acted immorally toward Native Americans (1951: 24-25). Thomas Jefferson, a key figure in the Age of Reason and the man who drew up the nation’s most highly rewarded document, the Declaration of Independence, asked for the extermination of Natives–unless they were “civilized” first, Ronald Takaki specifies (1993: 47)–and died in Monticello in the company of his slaves. The members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association crusaded for white supremacy (Carroll and Noble 1984: 295), while male black activists repeatedly ignored the rights of women when their sole aim was to ensure the acknowledgment of their rights as African Americans.

Regarding contradictions, Toni Morrison convincingly argues that freedom is highlighted, if not created, by slavery. As a result, it is through the Other (defined by her as ‘Africanism’) that the American self knows itself as free, desirable, powerful, historical, innocent, progressive–in a word, what the Other is not (1992: 52). This example of the process of racialization in nation-formation reveals the “historical reciprocity” between nationalism and racism commented upon by French philosopher Étienne Balibar (quoted in Weinbaum 2007: 168). With this in mind, it is easier to understand that US citizenship has been selectively granted. Apart from being a racialized term, citizenship has to be studied in relation to social categories like gender, sexuality, and class (not to mention a ‘natural right’ as property). Hence, Jefferson required of the members of the Cherokee nation that they modified their understanding of social organization and connection with the environment in order to become individual landowners. In the family units presented as the precondition to achieve citizenship, farming would be the men’s role while the women engaged in domestic labor (Wald 1995: 25). Accordingly, US citizenship depends on notions of race and class, but also of gender and sexuality, which fits Hariman and Lucaites’ description of a “heteronormative citizenship” (2007: 77), exposing at the same time the nation’s system of compulsory heterosexuality.

How has mainstream US responded to the alternative visions of the ideal American? In a nation markedly multicultural but with little cultural exchange, an assimilationist project has been the recurrent answer. The myth of America as a melting pot–a concept named after Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot–represents this urge to transform cultural diversity into a homogeneous society. The origin of the myth can be traced back to the first Dutch and Swedish settlements by the Hudson River bank, and it achieves full significance with the relentless immigration that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, the first transoceanic voyage of the Pilgrims may be the prototype of the melting-pot tradition: a community changing their individuality, making themselves American and adopting a new identity around 150 years before the nation was legally conceived (Wald 1995: 249).

Assimilation has been theorized by several US presidents. According to Woodrow Wilson’s essentialist position, the ideals embodied by the nation precede the nation itself, and therefore, its inhabitants. Consequently, the principles that rule life in the United States, more important than any racial or ethnic difference, transform and absorb the new arrivals into a new individuality, a new personhood (Wald 1995: 200). Amalgamation becomes a requirement rather than an option in the rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt. The ontological binary opposition he articulates forces one to either become American (i.e., embrace the WASP tradition) or face being “nothing at all” (quoted in Wald 1995: 204). However strong the melting-pot ideology was, an unprecedented arrival of immigrants, along with a constant presence of African Americans or Native Americans, inevitably threatened to render impossible the articulation of a homogeneous national identity. Accordingly, processes of social control needed to be implemented in order to fight a multicultural reality.

For instance, the concept of the traditional family, characterized by strict gender roles and reproduction, is crucial to the process of assimilation. One need only remember Jefferson’s requirements for the admission of Native Americans as US citizens: they primarily had to observe the nation’s heteronormative hierarchy. So in many respects Americanization begins at home. Ronald Takaki defends that in such a process, consumption plays a key role (1993: 300)–it is no wonder then, that in the US citizenship and ownership come hand in hand.¹¹ Immigrants have faced legal self-creation from the implementation of the Naturalization Act of 1906 onward, with the change of their name as the ultimate proof of the performative power of language. Self-definition in the new country is granted through a series of legal procedures and requirements (Wald 1995: 248). Interestingly, this process of self-fashioning was not unique to immigrants. As Boorstin (1965) recalls, members of the transient communities moving westward were given new names on the spot, depending on a range of details–from physical to personality features. This process reinforced the idea of Americans as a people “cut off from their family past, whose very nomenclature was of their own making” (91).

All in all, despite the existence of moral blots such as slavery and the systematic exclusion of non-WASP population–circumstances that stained many a conscience and cast an ominous shadow over the virtue of the whole nation–the United States never ceased to be considered a land of optimism. In some sense, the exultant ideal of the American Scholar goes back to the Puritan tradition characterized by Sacvan Bercovitch as exalting “will above intellect, experience above theory, precept, and tradition” (1975: 21). Bercovitch defines the spirit of Emerson’s thought as hopeful and full of optimism (1975: 178-80), an attitude that will come to be identified with the nation at large. Fiedler describes America as a land in which optimism has gradually replaced orthodox Puritanism as the people’s chief effective religion (1960: xxii). Inasmuch as “tragedy is a luxury of aristocratic societies”–in film critic Robert Warshow’s argument–“America... is committed to a cheerful view of life” where happiness “becomes the chief political issue” (Ricks and Vance 1992: 259).

One of the proponents of this optimistic life stance seems to be Walt Whitman’s poetic persona, who remarks in the prose introduction to Leaves of Grass that “the eternal tendencies of all toward happiness” should be the sole interest of any “sane philosophy” (1986: 15). As Carroll and Noble (1984) point out, confidence in the possibilities of the New World stems from the time of the Founding Fathers. To them, in contrast with the corruption of the Old World, “the American child enjoyed unprecedented opportunities in the cradle of liberty” (145). But, is it possible to endorse such a description of a place where, as historian Howard Zinn’s data about 1990s US show, “1 percent of the population owned 33 percent of the wealth, with an underclass of 30 to 40 million people living in poverty”? (1995: 600).

Even in the face of stubborn facts, the myth of a place that supposedly offered a promise of eternal regeneration has persisted. This confidence in the possibilities of the United States was exploited by one of its first novelists, James Fenimore Cooper, who resorted to reductionist contrapositions between Europe and America in his Leatherstocking series: corruption vs. innocence, sophistication vs. naiveté, or aesthetics vs. morality (Fiedler 1960: 185-86). Significantly, President Woodrow Wilson described the United States as “the only idealistic Nation in the world” (Ricks and Vance 1992: 249). This idealism gave rise to a large number of reform movements in New England public life. Since they maintained that evil exists only in the community, Transcendentalists considered that society could (and must) be perfected.¹² Martin Luther King, member of a racialized group, understood that the destiny of the country was the same for all its inhabitants when he declared that “abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny” (1996: 749), and such a destiny was freedom. As de Tocqueville described it, “Americans in fact do regard their freedom as the best tool of and the firmest guarantee for their prosperity” (1969: 541)–even if one is constantly excluded from the nation. And there may not be a better indicator of freedom than movement.

Don’t Tread on Us: Movement, Autonomy and Hierarchies

Movement has traditionally been seen as a signature feature of the American experience and an important source of optimism for its symbolization of freedom. In Daniel Boorstin’s phrasing, the new “homo Americanus [is] more easily identified by his mobility than by his habitat” (1965: 49). For him, freedom was what caused Americans’ constant movement, identified as a great equalizer that contributed to a blurring of both space and class stratification (1965: 95, 107). The most famous–and idealized–movement of population in the United States has been the relentless process of settling the Western territories of the subcontinent, reaching from the original New England colonies to the Pacific coast. The Lousiana Purchase in 1803 remains the sole historical event that has more decisively contributed to the myth of American boundlessness, opening exciting possibilities in terms of mobility. Closely related to the concept of American Exceptionalism, the narrative of expansion in its several instances has scarcely ever lost its significance–from the actual movement of appropriation of territories unexplored by the white population, completed in the nineteenth century, to the space race that confronted US with the USSR during the Cold War era, along with imperialistic expansion overseas. This spirit was both reflected in and constructed by the literary canon of the United States. According to Fiedler, the prototypical main character in American fiction is a “man on the run” who goes to any length in order to flee from civilization–understood as the meeting of a man and a woman and its inexorable consequences: sex, marriage, and adult responsibility (1960: xxxxi). A strongly gendered myth of Adamic innocence, this escape usually depicts the protagonist accompanied by a non-white man searching for an earthly paradise that represents their personal West (1960: 350).

There is some unknown force that puts the American Adam on the move. From the Pilgrim Fathers, who followed “IT”–identified by Lawrence as no less than “the deepest whole self of man” (1951: 17; emphasis in the original)–to Jack Kerouac and his bum-friends living On the Road. However, a deglamorizing socio-historical explanation for American mobility can be bluntly provided: with important extensions of land unsettled by people of European descent, Americans moved because they could, because there was enough land for them to do so. Hence, geographical circumstances have affected and molded the cultural spirit of the United States. In the national discourse emblematized by the search for “IT,” Pilgrims and Beatniks represent both ends of a long spectrum of Americans on the move, including characters of the mythical status of Melville’s Ishmael and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. In Bill Geist’s tongue-in-cheek summary, “as Americans, we want it, we want it now, and we don’t want to get out of our cars to get it” (2003: 155). Geist hints at competitiveness as one of the causes and consequences of movement, as in what Daniel Boorstin calls “the priority principle” (1965: 78; emphasis in the original). Popularized by the dictum ‘First come, first served,’ it is a philosophy of life that, Boorstin argues, works as an equalizer: your past makes no difference, you only need to get there first in order to benefit (1965: 112).

The best modern symbol of the above mentioned mobility is, of course, the car, linked by Geist to notions of movement and technology in an exaltation of progress as a value of the United States: “Cars are our freedom machines. We can go anywhere, anytime–and do, even when we really have no particular place to go. We feel good on the go. Free. Cars make everything convenient. Our entire country is built around them, from interstates to drive-through windows. We’re safe in our cars. We’re anonymous” (2003: 151).¹³ A piece of dialogue from Kerouac’s On the Road nicely summarizes this spirit: “‘Where we going man?’ ‘I don’t know but we gotta go’” (2007: 336).

Jackson Turner, the great historian of the frontier, or more specifically, of the end of it, considered it to be “the country’s most crucial force,” a source of energy, individualism, democracy, and perennial birth (Takaki 1993: 225-26). Obviously, national expansion becomes a source of anxiety too: while it aims to signify a celebration of the democratic principle, it somehow reproduces the very same act that the founders of the nation rebelled against: the colonial expansion of the British Empire (Wald 1995: 116). Furthermore, pioneers faced the dilemma of either staying home safe or trying their luck going west. At the same time, inland migration led the way to a rough version of land speculation as the price of the land rose in the new settlements. British academic James Bryce regarded speculation (from the purchase and sale of produce futures such as cotton or wheat, to land speculation) as part of “the national fibre,” a proof of the toll that Wall Street had taken on the people of the United States (Ricks and Vance 1992: 356-58). This phenomenon epitomizes the change from a society whose members ideally worked and changed nature so as to construct their own goods into a society where the most successful citizens earn their bread by exchanging products created by others.

With no more empty land available,¹⁴ the pioneer had to reinvent himself and turn to material substitutes. Gender scholar Michael S. Kimmel (2006) laments that the unmitigated accumulation of wealth has replaced a sense of adventure as the principal source of male accomplishment and fulfillment (186). On the other hand, Carroll and Noble (1984) link the closure of the frontier from the 1890s onward with a progressive fear of stagnation and death (244). This new feeling contrasts with the process of renewal previously represented by movement, which supports my initial notion of cultural identity as a process, a “becoming” rather than a “being” (Campbell and Kean 1997: 34). With the closure of the frontier, the myth of the West has been replicated in ‘tamer’ ways, from Hollywood movies to thematic parks, which try to offer a safer version of ‘the real thing’ (Campbell and Kean 1997: 126-27).

Not only have the experiences of the frontier people been idealized in both fictional and allegedly documentary accounts, but the kind of space encountered by those moving westward has been accordingly mythologized. Thus, Fiedler acknowledges that the nation is “sustained by a sentimental and Romantic dream” of escape into nature and “a renewal of youth” (1960: xxxiii). This sentimentalization was part of the project carried out by the literary nationalists known as the Young Americans. They aimed to turn the American landscape into a national symbol (Wald 1995: 111), so that the West would become embedded into the nation-building project. But more precisely, it is not the land itself as an element of geography that is deemed important, but the process of symbolization of the land and the relentless expansion westward according to some principles that have come to define the American spirit, such as liberty or equality (Wald 1995: 111). Much as this rhetorical construction aims to conceal it, this was not a peaceful process. In the frontier, the law of the gun ruled, to the point that Woodrow Wilson would acknowledge violence as part of “the spirit of American conquest” (quoted in Wald 1995: 255).

The process of conferring meaning to the land reaches its height with the work of Emerson (Wald 1995: 112), who equals the landscape with the redemptive history of America and interprets the self through nature (Bercovitch 1975: 158-61). On the other hand, nature has recurrently been opposed to urbanization in a battle of moral dimensions. A typical contraposition in the mythical construction of place in the US is based upon the conflicting descriptions of the city as either vicious or virtuous. Against Alexander Hamilton’s defense of industry and business, Thomas Jefferson argued that the United States would avoid corruption as long as agriculture remained the main occupation of its citizens, establishing an agrarian utopia (Carroll and Noble 1984: 128). The dichotomy between the vicious city and the virtuous country has been either perpetuated or challenged by artists and social commentators, from Whitman or Emerson to Woody Allen (Campbell and Kean 1997: 164-65; Abbott 1992: 117). Although Hamilton’s opposition to Jefferson and his defense of manufacturing and capitalism proved much more realistic, the ideal of a pastoral America has undoubtedly remained a powerful myth and has kept its place in the imagination of the United States, as cultural critics such as Leo Marx (1964) or Alan Trachtenberg (1979) have shown.

Regardless of the kind of space one analyzes, what remains obvious is the “centrality of the national landscape to the national imagination” and the importance of physical places in the evolution of US history, such as “the frontier, the farm, the factory, and the city,” all of them identified as sites of social struggle by George Lipsitz (2001: 4). In agreement with Jefferson’s emblematizing of progress through the very transformation of the American continent, Takaki (1993: 50), Carroll and Noble (1984: 135-36), and Boorstin (1965) remark that in the New World, the progress of the people is not observable through time but through space. This conception arguably highlights the United States as the ideal site of development of the postmodern episteme. If modernists were obsessed with time, postmodernist philosophers focus on space. Thus, Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson (1984) declares that the modernist themes of time and temporality, durée and memory, are no longer prevalent; the citizens of the new world order dominated by the United States inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and their life experiences are dominated by categories of space rather than time. Jameson sees a link between an increasing spatialization (or detemporalization) and the eclipse of historicity, the loss of any vital imaginative sense of the past, which is reduced to a stereotype of that past, as simulacrum and pseudo-past (62).

On the other hand, Hariman and Lucaites acknowledge that in the United States, history does not last more than one generation (2007: 186); this may be seen as an evocation of scholar James Oliver Robertson’s image of America as the “fountain of youth” (quoted in Campbell and Kean 1997: 216): a land of continuous renewal, starting anew, the land with no past that left James Fenimore Cooper complaining that in America “there are no annals for the historian”–so he had to resort to Indian warfare in order to find (and he did find) an endurable American myth (Fiedler 1960: 171). Similarly, around a century later, the Western novels, movies, and TV shows will represent to Robert Warshow the folklore of the American past, which endless repetition has rendered familiar and comprehensible (Ricks and Vance 1992: 261). In doing so, the Western as a genre simultaneously creates and recreates a mythical history of a nation with no past. Such a conception of the United States inevitably brings to mind the rhetorical construction of the timeless, eternal America before the closure of the frontier.

The relation of the United States to space has attracted the attention of modernist artists and thinkers too. A case in point would be literary author Gertrude Stein, who resorts to her idiosyncratic language to declare a unique fusion of space and time in the American nature: “Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving” (Ricks and Vance 1992: 284). It comes as no surprise that the first of the figures related to movement cited by Stein is the cowboy, who embodies the ancient notion of boundlessness associated with America from the first European contact. This variant of the American Adam is, of course, another highly gendered and racialized myth: he embodies the West as “manly, egalitarian, self-reliant, and Aryan,” in the words of Owen Wister, literary father of The Virginian (quoted in Kimmel 2006: 101). Exclusionary though he may seem, the cowboy is the quintessential romantic figure of the West in its embodiment of arguably the most cherished of the American values: freedom.

So far, this chapter has focused on different incarnations of Americanness (the American Adam, the rugged individualist, the American Scholar, the pioneer), both paying attention to the process of mythologizing and comparing the ideal to fact. It is probable that the key feature of such a myth has been its individuality. Therefore, it is worth ending this section with a review of the tension between the individual and social pressures in the United States. Walter P. Metzger (1968) argues that governments, through their different branches and institutions, have a significant influence on the formation of national character. And in a reference that perfectly fits the reality of the United States, he declares that “not doing is also a form of doing; no nation would be more distinctive as a molder of character than the one which adhered completely to laissez-faire” (167; emphasis in the original). Laissez-faire, non-government intervention, will be a constant in the politics of the United States. In this respect, two circumstances are worth noting. Firstly, supporters of laissez-faire do not hesitate to resort to institutional help when required. That is what Glazer (1992) argues when he explains that any kind of individualism sooner or later recourses to government support, either to protect its economic interests or to achieve social and egalitarian goals (297-98). Secondly, the lack of government interference does not imply the existence of a free society. For example, Boorstin’s provoking view pictures laissez-faire best preserved by slave states because of the limited government interference that informs the relation between master and servant (1965: 201).

English politician William Blackstone defends the fact that the price to pay in order to enter into society is to surrender a part of one’s natural liberty, and that attending to the resulting benefits, this transaction is more than worth it (Wald 1995: 19). However, Boorstin argues, in the United States there is no strong boundary separating the public and the private. On the contrary, the creation of communities was aimed at serving private interests; therefore, the stronger and more effective said communities were, the better they preserved private interests (1965: 72). Nevertheless, there seems to be good reason to acknowledge the tension between the individual and the collective as a source of anxiety in the history of the United States. A useful term to refer to this tension is ‘liberal democracy,’ the central concept in Hariman and Lucaites’ study of twentieth-century iconic photographs, No Caption Needed (2007). In their definition, a liberal democratic society “has to honor both the common good and the individual pursuit of happiness” (2007: 67). Hariman and Lucaites’ thesis is that there has been a gradual shift in twentieth-century public culture from liberal democracy to democratic liberalism–i.e., the emphasis lies now on liberal rather than democratic norms (2007: 13). One possible explanation links liberalism with the growth of consumer capitalism, as the former endorses the stance that social practices should not be constrained by political regulation (2007: 15).

To a certain extent, the tension between democracy and liberalism can be reduced to a political discussion about the limits of government. It is, somehow, a reenactment of the famous confrontation that took place during the first years of the national experience between liberty and property as epitomized by Jefferson and Hamilton, respectively. In Thomas Paine’s famous dictum, “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil” (2004: 3). Even though this principle, echoed in the following century in Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” may be a reduction ad absurdum, it nevertheless is telling about some specifically US perspectives. As Priscilla Wald (1995) explains, different conceptions of the struggle between unity and individuality have characterized US politics from the very inception of the country.

The confrontation between Federal and State sovereignty has been a constant. For the likes of George Tucker and John C. Calhoun, the people could not possibly be rightly represented by a centralized government, while John Marshall or Abraham Lincoln trusted that the consolidation of the Union would ensure the preservation of liberty–the key element of Enlightenment personhood (Wald 1995: 21). Nowadays, generally speaking, strong government is repudiated by the Republican Party to be one of the evils that interfere with individual rights, while Democrats allegedly tend to consider it the ideal procedure so that the needs of the underprivileged are taken into account. However, as Howard Zinn (1995) demonstrates, both parties have repeatedly ignored the wishes of the voters in order to favor the corporate America to which they are tied (600).

Historian Charles A. Beard points to the tension between democracy and capitalism as the main contradiction within the national narrative of the United States. However, this is not to say that capitalist US is not true to the principles of the nation. Probably the most often quoted nineteenth-century social commentator of American mores, Alexis de Tocqueville, declared, “To clear, cultivate, and transform the huge uninhabited continent which is their domain, the Americans need the everyday support of an energetic passion; that passion can only be the love of wealth. So no stigma attaches to love of money in America, and provided it does not exceed the bounds imposed by public order, it is held in honor” (1969: 621). Similarly, Hariman and Lucaites hold that liberalism becomes commonsensical in the United States, so imbued is American society in its principles (2007: 228). At the same time, it should not be ignored that there are many versions of democracy, including the notion of democracy as material abundance (Lipsitz 2001: 35, 247).

With the consolidation of corporate culture, Christopher Newfield asserts that democracy and capitalism become interdependent terms: “Mass production and consumption, freedom, self-expression, and personal satisfaction came to be seen as interchangeable and as enabled by corporate capitalism” (2007: 69). In short, when personal liberty and free choice triumph in the context of an unrestricted market behavior, the pursuit of happiness seems to invariably lead to consumerism (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 230). Much as the United States self-fashions as the land of liberty and democracy, this preponderance of liberalism perfectly responds to less romantic yet deeply ingrained national ideals: individual autonomy is its main tenet and it ensures the supremacy of the individual over the collective. An ideology grounded in reason, liberalism suits a radically individual conception of the American spirit.

Given the predominance of liberalism in the current political and social articulation of the United States, the previously rhapsodized heroic citizen has gradually become a rather prosaic individual devoted to acquisition and consumption (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 123). At any rate, however dismal this shift may seem, material prosperity represents a kind of moral virtue in the United States. In his analysis of Cotton Mather’s biography of John Winthrop, Sacvan Bercovitch remarks that the minister’s life becomes a model for the American stories of thriving, in part because “Puritanism opened the way to material as well as spiritual prosperity” (1975: 3). Puritanism’s strong urge for success, ambition and work-ethic are inextricably linked to capitalism. Indeed, in the first Puritan communities of the New England area, material prosperity was seen as a proof of moral grace. With God on their side, not only did settlers sanction a concern for wealth, they also promoted it. Such a perspective inevitably has left an impression in the way US citizens have historically faced material progress–especially since the New England Way has been adopted to a significant extent as the American Way (Bercovitch 1975: 108).

Many of the features associated with the Puritans will be present in the myth of the self-made man, such as determination, self-control and self-examination, or rectitude (Gooder 1984: ix, xviii). The self-made man ideal conveys a notion of radical independence and self-reliance already suggested by the term itself. In fact, as Fiedler insightfully remarks, it conveys an idea of fatherlessness (1960: 331) that greatly matches a nation born out of (symbolical) patricide in Revolutionary times. Kimmel defines the self-made man as an embodiment of economic autonomy, characterized by “success in the market, individual achievement, mobility, [and] wealth” (2006: 17). Imbued with the Protestant ethic of work as virtue and a strong striving for success, the self-made man is, nonetheless, in a troubling and troubled position, dependent as he is upon an unstable marketplace and the constant need for mobility (Kimmel 2006: 13). As the nation relentlessly consolidated its position as a capitalist power controlled by corporations, the myth of self-made men became increasingly hard to sustain–especially when the United States completed the transition from “a nation of small entrepreneurs... into a nation of hired employees.” Being bossed by a superior dramatically challenges the self-reliance that had characterized the ideal American man. Individualism has to be redefined to fit the social and economic reality of corporate America, where men are subject to a great number of forces they cannot possibly control (Kimmel 2006: 158-59).

The cult of material prosperity guides the work of the “consensus” and “end of ideology” schools, formed by Daniel Boorstin and Daniel Bell, among others. In their revisionist narratives, the Robber Barons of the twenties and thirties are rediscovered as the “constructive captains of industry” (Carroll and Noble 1984: 363). However, an excessive preoccupation with capitalistic competition and wealth accumulation found its critics too. De Tocqueville denounced what he identified as Americans’ excessive love for wealth: “One usually finds that love of money is either the chief or a secondary motive at the bottom of everything the Americans do” (1969: 615). Carroll and Noble point out that in the first decades of the nineteenth century the disproportionate materialism of the US ruled by Andrew Jackson threatened to destroy American nature (1984: 183). On the other hand, as the twentieth century began, economist Max Weber complained that the Protestant work ethic was degenerating into generations of men “dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of [their lives]” (quoted in Kimmel 2006: 71). This has meant the degradation of the American Dream, extensively analyzed by twentieth-century authors.

Some of the nation’s better remembered characters are self-made men who face the decay of a narrative of success in the US (Jay Gatsby immediately comes to mind). The struggle of the defeated–either in moral or economic terms–or selfdeluded individual who fails to live up to the expectations of a hypercompetitive society is the central dilemma in a myriad of works, ranging from Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922) or Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Rose (1983).¹⁵ And, of course, the literature of the United States have likewise offered alternative views to the dominant national ideology and what is perceived as the perverted idea of the American Dream, epitomized by the nightmarish Moloch of Allen Ginsberg’s poem, Howl (1956), or the ‘phony’ world of J. D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), set in New York, business capital of the world.

For Hariman and Lucaites (2007), the substance of the American Dream in the twenty-first century is reduced to “progress, machines that promise prosperity, and an easier and more comfortable life” (256), therefore linking the dream with mere consumerism. Paradoxically, these negative views of a frustrating Americanness stem from the enormous faith put into the national experience. Even before 9/11, Greil Marcus pictures the United States as a nation whose profound optimism renders disaster incomprehensible (2000: 190-91), and several years later he holds that a feeling of portent and doom is embedded in the American identity (2006: 8). Thus, in Mystery Train, Marcus analyzes the lyrics of one of the greatest American bluesmen, Robert Johnson, who poses in his songs the old quintessentially American question: “Why are we cursed with the power to want more than we can have?” (2000: 33).

In his deconstruction of the myth, George Lipsitz (2001) sees the ideology of the self-made man as an element of the conservatives’ allegiance to the American master narrative (79). In a similar vein, Zinn (1995) describes the “rags to riches” myth as an ideology aimed to facilitate social control of the working class (248). In fact, it is interesting to note that, as Carroll and Noble realize, actual self-made men were an exception: “The new rich usually bore the same family names and possessed the same genealogical connections” (1984: 155-56). To put it another way, they agree with Zinn’s exposing of the notion of social mobility as a useful lesson in values, regardless of its historical accuracy. When social mobility failed–and that was the most common case–the nation searched for alternative myths to avoid despair. Geographical mobility acted as a compensatory option–or, as Kimmel puts it, “one could at least head west” (2006: 61).

The accumulation of wealth in the United States has been interpreted in different ways. The most complacent explanations link it to the exuberance of America’s landscape and democracy, its boundlessness. A prime example would be Walt Whitman’s poetry, based on the accumulation of poetic elements instead of syntactic subordination–reflecting, thus, the myth of the lack of a rigid social hierarchy in the United States (Simpson 1990: 182). On the other hand, as it has been hinted at by the previous quotations from Zinn or Kimmel, an excessive dependence on material prosperity leads to a vision of the nation as a brute force, a monopoly capitalism where, in philosopher Charles Taylor’s wordplay, “contracting has replaced the social contract” (quoted in Marcus 2006: 53). Against the narrative of America as the ultimate equalizing land, the wealth accumulation represented by the last stage of industrial capitalism could not be possible without a clearly demarked social hierarchy.

Daniel Boorstin reproduces the rhetorical construction of a classless United States when he defends that “even more characteristic than the ideal of equality, the vagueness of social classes became an ideal in America” (1965: 29). The predominance of this view, adopted and promoted by the hegemonic powers of the nation, is reflected by the fact that most US citizens, in historian Edward Pessen’s view, ignore the centrality–not to say the very existence–of clear-cut class distinctions in everyday life (1992: 372). This idealized narrative is sustained by diverse cultural elements. For example, Walt Whitman’s poetry offers a vision of an egalitarian cooperative America without either bosses or all-powerful corporations and monopolies–which is exposed by David Simpson as a fiction that hardly responds to the reality of mid-nineteenth-century United States (1990: 188); and Daniel Boorstin refers to an “American language,” described as “the apotheosis of slang,” that parallels its speakers’ freedom (1965: 279).

The idea of the United States as a nation with a different notion of class hierarchy is arguably part of the tendency to avoid a Marxist analysis of US society.¹⁶ Michael Denning (1986) reviews the major cultural and ideological grounds for American Exceptionalism according to Marxist critics, all of which constitute the basis of the so-called American Way of Life. Certainly, national peculiarities like “the role of the frontier in American imagination; the ideological power of the Puritan covenant; and the consumer culture of the ‘people of plenty’” (362)–each of which are commented on in this chapter–open the way to a unique view of the United States, alien to a European frame of interpretation.

However, the work of progressive historians like Howard Zinn, who focuses on class struggle and the role of the disadvantaged in national construction, reminds readers of the fact that the relentless growth of the United States as the model capitalist society can in no way be explained without the presence of an exploited workforce. Zinn deconstructs the usual narrative of (WASP) heroes and statesmen and focuses on the underprivileged–those equally important in the construction of the United States. Quoting works like historian Carl Bridenbaugh’s Cities in the Wilderness, Zinn’s study reveals an unequivocal class system that aimed to reproduce the European structure–to the extent that he refers to colonial New York as “a feudal kingdom” (1995: 47-48). In his demystifying narrative, Zinn subverts the ideal of a meritocratic US and suggests that the nation was not born free “but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich” (1995: 50).

The myth of boundless America as the land of opportunities has been propagated from the first European settlements–not in vain the land was seen as there to be taken by people fleeing from religious persecution. In the eighteenth century, Crèvecoeur’s description of the social structure of the United States insists on this exceptional American quality:

Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one. … We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be; nor is this pleasing equality so transitory as many others are. (1999: 187-88)

It does not look like Crèvecoeur’s prophecy has been fulfilled if one compares his rhetoric to the reality of a land with a dramatic contrast between the technological heights reached by the nation and its richness in macroeconomic levels, and the presence of a good share of poverty-stricken citizens and communities. In short, the society of the United States allows for a distinction between laborers and those who benefit from their labor. It is characteristic that those who prefer to minimize in their discourse the distance between labor and capital belong to the latter group, such as New York City Mayor Hewitt, recalled by Alan Trachtenberg in his cultural analysis of the Brooklyn Bridge (1979: 119). The current relevance of unpopular class-warfare rhetoric is confirmed by the controversy that confronted US President Barack Obama and members of the Republican Party in 2011. Obama replied to critics of his program to raise the taxes of upper-income citizens stating that the question “is not class warfare–it’s math.” As media pundit Sally Kohn reminds the president, “if ‘class warfare’ isn’t the richest of the rich fighting tooth and nail against unions and any tax increases while record numbers of people lose their homes, what is?” (2011). That even a supposedly progressive president–member of the nation’s most aggressively racialized group–seems hesitant about clearly voicing the tremendous economic gap in the nation, and the class differences it provokes, speaks volumes about how difficult it is for public figures to contradict the rhetorical foundations of the United States.

Obviously, the US hierarchically organized society is not a twentieth-century phenomenon. Thus, Howard Zinn attacks the narrative of the Founding Fathers, stating that for the common people, the Revolution only meant the substitution of some ruling elite for another.¹⁷ On the other hand, during the first decades of the national experience, movements like producerism, which advocated the autonomy of the worker, highlighted the inveterate social conflict between the producing and nonproducing classes as part of a rhetoric of resistance to proletarianization. A similar position was defended by the Populist movement, which would eventually be articulated into a People’s Party that fiercely opposed aggressive capitalism (Kimmel 2006: 21, 74). Interestingly, this working-class conscience would define its members as “distinctly white, male, and native-born” (Kimmel 2006: 73)¹⁸–which proves, once more, the complex relationships established in US history and society between the main social categories: class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. The categories, in a word, that articulate any cultural identity.

In short, a rhetorical construction that combined purely historical factors and ideals has shaped some of the most representative myths of US national identity. In the following chapters I will argue that the fiction of Richard Ford, concerned as it is with the question of identity, resorts to those myths in an attempt to present a comprehensive picture of the “homo americanus” through a recurring figure, Frank Bascombe, and the secondary characters he interacts with.

¹ ‘Native-born’ here stands for ‘born in US territory.’ It should not be confused with ‘Native American.’

² See Michael Holzman’s “The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale” (1999). Holzman provides insightful information about founding figures of American Studies like William Robertson Coe or Norman Holmes Pearson and the role of that discipline as “an instrument for ideological struggle” within “the American crusade in the cold war” (71).

³ See Butler’s Undoing Gender (2004) or Lynne Segal’s “After Judith Butler” (2008).

⁴ Sociologist Raewyn Connell acknowledges the achievements of a poststructuralist approach to gender as performance, despite the risk of reducing performance to “the wearing of a mask”; thus, she prefers to speak of “projects” and “trajectories” to account for the effects and consequences of gender performances, especially in young people (2008: 136).

⁵ Susan Manning (2007), in her review of the usages of ‘Performance’ in American Studies, points out that the term has already been applied to many different social categories such as class, race, sexuality, profession, region, etc.

⁶ The use of masculine nouns and pronouns is not accidental: Crèvecoeur talks explicitly about a “new man” instead of a new person. This is a tendency shared by many of the sources I will be quoting and referring to throughout this study.

⁷ Of course this myth applies exclusively to men. Women, when convincingly portrayed at all in classic American fiction, do not usually transcend the typical duality “fair girl vs. dark lady” (Fiedler 1960: 273), with its racial and religious implications.

⁸ In practice, the policy of non-intervention with belligerent countries did not prevent an imperialistic extension of the nation’s area of influence.

⁹ See Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival (2003).

¹⁰ In the California Supreme Court decision of People v. Hall, the status of Asian Americans was assimilated to that of “black,” “mulatto,” or “Indian” persons so that the testimony of three Chinese witnesses against George W. Hall, a white Californian tried for murder, was not accepted. Hall’s conviction was eventually reversed.

¹¹ As Priscilla Wald brilliantly asserts, the cowboy may be the best-known myth of the West, but in fact it is the rancher (an owner) who arguably better represents the spirit of the United States (1995: 266).

¹² Unlike Protestants, who denounced mankind’s innate depravity and conceded great importance to Original Sin (Bercovitch 1975: 16).

¹³ Incidentally, Geist’s exposition seems to work in the same direction as Boorstin’s equalizing interpretation of movement, or Whitman’s symbolization of democracy as the meeting of the individual souls on an open road (Lawrence 1951: 190).

¹⁴ It is worth remembering that the presence of Native American communities did not prevent pioneers from considering that the land was there to be taken.

¹⁵ The protagonists of these three works represent an updating of another mythical figure of the US imagination, the Yankee peddler or the traveling salesman.

¹⁶ Marxism provides a historical account of the material conditions beginning with medieval feudalism, a period never witnessed in the American continent; the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery, with its own characteristics, may be deemed as the closest variant in the American experience.

¹⁷ As Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle clearly understood: for him, George III and George Washington, different as they were, represented the same authority that required blind allegiance; one should remember that the latter was hailed as “the Father of our country” (Kimmel 2006: 14).

¹⁸ Needless to say, here ‘native-born,’ as indicated at the beginning of this chapter, refers to those born in the United States of European descent rather than ‘Native American.’