In Search of America [antikvár]

Introduction I- "Our peculiar claim to greatness as a nation rests on the fact that we have done \ \ without many elements that might be thought of as the marlis of a great people, y among them a myth of origin. Americans have been suckled by no wolf sired by no p Trojan fleeing Troy; they are not descendedfrom the sun or from the dragons teeth sown in the earth . . . Indeed our greatness consists precisely in the fact that we i i are making it up as we go along — that we are perpetually in the process of devis-i-; ing ourselves as a people." —Robert Pinsky Poet a 'o here was our experiment: become reacquainted with the principles of the American founding and the men who first presented them back in the turbulent days of the eighteenth century; then go out and look about us for evidence in this America of the country they so long ago established. If we tell you now that we discovered it — indeed, that the foundations laid back then and built upon in the 225 or so years since, still form the essence of the American identity — it should not spoil the experience of this book. In fact, that is the message we hope you will see in every page: that the America of Jefferson and Madison, Hamilton and Franklin, Washington and Adams is as alive now as ever before. You can hear it in the arguments before a South Carolina school board considering the line between church and state as the community it serves initiates a campaign to build a more "moral" society (Chapter 1), and in the hallways of a multinational corporation as it conceives a marketing plan to sell the potato chip — and with it, the gospel of the free market — to the underdeveloped world (Chapter 3). You can detect it in the chatter of Washington political activists using the debate over a president's plan for tax relief to make their case for the appropriate balance of power between the federal government and the states, between any government and the "sacred" individual (Chapter 2), and you can watch it in the staging of an American musical — that quintessentially American art form — as presented by Colorado high school students who find in its lyrics and melodies the expression of a still idealistic people, embracing freedom, equality, and the spirit of rebellion (Chapter 5). To become reacquainted with the founders was, for us, its own reward. Like so many others, we had come to regard them in the form of Though the ship he was on was headed to New York City, Alexis de Tocqneville's 1831 American journey began here, in Newport, Rhode Island, when heavy winds forced an unscheduled landing. The passengers disembarked at a time when the coastline, left, was pitch black, and not, as it is today, also dotted with the lights of commerce. Tocqueville wrote his mother that the residents of Newport differed only "superficially from the French. "But by the end of his visit, he had grown to see Americans as the embodiment of a new civilization.