America's most powerful myth
America's most powerful myth
With due respect to Heather Cox Richardson, America's best ideas aren't the radical declarations of equality from Jefferson and Lincoln.
This morning, my grandmother came into the kitchen to read us Heather Cox Richardon’s July 3rd post—because it’s such good writing, she said.
I cooked pancakes for the kids, my mom drank coffee, and my grandmother read us Richardson’s brief post about one of America’s fundamental founding myths: equality.
In a family of writers, at least this much we can all agree: powerful writing is a thing of beauty, but we can appreciate beautiful words while also disagreeing with their sentiment.
So, with due respect to Richardson (who has about a gazillion more subscribers than me), I think she’s kind of wrong about America. The “words to live by” in 2023 aren’t the ones about equality—they’re the ones about the American dream.
And since it’s 4th of July, I hope you’ll take a moment to indulge me as to why.
All men are created equal
Heather’s post quotes from two of America’s greatest wordsmiths in Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
It was Jefferson who gave us We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… But it was Lincoln, who once noted that the aggregate of all his schooling on the Illinois frontier amounted to about a year of education, who wrote, in my mind, the even better stuff.
Here’s via Richardson:
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
This last part is quoted from the Gettysburg Address. But I actually prefer Lincoln’s 2nd Innagural Address, which also took place in the midst of the U.S. Civil War. The entire text is only 701 words long, and for my money, it is a masterclass in great political speech.
Both the Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address are etched into the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., making it my runaway favorite of all the D.C. monuments (did I mention I come from a family of writers?).
And yet I was super disheartened when I took my Canadian friend to visit it just two months ago. It was my last month in D.C., and he’d never been. So I took him to see the greatest hits all in a big loop around the National Mall. But though he appreciated the big statue of Lincoln seated in the chair, the words etched on the walls just didn’t mean much to him.
I tried to make the case, arguing something about the historical context, the phrasing, the man meeting the moment—yet it seemed my arguments were falling on deaf ears.
But then I had to remember that to outsiders, America’s Civil War is basically just about how the racists nearly got their way, just before getting their way in other ways for another hundred years.
And in fact: it was just one of the dozens of moments I’ve had in interactions with people around the world in my life where I am reminded that America’s most powerful idea—what I call our founding myth—is actually not about all men being created equal, or pontifications about government of, by, and for the people.
To most non-Americans, all our rah-rah about equality is just so much hypocrisy.
Individual freedom and enterprise
What actually resonates, and what I think is the best, most powerful idea we have in this country, is one that was also at the core of our founding documents: The American Dream.
(The original phrase which could have made it into the Declaration of Independence is from John Locke, who argued government’s role was to protect “life, liberty, and property.” But it was Jefferson’s editorial genius that changed it to “the pursuit of happiness,” which can mean more things to more people, and besides is much better writing.)
The pursuit of happiness is the American Dream, and it remains our most powerful, attractive, and universal idea.
I wrote a little about this in April, in a post about “The best noble lie,”—focusing on the idea that we are in control of our own destinies. Even if not totally true, I wrote that it’s important we continue to believe in the myth.
In the U.S., we hold to a similar idea:
It’s the myth that anyone, no matter the circumstances of their birth, can come to this land of opportunity and make it.
I’m sure that’s less true than we would like, but no matter: it’s important that we keep up the myth, because the fact that the smart, ambitious, and talented people of the world who want to make a change for the better have more often than not wanted to come here is a kind of superpower for this country.
THAT is exactly the kind of superpower we need to be defending. It is still about an idea, just not the one Richardson is focused on.
As ‘friend of the newsletter’ Gena Gorlin pointed out in her own 4th of July post, when she thinks of America, she thinks of all the “scrappy, hungry, enterprising founders—an outsize number of whom are immigrants—and the many others who remain focused on doing what the nation’s Founders fought to give them the freedom to focus on: building.”
And when I think of America, I think of immigrants.
Gena herself is an immigrant from Ukraine. Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant, as were seven of the 39 men who signed the Constitution. Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Andrew Carnegie—all immigrants. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, both children of immigrants. AT&T, eBay, Kraft Foods, Kohl’s, Pfizer, Yahoo!, Instagram, Intel, and yes the iconic American jeans brand Levi Straus—all founded by immigrants, along with countless more.
A Harvard Business Review article lays out the numbers: In the U.S., 13.7% of people are foreign-born, but foreign-born make up a disproportionate share (25%) of startup founders. And immigrants founded or co-founded more than half of the United States’ billion-plus-dollar companies.
Why do people come here? We hook them with our myth, The American Dream, and people come here and they try to make it. Or die trying.
It was Calvin Coolidge, not exactly known for his rhetorical gifts, who is oft-quoted as saying, “the business of America is business.” (Which is a misquote, but what he actually said elaborates on the sentiment: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”)
Happy 4th—don’t be a cynic
It may sound like I’m some free-market Republican.
I’m not. I’m a writer, philosopher, and not a member of any organized political party—meaning, I’m a Democrat. But I also happen to think America can still mean something important, not just to Americans, but to everyone. We can still be the place to come and pursue your dreams.
I don’t care how that sounds (pollyannaish? delusional?). Hope for a better future isn’t just a particularly ingrained, deeply American obsession—it’s important for humanity writ large. If there were no hope for the future, if we were to descend into cynicism and pessimism, why try at all… for anything?
Lest this piece about politics feel a little out of place, remember I’ve been writing about this for a while. Here’s me on parenting and education:
…we should be teaching our kids optimism, not cynicism—that they have the power to make a change and that they can be whoever they want to be. Because the opposite message is soul-crushing. For us, and for them.
And so, whatever is going on in America, remember that America is bringing an extremely important idea to the table, and it doesn’t even matter how true it is. What matters is that we keep pushing for it. Optimism, the American Dream, striving for a better future. You know: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Defend that myth.
