By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Having referenced “American culture, whatever that is,” in my post about anchor babies, I got harsh words in return. Usually I’d just comment on the comment, but the question demanded a more generous format. What follows is my own experience with the intriguing plurality of American cultures within the larger, multivocal political culture that does embrace us all.
When I was a kid, my father’s company kept transferring him from one office to another as he climbed the corporate ladder. I never lived in one place, meaning one city, one town, one neighborhood, one state, long enough to belong or make friends. I took refuge in history, as laid out in a genealogy of my mother’s family, which went back to the early 1600s, in Connecticut. Nomad I might be, but I had roots. I took comfort in that. Since my father also had a WASP background, the family culture was consistent, a recognizable (and often lampooned) evolution from the mores of those God-ridden early settlers from England.
Meanwhile, other traditions, no less directly descending from English antecedents, had been established in the American South, where a strongly Anglican, highly stratified, plantation economy depended on slavery until involuntary servitude was abolished. Since one of my mother’s ancestors had fought in a Connecticut regiment during the Civil War, there was no way I was going to leap to my feet in order to sing “Dixie,” when I attended a school in Maryland during the fifth grade. Mere singing? Well, ok. Standing? No way! The culture clash was too extreme.
That’s two cultures so far—and what deeply divided them was another: the culture of those whose ancestors had been shipped like cattle from Africa. We now know that the future African-Americans managed to preserve significant elements of their culture despite their owners’ commitment to deracination. Family history informed me of my descent from some of America’s earliest abolitionists. That soothed me through those uncomfortable “Dixie” moments.
Having referenced “American culture, whatever that is,” in my post about anchor babies, I got harsh words in return. Usually I’d just comment on the comment, but the question demanded a more generous format. What follows is my own experience with the intriguing plurality of American cultures within the larger, multivocal political culture that does embrace us all.
When I was a kid, my father’s company kept transferring him from one office to another as he climbed the corporate ladder. I never lived in one place, meaning one city, one town, one neighborhood, one state, long enough to belong or make friends. I took refuge in history, as laid out in a genealogy of my mother’s family, which went back to the early 1600s, in Connecticut. Nomad I might be, but I had roots. I took comfort in that. Since my father also had a WASP background, the family culture was consistent, a recognizable (and often lampooned) evolution from the mores of those God-ridden early settlers from England.
Meanwhile, other traditions, no less directly descending from English antecedents, had been established in the American South, where a strongly Anglican, highly stratified, plantation economy depended on slavery until involuntary servitude was abolished. Since one of my mother’s ancestors had fought in a Connecticut regiment during the Civil War, there was no way I was going to leap to my feet in order to sing “Dixie,” when I attended a school in Maryland during the fifth grade. Mere singing? Well, ok. Standing? No way! The culture clash was too extreme.
That’s two cultures so far—and what deeply divided them was another: the culture of those whose ancestors had been shipped like cattle from Africa. We now know that the future African-Americans managed to preserve significant elements of their culture despite their owners’ commitment to deracination. Family history informed me of my descent from some of America’s earliest abolitionists. That soothed me through those uncomfortable “Dixie” moments.
So now we’ve identified three more or less conflicting “founding” cultures for America. But this “new” continent wasn’t unpopulated when Europeans, technologically superior, flooded in and very nearly eradicated the people who’d arrived thousands of years earlier. Those genocidal efforts having failed, there remain, in the U.S. alone, dozens of tribal peoples nurturing cultures that differ, even from one another, in significant ways. You can’t live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, without being aware of this history. The population of New Mexico breaks down, roughly, like this: 45% Hispanic, 45% Anglo, 10% Native American.
Those who aren’t completely ignorant of American history also know that all of the Southwest plus California belonged to Mexico until the 1840s. Henry David Thoreau’s still influential Civil Disobedience expressed his opposition to the Mexican War, which he and many others considered illegal. (Anti-war sentiments are nothing new in this country.) Even today, many New Mexicans descend from Spanish ancestors who settled the Rio Grande valley well before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth. This weekend Santa Fe will celebrate Fiesta, which honors their traditions. Indian Market showcases Native American art and culture. We Anglos have to make do with the Fourth of July.
When I first came to Santa Fe, a Hispanic neighbor told me to go home. I had to laugh. His ancestors had stolen land in the West. Mine had stolen land in the East. That put us on the same level, I retorted, vis-à-vis the Native American population. He had to agree. So we became comfortable neighbors. New Mexico is NOT like Arizona, which shares so much history with its more tolerant neighbor. New Mexicans, by and large, accept the fact of many American cultures.
Meanwhile, I forgot to mention another powerful encounter with cultural diversity. I attended a grade school in Boston for a few months, including the crucial month of March. On St. Patrick’s Day, many of the kids wore green. Others donned orange, and I was one of them. Advised I’d have to wear green, I made sure I didn’t, especially since I wasn’t Irish. To this day, when someone pressures me to conform to his or her simplistic notion of the real American culture, I recoil in the same way—which, come to think of it, may key into a characteristic we Americans actually do share. We may not rebel against the same things, but we sure do rebel.
Eventually this practically pure WASP married a through and through Pole, whose maternal and paternal relatives illustrated rather dramatically the fact that even Polish culture is not homogenous. Over time, I decided that there were some WASP traits I wanted to keep, while others I happily supplanted with customs derived from my Polish-American in-laws. And now comes the big question. It has to do with my children. Clearly they are American by nationality, but what is their culture? Take religion. Are they Protestant? Catholic? Buddhist? Ardently secular? Do they eat their turkey with meat or with bread stuffing? Or did they decide to become vegans and eat tofu for Thanksgiving? I’m not telling. It’s their life.
Probably most Americans could tell a similar story of embodying and negotiating the inter-locking diversity of American cultures. But there is something we share. There is something that all Americans, naturalized or born here, can pledge allegiance to: the political culture engendered by the founding documents of the United States of America. I refer to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution with its appended Bill of Rights* and the Common Law legal tradition out of which these documents emerged. Some of the strongly resonant political values expressed in these documents are these: notions of equal justice under law, the need to “provide for the general welfare” even as private property rights are duly respected; tolerance for lived and expressed differences in opinion and faith; the importance of due process; the need for a healthy balance between individual rights and the common good; checks and balances to prevent over- concentration of power; and so on.
The person who questioned my Americanism probably does not share my spot on the broad continuum of American political values. That’s fine. Homogeneity is static and boring. But I do hope that he can find a place for both of us when it comes to “we the people.” The ability to negotiate differences through reasoned debate and a trustworthy electoral process is what democracy, a bedrock element of American national culture, is all about.
*Some people are tempted to add specifically religious texts to the list of core American documents, forgetting that the founders themselves came from nascent states which, as colonies, had been settled by believers who were more or less at war with one another. Not many years before those first English settlements, Englishmen had been burned at the stake for reading the wrong version of the Bible. By the time the Constitution was being drawn up, the Catholics of Maryland, the Puritans of New England, the Anglicans of Virginia still disagreed so thoroughly about the interpretation of Christianity that total disestablishment and freedom of religion was the only route to consensus. The religion-inspired nastiness of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries proves the durability of their good sense.