One of the greatest of slave narratives is Frederick Baily “Douglass” account of his awareness of his condition and how it is meant to be perpetual.  This prompts him to grasp for freedom and learn about abolition and make his way towards freedom.  His narrative rises above so many of the others because those, whether fabricated in whole and in part, followed a Christian narrative convention – describing the hell of slavery and then their redemption through freedom.  These narratives did not focus on the individuality of the slaves in part because the abolitionists didn’t want to recognize the humanity of black people but rather the evils of slavery.

Thoughts:  I made this point in an earlier post that the abolitionist cause confronted slavery but didn’t address racism.  They didn’t really consider how racism was embedded in slavery and how eliminating slavery without addressing racism, left black people at the mercy of white hatred.  The slave narratives point out this dilemma in abolitionist thinking.

The other thing that’s interesting is how “freedom” is something humans struggle with whether its artificial and externally internally imposed.  Thinking about the addiction narrative - people have the freedom to choose a substance and then become its prisoner and must find their way to freedom through “escape” to a Betty Ford Center and the like.  Is there some internal psychological mechanism that requires us appreciate “freedom” only as its contrasted to “slavery”?

Emerson then is in the line of philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger who turned back to Heraclitus who built his thinking  on ungrounded, primal thinking that is both ancient and modern but bypasses the bulk of Western thought.  Emerson’s use of aphorisms isn’t just about a pithy saying in the moment but a method of inquiry that possesses the moment and discards it simultaneously.

Thoughts:  This essay is transformational because it plants a flag for modernism with a thinker that I always saw as a great stylist of quaint 19th century thought.  More than that, Emerson is depicted as modernist in a way that changes and deepens my thinking about modernism.  I had always saw it as a movement breaking with the past but never thought of it as calling for an ancient, anti-Western approach and I had never thought of aphorisms as a philosophical method.  I clearly need to read Emerson!

But the speech did more than set out a goal, it identified a danger in the American thinking of those times in which the words used to express American values no longer reflected reality.  These words lived in an unreflected bubble of their own creation that failed to advance the very values America was suppose to embody.

Thoughts:  I know I am a heretic in my disdain for America in the days immediately after 9/11.  Many people felt a coming together, a blurring of partisan lines but many of these same people decried the quick evaporation of that togetherness.   Which did so because it rested on a flimsy foundation – the American flag, the rote repetition of, “America is the greatest country on Earth.”  These sentiments sprang from an unreflected chauvinism not an embodiment of American values.  If America had invoked it values during those times, it could have been to encourage a range of competing ideas that were all treated respectfully and which were nurtured so as to make sense of people who now saw America as the enemy.

Had American gone back to Emerson and Thoreau and William James to question, probe and expand their nationalistic pride, it might have resulted in a healthier, sturdier America.  An America that didn’t need to invade sovereign nations to punish perpetrators who honored no such sovereignty.

His journey took him to Mexican California where he was dubious about the morality and general worth of the residents, questioning their whiteness, believing them to be shiftless and slow, willing to take from the land what it offered them rather than to build it into something monumental.  Two Years before the Mast came out in 1840, eight years before the Gold Rush and yet he captures the sense of California as being the ends of the earth, the end-game of manifest destiny.

Thoughts:  As a native Californian, I’m always intrigued at what people from outside the State think and say about its people.  The stereotype of the flaky, vegan, cultish residents, obsessed with looks and self actualization does exist if not in quite the reductive sense of the stereotype.  Dana didn’t see those people as the “white” people attracted to the State came later, they weren’t the Californios that he saw and derided.  

Our Spanish heritage now more than a century and a half ago remains a strong subtext, found in the place names, the red tiles, the worship of the missions that are sprinkled along most of the California coast.  Is that because Anglo culture never formed its own identity because its people were too busy tending their own self creation to worry about the collective?

Thoughts:  Although I agree with the politics of this essay, I found its discussion full of assumptions, generalizations and a failure to both explore the myth and counter-evidence.  We are too believe what is written because of the wrong that was done to Mexicans in Texas rather than because of the power of the essay to make the case.  My other thought is about how the power of the Alamo myth, based on the idea of the underdog whose courage and heroism in the face of certain defeat is one that obscures the real American story we don’t tell ourselves which is that we are conquerors and tramplers of other people.   Maybe what disturbed us  about the Iraq war was that it was a war of choice, like our wars of choice that we waged across our continent under the name of manifest destiny.

Thoughts:  This essay didn’t interest me much but did make me think about how pervasive religion was in American life before the 20th century.  Here, the second biggest seller was a book of hymns while the first biggest was the Bible.

First, the Native American was seen even by the noble Indian chief Sanutee, a character in “The Yamesse” as inevitable historical losers.  That while the native people were noble keepers of the wildness of the American continent, they were incapable of understanding or managing its necessary transformation into an agrarian and then industrial civilization.

Next, the book is concerned with the fear both of Indian and white slavery and the dread is that will make them black.  African Americans to the extent they exist at all as characters, are seen as appreciating the benefits of civilization slavery affords taking them away from the barbarism of their native continent.

White people define the roles of both native people and African Americans from the perspective property – the natives were on the continent first and must be negotiated with, in bad faith, as it turned out in order to expand the American nation.  With African Americans they were property and therefore no negotiation was necessary.

Thoughts: American is more diverse than it was in 19th century and there is much greater appreciation and sensitivity to other people.  However, the concept of the “other” is still a subject of demonizing – fear, disrespect, stereotypes, paranoia and hubris.  After World War II, it was the “communist” who was the same whether Russian, Cuban, Chinese or Vietnamese.  He was a hypocrite bent on depriving everyone of their freedom in exchange for a gray and censored equality.  Now its the “terrorist” who is so scary that we shudder at the idea they might shake the bars of their maximum security federal prisons.  In all these cases, there is desire to close off any discussion of these “enemies” as people.  We don’t want to understand who they are, what they want and why they might hate us in order to feel morally superior.  Our guarantee of free speech is no guarantee of free thought.

This exploration of a country little more than fifty years old produced the greatest publication on the workings of the American idea.  Tocqueville was a reluctant democrat who saw Europe’s future in the American system whether they wanted it or not.  He understood that it was the institutional democracy embedded in townships and villages that bolstered the federal government.  He worried about the mediocrity of an egalitarian society where intellectual vigor was only a means to making money not a value in itself.  He also saw the alienation and emptiness that unfettered individual freedom brought along with its promise of wealth and creativity.

Thoughts:  I read Democracy in America when I was 18 while sitting in a golf cart parked in a tool shed late at night while I waited to make my rounds as a late night security guard at a retirement village.  High on coffee and ice cream, I walked the grounds at 2am, agitating over the great ideas Tocqueville presented me.  I was taken with his fearless ability to tackle big ideas and roll them together into even bigger ones.   As a history major, I saw very little of that in academia and felt in my bones that I would be restricted and reduced if I became a professor.  I also saw someone who recognized America as an idea and was willing to observe the society always keeping that in mind.  But as he said, ” I never gave in to the temptation to tailor facts to ideas rather to adapt ideas to facts.”

Thoughts:  I’ve never really understood whether this U.S. bank was a good thing or not.  Would there still be private banks would they compete against it?  How does the Federal Reserve Bank resemble or differ from this previous federal bank?  Maybe it doesn’t matter because what is important is that served as a watershed when the country and its President first recognized the crucial role of labor in the American economy and the vital need to protect it.

But Georgia didn’t adhere to the Supreme Court’s ruling and the Andrew Jackson’s White House refused to enforce the decision so Indian removal went ahead despite the avowed law of the land guaranteeing native American sovereignty.  Only in the 20th century as the Native American plight and sorry treatment became too much for white guilt to ignore did this ruling of sovereignty bear fruit.  Alas, we have it to thank for the glittering neon of reservation casinos.

Thoughts:  Never over-estimate the immediate power of the Supreme Court  to overcome social, culture or economic injustices when the popular will won’t support the law.  Marshall’s decision to grant sovereignty to the Cherokees was ignored then and for decades.  But that’s the power of the Supreme Court: its not about now, it about the future, about the idea of the America to come