Making America Great

ushistory.org

About twenty-five years ago, I used my sabbatical year to spend a year in
Lillehammer, Norway, where I taught at a Norwegian college:  Nansenskole.   Mari worked part-time at a firm that provided a computer system for Norwegian universities, and Daniel discovered what a sudden and total immersion into a Norwegian public school meant.

It was a wonderful year.  Lillehammer
was the center for the Winter Olympics,
the following year, and we explored
as many venues as we could.  Daniel
skied the slalom and downhill courses,
Daniel and I went down the bobsled run twice,
and all of us tried the ice skating venues,
and were spectators at the hockey and
ski-jumping venues.

One day, while stumbling my way, almost blindly,
through the tax reporting system--none of my
vocabulary included either words or concepts
having to do with the tax system:  I barely managed
my way through my lectures at the college--
a governmental official told me that if I were to
apply for Norwegian citizenship, that it would
likely be approved because my father had been
born in Norway in 1905.

Huh?  It was then that I began to understand
what it is to live in a nation that understood itself
in terms that were more tribal than I was used to.
I was about sixty years old, born in Tacoma, Washington,
but. . . . It was not easy to be granted Norwegian
citizenship, but. . . .

Then I realized that I had roots.  My roots reached
back or down a generation.  My mother's whole
family was Norwegian in heritage, too, but she
had been born in Washington, too, and roots on that side
of the family were not long enough for possible citizenship.

I had always known, without dispute, that I was part
of a Norwegian family--not Norwegian-American, but
simply Norwegian family.  It was a time before hyphenation.
But even smeared as we were with Norwegian names
and accents and foods and foibles and religion,
I also had known that we were American citizens.
That Little Grandma could not speak English,
or that Dad and Grandpa and lots of other relatives
spoke with Norwegian accents had nothing to do
with the fact of our being Americans.  I do not think
that our great-grandparents ever became citizens,
but they were Americans by choice and home.

Lots of other Americans displayed other ethnic heritages, too.
In fact, we categorized them, even assigned a certain oddity
to them because they in their own way were doing
precisely what we were doing in our own way:  settling down,
side by side something like a patchwork quilt on the land.

All of us, nearly all of us, had roots from somewhere,
but the roots did not make us Norwegian citizens,
or Italian or Irish or German citizens:  we were Americans,
even if we distrusted each other's roots and religions.

It was, not a precarious, but certainly not a very-well-thought-
through idea.  Native Americans, the only Americans
with thousands of years of live and culture in America,
were pretty much parenthesized.  They belonged here but,
shameful as it had been, we had taken the land from them,
so without saying so, they did not belong here.  Nor anywhere else.

As for Asians, we knew there were places like Chinatown
in San Francisco, or New York or somewhere, but. . . .

Black people were . . . still . . . an unfinished problem
from a shameful time ago when people owned slaves.

So, while there were Native Americans, and Mexicans,
and Black people, we did not define ourselves by our roots
but by what we believed to be a new kind of nation,
forming a more perfect union.  We were settlers
more than we were root vegetables.  We pledged allegiance
to "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all",
possibly with some exceptions, or course, but uncertain
as we were, we generally believed that Native Americans
and Blacks and Jews and Catholics and Asians did belong
here, too, sort of, somehow.  We fudged.

It wasn't our White, European roots that made us Americans,
although it was mostly White, Europeans--well, maybe Northern
Europeans had shaped the kernel around which America grew.

In that sense, the Norwegian governmental official who said
that I could most likely be granted Norwegian citizenship
was saying something like what most Americans I knew
were saying:  that I was the right kind of person, with good roots.

That is to say, even though America--the United States of America--
professed to be beyond a root-vegetable definition of citizenship,
we were in many ways doing just what Northern European, White,
Christian, male-dominant tribal nations had long been doing:
turnips here, radishes there, and so on.  Catholic turnips here,
Protestant turnips there.

But, as unthinkingly male, and as White supremicist as our
founders were, they did define us, in our constitution,
as a new kind of nation, not Catholic, not Protestant,
not slave, not free, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
We did lose our grip a little under Eisenhower, during the
Cold War, in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union, and put
"under god" into the pledge.  It still does not come naturally
to my lips at football games and on the Fourth of July.
It is a barely-constitutional phrase.

We did not weave a water-tight Constitution.  Some of our
founders found it difficult to stop owning slaves, and they did
not give women the right to vote.  We even defined Black
people as not-quite fully human when counting them.

So we have been, and are, shamelessly reluctant to be what we
have said we were--not tribes, not a religious nation, not a single
cultural nation.  But, not because we were lax, but because we
do, at our kernel, believe we are a new kind of place, we have
always--however reluctantly--understood that the strangers at
our gates probably ought to get inside the gates, somehow.  There
have always been citizens who reached out, given a hand to
to people to help them over the wall.

That is what the Dreamers are all about.  They got here because
their parents found work here, and wanted to stay here, even if
they did not have Northern European roots.  Their children--now
The Dreamers--do have roots here.  They have grown up here,
gone to school here, speak English better than my immigrant
ancestors did.  They are, 800,000 of them, what we have always said
we were, even when we have not always meant what we said,
or when we, something like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,
could not quite bring themselves to sell their slaves,
or to allow women to vote.

Like them,
like St. Augustine of Hippo, we have prayed:
"Lord, grant me chastity, but not yet."

We are mucking about these days
because we have lost a clear sense
of what this nation was founded to be.
We are still fudging on how to count Black people,
still pretending that males are superior to females,
still wondering whether we should build a wall
around Chinatown, which might include
the University of California at Berkeley.

We are wondering whether we should
throw out 800,000 of us.

". . . one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

It isn't a matter of making America great again:
it is a matter of making American great.