We the People: America Is an Idea

What is a country? What makes it up? Is it an enclosed area populated by people speaking a common language, honoring certain customs and traditions, and practicing similar religions? Are there traits a country’s people share? Perhaps love for a particular sport: football, sumo wrestling, rugby. Or cuisine: lasagna, frog legs, sushi. What about size and history? Ideas abound when thinking of a country’s makeup.  

My questions aren’t meant to be a query into geo-political dynamics but instead to prompt thinking about how America is distinct relative to other countries.

Peggy Noonan says America was invented. I prefer constructed or built since it was a matter of our Founders piecing together building blocks that had been created over the ages including democracy, trial by jury, and due process. Maybe it’s a matter of semantics because in the end we’d probably agree America’s founding was unique.

A few countries are ancient despite undergoing iterations throughout their history. China and India along with Egypt and Greece come to mind. Others formed through evolution. Due to the migrating tribes that swept into Europe over the millennia, sometimes displacing and sometimes blending with the native populations, Europe is filled with such countries. It’s a fascinating story, one that might add spice to your research into your family’s origins.  

America, though, is different. Other than the native populations, people didn’t happen upon here; they intentionally came, initially from Spain, France, and England mainly. Most carried with them their birth country’s traditions and practices, especially religion.

But the English colonists’ experience differed from the other two. First, they were primarily Protestant, not Catholic, and largely guided by the Calvinistic Puritan Ethic. Further, their unifying principle centered around one broad idea: freedom. And with that came diversity, tolerance, and acceptance, even if they weren’t ideally practiced.

With the Magna Carta, the instinct for liberty became ingrained in the English consciousness. It was enhanced by the rise of mercantilism and the schism between the English and Roman Churches. So by the 1770s, it became a fool’s errand for King George III to try to whip the Americans, who no longer considered themselves Englishmen, into shape and bend to his will. It was that mindset that led to the Americans taking up arms. That mindset remains indelibly etched into the American psyche to this day, so much so that it makes it a fool’s errand for any wannabe monarch to try to rule by fiat.

In conjunction with that, there are others, some in positions of power, who have an unsettling view about the meaning of America. Theirs is a transactional, self-serving perspective. It’s not principled. Rather, it’s utilitarian, which according to Merriam-Webster, means “the aim of action should be the largest possible balance of pleasure over pain.” They see America as a playground, a venue to accumulate wealth. It’s a tension currently being played out in our socio-political exchange.

That and them aside, there’s more than the sanctity of freedom and opportunity that bind us. There’s social trust, among us the people and in our institutions. There are commonly shared traditions and customs like fireworks on the Fourth of July and football on Thanksgiving Day. There are honored and sacred sites that should be inviolate—places of worship and learning and forums for free speech, from sidewalk soap boxes to press rooms— even if one doesn’t believe in their preaching or agree with their teachings and opinions.

It’s been an ongoing struggle to defend and expand that fundamental idea of America. It got especially ugly in the Civil War, but it didn’t doom the American experiment. A poignant tale from it is telling and relevant.  

In “These Generals Were the Closest of Enemies,” Peggy Noonan recounts an anecdote, originally told in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, about the enduring friendship between two Civil War generals, Winfield Scott Hancock of the Union and Lewis “Lo” Armistead of the Confederacy. As fate would have it, they nearly met face to face at the Battle of Gettysburg. Scott was wounded but survived; Armistead died of his wounds in a Union hospital tent.

When the war began, Armistead sent Hancock’s wife a package that she was to open only in the event of his death. She honored his request. It was Armistead’s family Bible.

Peggy says stories like these are part of our history and shouldn’t be lost because if we lose them, we lose part of ourselves and “part of the gift we give our immigrants.”

“We’ve overcome a great deal,” she writes. “We see this best if we don’t deny our history but tell the whole messy, complicated, embarrassing, ennobling tale.”

Now, there’s an idea for you.