A new generation of historians finds new meanings in the past
The American . . . seems to bear lightly the sorrowful burden of human knowledge. In a word, he is young . . .The American has never yet had to face the trials of Job.
—George Santayana, 1920
The Fourth of July speech today is seldom the shapely purple cloud of bombast that it once was. That style is nearly extinct. The old eagle-screaming rhapsody, the Everlasting Yea, survives mostly in wistful, or merely empty, references to Jefferson, in Smithsonian pageants or in the elegiac drone of a speaker recalling something that happened a long, long time ago, almost in another country.
This year a note of truculence may thrum now and then in the holiday; prayers for the hostages will sound and some rhetorical menace will be aimed at ayatullahs and other Iranians. The nation will brighten itself with parades and fireworks and concerts in the park, and cute local events like the porcupine race in Council, Idaho. Patriotism and nostalgia will gust among the picnickers. But on the whole, American morale may not be up to a convincingly exuberant Fourth. In the years since Viet Nam, the U.S. has accumulated a few sorrows that, if not worthy of Job, are at least chastening.
A deepening recession is closing automobile plants; unemployment has gone to 7.8%. Inflation has subverted the traditional apparatus of American hope and self-improvement: hard work and saving. The nation's allies have developed the habit of treating it with public condescension and private contempt. Voters face a choice for President in November that leaves many of them shaking their heads. An uneasy suspicion has formed that the U.S. is about to leave the sweeping interstate highway it has cruised along for more than a generation, and return to a two-lane blacktop. Or worse. That is a heretical direction of thought for Americans. For most of the nation's 204 years, pessimism has been considered un-American —in an official way, at least.
Americans have an almost physiological need to think well of themselves, to be likable and to be liked. More than most people, they seem to have a passion for self-analysis. If the nation was constructed upon abstractions, Americans somehow need to be reassured constantly about who they are, about what they are up to and what they mean in the scheme of things. They are less certain now about their moral place in the world; that is a possibly promising readjustment of the national psychology.