America: Our Byproduct Nation

By Daniel J. Boorstin

Since 1776 the U.S. has grown from a sliver of colonies along the Atlantic coast into a colossus whose shores are also washed by the Pacific and even the Arctic oceans, from a population of 2.5 million into one nearly 90 times larger, from a simple agrarian society into the world's most technologically sophisticated civilization. How did we get from there to here? How have we changed in our 200 years? And what do these changes portend for our future?

The following TIME Bicentennial Essay is the first in a series that will appear periodically into early 1976, and will seek to answer those questions. The opening essay examines the nature of American nationhood: how we evolved from "these United States" into 'the United States"--one nation, indivisible.

Looking back from the late 20th century, it is easy for us to forget that our nation was really born in a War for Independence and not in a war for nationhood. Yet that is the crucial fact about American nationalism, and helps us understand how this nation could be born without ever having been conceived.

Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence does the word nation appear. The title of the final version described the document as "the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united [small] States of America." There was no one capital city against which the British could aim a mortal blow. During the first five years of the War for Independence, British troops occupied every one of the most populous towns (Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston) without decisive effect on the war's outcome.

The wartime union of the colonies, American statesmen assumed, would be only temporary. "The present Union will but little survive the present war," James Madison predicted. "They [the states] ought to be as fully impressed with the necessity of the Union during the war as of its probable dissolution after it." Endless bickerings in their Continental (not "National") Congress, accusations by small states against large and by the poor against the rich, the difficulty of securing "contributions" from the states--all these have become familiar in our own time in the meetings of sovereign independent states in a so-called "United" Nations, and give a new vividness to the problems of our leaders in those days.

The colonists survived against the most powerful nation of their day, not because of strong national sentiment but rather because of a host of other factors: the extended British lines, the aid of the French, the unorthodox modes of American warfare, the ingenious makeshifts and improvisations of American commanders who had not had the advantage of being bred in a rigid European military etiquette (Americans would actually fight at night, in the woods and on rainy days), and the steadfast, courageous leadership of George Washington. In retrospect it might be more accurate to say that the British lost, than that the Americans won.

"Our country," as John Adams used that phrase in 1774, was Massachusetts, and he called his colony's delegation in Congress "our embassy." For Jefferson, until much later, "my country" usually meant Virginia. The decisive resolution (introduced in the Continental Congress on June 7, 1776, by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, seconded by John Adams and adopted on July 2, 1776) that provided the occasion for the Declaration of Independence declared "That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." Even until the Civil War the nation was commonly described in the plural, as "these United States."

In our homogenized age it is hard to realize how great seemed the differences between the colonies, how long were those miles that we now cover in an hour by air. Differences had accumulated as the population spread out and as the colonial decades wore on. In 1760 the shrewd Benjamin Franklin (experienced in trying to bring colonies together) said that even if, in the "impossible" event of "grievous tyranny and oppression," a few colonies should somehow ever come together, "those colonies that did not join the rebellion, would join the mother country in suppressing it." As John Adams recalled, "the colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them ... was certainly a very difficult enterprise."

A single nation spreading 2,800 miles across one of the most varied landscapes in the world was therefore beyond the imagination of those whom we call our founding fathers. The generation that fought the War for Independence and wrote the federal Constitution doubted that a representative government could decently and efficiently rule a large area. The excesses and failures of the British Parliament in its effort to govern the colonies seemed an obvious illustration. When Patrick Henry argued against ratifying the federal Constitution in the Virginia Convention (June 9,1788), he called for a single example of a great extent of country governed by one Congress. "One government," he insisted, "cannot reign over so extensive a country as this is, without absolute despotism." Americans were fighting against the evils of being governed at a distance.

In the Old World at the time of the American Revolution, the modern nation was still taking shape. There had been stirrings of nationalism in Western Europe as early as the 14th century, but in the 18th century the characteristic medieval institutions--a feudalism that tied people and their children to a particular plot of land and a Catholicism that made everybody a member of a universal church--were by no means dead. Great Britain was ahead of most of the Continent in talking and acting like a single nation. In France the Bourbon kings were still addressing their subjects not as the "French" people but as the peoples of Languedoc, Gascony, Burgundy, Picardy and other duchies and regions that had been brought under the suzerainty of the House of Bourbon. The word "nation," from the Latin nasci (to be born), with strong overtones of a tribal or racial community, still commonly referred to the people who happened to be born in one particular region and who shared a common ancestry.

Loyalties were gradually transformed. A wholesome love of the locality of your birth (le pays) became a belligerent devotion-to-the-death to a vast "fatherland" (la patrie) and its government. The Protestant Reformation, meanwhile, had bred scores of new sects of Christianity. The once Europe-wide loyalty to a single "catholic" church was fragmented into national churches. At the same time, skepticism and science bred doubts of the sovereignty of a single supernational God. The struggle of nations for power then became the story of modern European history --of its boundary disputes, its wars, its revolutions, its literatures and cultures, its deepest communal loves and its bitterest hatreds.

Not until the 19th and 20th centuries did modern nationalism in Europe produce its ripest fruit and its lethal poisons. Nationalism proved to be the modern tribalism, fencing in thought, focusing passions and blinding men to their common humanity. Chauvinism--the word for unreasoning patriotism--came from Nicolas Chauvin, a soldier serving in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars who made himself notorious for his militant national enthusiasm. "Our country, right or wrong!" became a battle cry of peace-loving people.

The growing pride in national cultures and the rise of language consciousness fed the virus. With the spread of literacy and of the cheap daily press, nationalism in the virulent form of chauvinism swept Europe. By 1885 Nietzsche could define a nation as "a group of men who speak one language and read the same newspapers." The epic of nationalism, enlivened by folklore, poetry, painting and music, became a worldwide tragedy written in blood.

For much of our history, this nation was settled by victims of nationalism. The War for Independence was sparked by the inability of the British to find a fair status for "colonials" in their growing nation. Later settlers (for some reason we call them "immigrants") came as refugees from nationalism, from its excesses and its horrors. Some had been deprived of their rights in nations to which they really belonged. Others had been forcibly included in larger nations to which they felt no loyalty. Many came to escape the draft in dynastic wars. Some--indentured servants, transported criminals, or slaves--were brought here against their will.

Our American brand of nationalism was produced while people here were thinking of something else. The early British settlers already had their Old World nation, and long continued to feel themselves part of it. But they and all later comers to America --Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Jews, Negroes and many others--were willy-nilly committed to a common search in a strange land. How to make a riving and a new life? How to clear the wilderness and get crops to grow? How to lay roads, dig canals and build cities? How to construct and organize factories, to find customers, and to begin to trade profitably with the rest of the world? Out of this variegated common search came a nation.

This was to be a Byproduct Nation, made much less by people hoping to glorify the land of their grandparents than by people working to provide a decent, prosperous life for their grandchildren. European nationalism hallowed the past; this new American nationalism hallowed the future. The very same features that had made the Revolutionary generation wonder whether there could ever be one nation across the continent--the vastness of the land, the diversity of landscapes and climates, the conglomeration of peoples, the mixture of skills and traditions, the variety of religion--finally proved to be the nation's peculiar strength.

When American settlers moved westward across the continent, they, like the early Atlantic seaboard settlers, went in secession. They went away from pre-empted lands and diminished opportunities, from towns that to them seemed already crowded, to a new America in the West. They went not to build a nation but to find opportunity. The founding of the Western states, the writing of their constitutions, the building of their cities was as American an epic as the story of the first 13 colonies. These Americans too saw that they could not be decently governed at a distance. They too wanted statehood. The struggle for independence was relived again and again, on the prairies, in the mountains, in the new cities.

The wars that America fought for a variety of motives incidentally persuaded its citizens that "these United States" were actually one United States. The American Revolution gave 13 disparate colonies a hint of their possible united strength and their peculiarly American advantages. The War of 1812 confirmed independence from Britain. The Civil War made a national government and helped build a national economy. To supply a large and wide-ranging army, the North speeded the unifying of the railroad systems with a standard gauge, and found itself compelled to produce clothing and all sorts of other items in unprecedented quantities and in nationally standardized sizes. The victory of the North established the fact that no state could divorce itself from the Union, that the Union was an indissoluble nation.

Over there, in 19th century Europe, new nations arose as different peoples asserted their right to speak in (and be governed in) their ancestral tongue. Language (the "mother tongue"), as Nietzsche observed, became the common test of peoplehood, of nationality--and of the legitimate range of government. Impassioned nationalists, like the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, demanded that the Austrian Empire and other motley empires be dismembered. People were thought to be like different species of plants, each of which could grow properly only in its own ancestral habitat.

But the making of America was the unmaking of these cliches. Here it was discovered that no people was quite as peculiar as Old World nationalist leaders had urged them to believe. You became an American by coming to a strange land and learning to speak somebody else's language. Broken English would be the only tongue that really expressed our history. No wonder, then, that education became our national fetish, for the public schoolroom was the frontier of the mind, where children of older nations learned to speak a common language.

The grandchildren of men who had fought each other on the battlefields of Europe now became good neighbors. Of course, this demanded a new kind of patriotism. Older settlers, who imagined that newcomers could become more "American" by becoming more like themselves, were all wrong. America was always being redefined by the arriving millions, by the common quest for a new kind of nation.

As the 20th century wore on we became more and more a nation of birthright Americans. The proportion of native-born Americans increased every year. While 85% of the population was native-born in 1890, the number was 93% in 1950. In the familiar illogic of nationalistic pride, birthright Americans--here not by choice but by chance--began to insist that there was some special virtue in their nativity. The American spirit seemed to be changing from The World Turned Upside Down (a song of the Revolutionary period) to God Bless America.

Yet when Americans joined two world wars, they believed they were fighting not primarily to preserve the integrity of national boundaries but to defend principles by which men could and should live everywhere. They kept alive Lincoln's faith that this nation was destined to be "the last, best hope of earth." They were not talking the language of nationalism when they spoke in American accents of Making the World Safe for Democracy or of Defending the Four Freedoms.

The rising flood of current news -- in the papers, on radio, on television -- buried the past. Sociology and social studies, the sciences of unfavorable comparisons, buried history. Americans, forgetting how far they had come, could think only of the present and its extension into the future.

In our day we face the danger that the old-fashioned nationalism (with its corollary isolationism) will become newly respectable. We are in danger of forgetting our oldest American tradition, that the nation exists for the sake of principles that can be shared. This nation first declared its independence in "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." Our uniqueness as a nation may depend on our ability and our power to preserve this paradox. In every generation we must once again declare our independence, while finding new ways to discover and declare our community with the world.

Just after midcentury, there came a new awakening of the American conscience. Like earlier Great Awakenings, it was compounded of religion and an impatience with history. More Americans than ever before were dazzled by the contrast between perfect faith and crude fulfillment. They were less impressed by the fact that Negroes had been emancipated from slavery, that the Constitution proclaimed them equal, than by the fact that Negroes were still enchained by unequal schooling, unequal housing, unequal employment. They were less impressed by the rights that women had won than by the rights still to be won. They became obsessed by the deprivations and in dignities visited on minority Americans, impoverished Americans, imprisoned Americans, mentally retarded Americans.

Frustrated by "victory" in two world wars (and troubled by doubts about the war in Viet Nam), surfeited by an American standard of living, many Americans, then, were tempted to become refugees from the American quest. Some felt that the decent, prosperous life the earlier Americans wanted for their grandchildren had not been achieved by them. But belligerent campaigns for ethnic and racial pride fragmented the nation with new chauvinisms. The fertile pleasures of an immigrant nation were displaced by cold-blooded quotas -- unashamed power struggles of Americans against themselves. The struggle for minority rights became a demand for minority veto.

There was a dangerous new temptation to believe that the great national goals could be defined by numbers. Because many of our ills -- pollution, inflation and unemployment -- had to be described statistically, we were inclined to believe that our goals could be described the same way. We began to be threatened by what the New England Puritans called the sin of pride -- belief that all our possibilities had already been revealed to us.

We must have the courage to remain a Byproduct Nation. We must have the courage to be concrete, to specify our projects while still refusing to fence in our national hopes. We must refuse the so lace of ideology and crusading dogmas. While others talk of National Purpose, we must remain a nation in quest, believing that for us there can only be national purposes, that these are newly revealed to every generation, and that our efforts must be devoted no less to discovery than to fulfillment. We must not forget our oldest tradition -- that our New World is a reservoir of mystery and of promise.

For this nation, which had never been conceived, grew in the open air on a continent that had never been imagined to exist. How can Americans believe that they are the last New World?

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