We Can All Share American Culture

By Richard Brookhiser

What then is the American, this new man?" asked French immigrant Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in 1782. Two hundred ten years later, many Americans answer, "No one." America has always treated its ethnic and racial minorities abominably. The only consolation they have for being shut out of the mainstream is that they should never have wanted to join it in the first place. Happily -- what with multicultural education and bilingualism -- the very concept of a mainstream is being junked.

The facts that get pitched around in the multicultural debate are all familiar. Immigration has reached levels higher than at any other time since the turn of the century. Majorities or near majorities of students in some big-city school systems speak English as a second language, if they speak it at all. An urban underclass seems cut off from any culture, much less mainstream American culture. What is new, however, is not the facts but our attitudes toward them. Once upon a time, Americans knew what to do with people who seemed different: obliterate the differences. Today increasing numbers of nominal Americans refuse to see America as anything more than a collection of ZIP codes. Their ideal is Yugoslavia, without machine guns. Multiculturalism, in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "belittles unum and glorifies pluribus."

The stakes are high, and so is the decibel level. Why then is only one side of the argument being presented effectively? Schlesinger's alternative to multiculturalism is "an open society founded on tolerance of differences." That sounds pretty pluribus, professor. If the toleration of differences is the be-all and end-all of America, then why not tolerate multiculturalism?

A less mealymouthed defense of the American character would begin by acknowledging its historical roots in the behavior of the Anglo settlers of 200 and 300 years ago -- what are known today as Wasps. The Ur-Wasps brought with them a load of cultural baggage, which they unpacked when they arrived. Their load included a politics of natural right, derived from English Whigs; Protestant churches, mostly Bible reading and "low" in ritual and theology; and a near religious belief in the virtues of working hard and getting rich. These traits reinforced one another: pulpits proliferated under nonauthoritarian government, and the work ethic flourished under the stimulus of earnest preachment.

The ways of the Wasp linger today, despite condoms and Madonna. America attracts hard workers from abroad and breeds them at home, whatever Japanese politicians may think. Thomas Jefferson could still vaguely recognize our politics (Aaron Burr would certainly recognize our dirty politics). Survey after survey finds that Americans are the most religious people in the industrialized world, and the seriousness with which we take our sex scandals amazes cynical Europeans.

Throughout American history, newcomers assimilated to this model, despite the doubts and hostility of their hosts. At the turn of the century, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was worried that East European immigrants labored under a "Byzantine" inheritance that would make them inimical to republican rule. Sixty years earlier, Protestant mobs burned Irish Catholic churches. The Senator and the rioters were both mistaken in their fears. Even blacks, the oldest and most abused American minority group, bear the marks of Americanization. Martin Luther King Jr. may have written about the influence on him of the teachings of Gandhi, but when he spoke, the texts he cited were the King James Bible, the Declaration of Independence and My Country, 'Tis of Thee. Minorities assimilated, because assimilation allowed them to get ahead here, and because here seemed better than any available alternative -- especially their homelands.

One of the stumbling blocks to acknowledging and proclaiming such once obvious truths may be the figure of George Bush, who is the most visible Wasp in America right now. But Bush is more post-Wasp than genuine article. Thomas Jefferson didn't think in cliches and speak in mush. There is also a lot worse in Wasp history than George Bush's inarticulateness, with slavery standing at the top of the list. The best defense of Waspdom is that it always included people who saw that slavery was wrong, and when it came to a fight, they won the war and (thanks to Lincoln) the argument. The way of the Wasp contained the correctives for its vices. It is the matrix of most of the good that America has done as well as the good that needs to be done.

This is not an argument in favor of DWEMS (dead white European males) -- at least, not in favor of those recently dead. As an intellectual and social system, America is clearly superior to Europe, which for the past 200 years has been an assembly line for destructive ideas, and for destruction. We don't have to take second place to the continent of Robespierre and Enver Hoxha.

Americans should take pride, not in empty formulas of tolerance and diversity, but in the historic content of their culture, in forms as homely as Benjamin Franklin's how-to-get-rich maxims, or as sublime as Lincoln's second Inaugural Address. There is no need to say to those who demur, "Love it or leave it." They have already left, for internal exile. If there are Americans who feel as alienated as the Amish, let them live like the Amish -- without harassment, but without subsidized proselytizing for their rejectionist world views. America has business -- noble business -- to attend to.