America as an Underdeveloped Nation/part 1

From American Studies in Transition
Edited by Marshall W. Fishwick
Houghton Mifflin Company Boston

America as an Underdeveloped Nation

My title is not meant to conceal a trick, but to reveal a truth. The United States, which spends millions to help “underdeveloped nations” is herself, in important respects, immature. The paradox became apparent when I served as the first Director of the Institute of American Studies at the East-West Center for Technical and Cultural Exchange at the University of Hawaii. An old pedagogical saw holds that one never understands a novel until he tries to teach it. I found out that the principle is even truer applied to one’s own country.

Our real weakness is that we don’t know what America means in human history. We have not developed a deep or broad historical understanding, having enlarged our know-how much more fully than our know-why. This imbalance is crippling us. It could destroy us. Too many Americans have highly idealized, essentially nostalgic images of what has happened in the course of American history. This naïve innocence is our single most debilitating influence in helping the world modernize. Why?

At the East-West Center a most interesting discovery was that the Asian grantees were greatly frustrated by the American grantees’ superficial understanding of American institutions and traditions. Asian students know much more about their cultures than we do about ours. Though deplorable, this is due to several factors. American grantees are younger. But theoretically we are the best informed nation in the world. What this cliché really means is that Americans are bombarded by more and diverse messages than any other nationals. It may also mean that our minds are the most cluttered and the least coherent. Information does not necessarily lead to wisdom. Indeed, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton have argued, in their theory of narcotizing dysfunction, that a surfeit of knowledge tends to paralyze people as information intake becomes a substitute for outgoing decision.

American ignorance of the enduring values in life also stems from their enthronement of the entertainer over the past generation. We all know the most intimate details of Bing Crosby’s family; but did we read the Federalist papers? We all recall Bob Hope’s latest gag, but how many of us here have re-read Emerson lately? We all know who Elvis Presley is (or was, already), down to the last wiggle, but how many have heard of Philip Booth, one of the finest contemporary poets America has produced?

In a pre-industrial, tradition-ruled society an individual needs little sense of history to become empathetic enough to sustain change. Tradition is the best guide because generations have been through the same experiences. In a modernizing society, not even father can always be counted on to know best. Unprecedented conditions confront everyone with equal freshness. Tradition not only often doesn’t work well; it can be a positive impediment to a rational solution of difficulties. Experience must replace tradition as a guide to behavior.

History in our kind of society is not a luxury but a necessity. In totalitarian societies ancestor worship may do; but not in a society where men are free to choose their own styles of life. A sophisticated awareness of the past prepares one for the uncertainties that are the only certain thing in our world today. Keep the majority from achieving this kind of self-understanding, and you deprive a formidably complex machine of most of its lubricants. Today many Americans do not have a valid sense of where they have come from. This lack is the most serious challenge facing our historians today.

Deprived of the resilience a mature historical sense would provide, we seem destined at the moment to become another kind of ancien regime. Big labor, big capital, and big agriculture and a complacent middle class seem content in the cocoon of suburbia—willing to ignore deteriorating conditions of urban life and unwilling to internationalize abundance fast enough to abort the appeal of competing totalitarian systems. It is when one measures the depth and breadth of our historical awareness that he sees that we may indeed be an underdeveloped nation.

One deep-seated reason for ignorance of our past and its living traditions is that America is a future-centered country. We know too little about our past partly because many came to America to get away from an oppressive or stultifying past—whether it was the rigidity of a fixed class position, the affront to conscience of an established church, or the frustrating conscription into a noble’s private wars. America, the poet Archibald MacLeish reminds us, was promises. We came to make history, not to revere it. That is a sense in which Henry Ford’s pronouncement about history’s being bunk is true. One has to be free of the burden of the past to create a River Rouge. By the same token, you inevitably end up wallowing in the nostalgic irrelevance of Greenfield Village if you have a shallow sense of your country’s past.

A defective sense of the past is endemic in our country. Instead of making our people more resilient to the stresses of accelerating social change as choice replaces tradition in the full modernized society, popular history is a psychological safety valve for escaping into some Golden Age. Instead of insight into the future’s complexities, instant nostalgia pretends to revere a past that never existed. It provides the patriotically lazy, say, with the easy alternative of visiting attractive Sylvan Valley Forge instead of accepting, as Peace Corps volunteers do, the contemporary equivalent of no shoes in the snow. The summer soldier of today apotheosizes Founding Fathers instead of flattering them with substantial imitation of their own virtues in new circumstances. These, after all, are the times that try men who still know they have souls. Only the sunshine patriots are Pollyannas enough to hope the fighting is long since over.

Why has our revolution stalled? Precisely because we have so inadequate a sense of national past. Asian, African, and Latin American countries are displaying the same sense of over-compensated inferiority complexes that we showed towards European aristocratic travelers who came to America to reassure themselves that our democratic experiment wouldn’t work—they hoped! For if it did, they would have to change their status quo in Europe as the American good news spread among their peoples. Americans who don’t “understand” the neutralism of Nehru and Sukarno have forgotten George Washington’s Farewell Address as well as the Monroe Doctrine.

There are other ways in which it would be easy for us to sympathize with the “new” underdeveloped nations since we so recently threw over colonialism ourselves. Take Brasilia, for example. Americans grumble about all that elegance the economically strapped Brazilians are erecting in the middle of forest hundreds of miles from centers of population. Does it sound familiar? It should. Washington City was founded in a swamp in the early 1800s for precisely the same reasons: to give a new country some architecture to live up to in spite of the fact that economically we couldn’t afford it at the time. The truth probably is that psychologically we new Americans probably couldn’t afford not to aspire to such compensating elegance given the gap between our ideas and reality. Or take the tendency of every country to want its own airline. I’m less sympathetic with this penchant for global public relations; but American history has an important lesson on this score too.

John Adams reacted in an interesting way to the smug comments of European aristocrats about how little culture Americans had when he was president. He said it was the responsibility of his generation to insure the political stability of the United States (and how enduringly those architects of our constitution did build). Andrew Jackson followed John Quincy Adams as president in 1828, announcing to the world with every muddy western boot that followed his Tennessean footsteps into the White House that there could be no turning back politically. Property, literacy, and sex qualifications would eventually be abolished—as they almost are in America today with the exception of the Southern Negro.

Adams thought it would be the responsibility of the next generation to insure economic growth—and Charles Francis Adams, a generation or two late by his forbear’s schedule, was a railroad tycoon. Charles’s brother Henry was the original alienated American intellectual, with qualities literally too fine to be of use in that shoddy post-Civil War era. This brings us to the third phase in John Adams’s prophecy. Once politics and economics matured, culture would flourish. He predicted that his grandsons would reap the artistic harvest from the careful political and economical cultivation at the grass roots that the two generations preceding had taken care of. That cultural revolution is now transforming America.

I want to relate the problems of the cultural revolution to our policies towards the underdeveloped countries. American intellectuals have suffered from a cultural inferiority complex ever since Sydney Smith made his insulting sneer heard round the world about who ever read an American book, or saw an American play, or gave a hoot and a holler about American culture with a capital “C.” For a century we’ve been trying to mass produce artists to keep Europe from laughing at us.

When we try to understand why Asian students are not interested in the arts of America but in the small “a” arts of agriculture, politics, and economic development, John Adams’s model of how a society develops becomes most helpful to us. Asians are in the earliest stages of his model of how a society matures. Literally and figuratively, the Institute of American Studies movement had to reorient itself to the needs of Asia, Africa, and Latin America; as indeed I believe the American Studies movement on the mainland United States must do and as all of us in America ought to do if we are to revitalize our revolution.

Carl Rowan, then in the State Department and now the U.S. Minister in Finland, made a brilliant speech at the University of Washington’s Communication Week held as part of the Seattle World’s Fair. What we do at home, he said, is more important thant what we pretend to be abroad. If we can’t meet our own racial, industrial, and social problems in a humane way, all our libraries, jazz combos, and international road shows will avail us little. Instead, our own headlines will undermine our pretense.