The American Future (33 page)

It came about in the early spring of 1784, once the roads were passable and Crèvecoeur had shaken off his epileptic seizures. At Fellowes's door in Harvard Street, he announced himself nervously, but he need not have worried. The children who came to his embrace were much grown: Fanny thirteen now and Louis nine, but they were still a family. Brought together, they stayed in Boston for some months before Crèvecoeur took them back to New York to take up his post as consul, instituting the ocean service, seeing to imports and exports (alfalfa, sweet potatoes), finding a way to pick up a semblance of domestic life. Gentle honors came his way. Ethan Allen, the governor of Vermont, named the town of St. Johnsbury for him, but then Allen was himself an ambiguous patriot, wanting first and foremost sovereignty for his state and prepared to ask Canada for it, should Congress not agree.

For a few years, the Crèvecoeurs/St. Johnses were truly if not quite easily of the two worlds: in France again between 1785 and 1787, where the children learned the language at school; then two years in New York, where he helped establish the first openly Catholic church, St. Peter's on Barclay Street. Crèvecoeur had been in Philadelphia to witness the making of the American Constitution and, stirred by what Jefferson was reporting from Paris, believed he might see something of the same dawn in France. In the summer of 1790, the closest moment to a revolutionary honeymoon that France experienced, Crèvecoeur returned and for a moment thought that there might indeed be a dawning of some universal republic of liberated humanity. Was not the declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen addressed to the whole world (much like his own work)? But it took little time for the violence of the Revolution to shake his confidence, and whenever he could he took refuge at Pierrepont from the brutal politics of Paris that engulfed so many of his friends, both French and American. In 1792, the foreign minister Bertrand de Moleville ordered him back to the United States, but Crèvecoeur replied that, being nearly sixty, in poor health and with no funds at his disposal, he needed to secure whatever little he could and resigned his post. As the monarchy fell to a further revolutionary upheaval and the Jacobin Terror became
the order of the day, Crèvecoeur had reason to regret the decision, but it was now too late to effect an exit without being suspected of espionage or outright treason. Invoking the doubtful honorary citizenship bestowed on him in Vermont would only have made matters worse. Already his son-in-law, Otto, suspected of being too friendly with foreigners, was in prison.

Crèvecoeur would survive the worst, but he would never recover, except in print, the bucolic idyll he had made famous in
Letters from an American Farmer.
He journeyed up American streams now only in his mind and in his papers, writing his
Voyages dans la Haute Pennsylvanie et dans l'Etat de New York
from Normandy and the Seine Valley. There was no interest at all in England and little more in France. Trails were being blazed elsewhere, lit by the campfires of Bonaparte's armies. But although Crèvecoeur's own dream of a republic that gathered all the
misérables
of the world to its bosom was belied by his own difficult life, others wanted to make a go of it; first his younger son, Louis, who bought 200 acres in New Jersey, built himself a log cabin, and attempted a rural subsistence. But the father's paradise eluded the son. Louis survived brutal winters in his log cabin only by living on the flesh of frozen hogs. After two years, his father pleaded with him to come back to France.

But even though its author became ever more remote from his American destiny, what he had written in the 1770s and published in the 1780s became real in ways he could never have anticipated. Thousands then tens and eventually hundreds of thousands who had never heard of Crèvecoeur, much less read him, were nonetheless moved by the vision that came to him of an American “resurrection”: “no sooner than they arrive than they feel the good effects of that plenty of provisions we possess; they fare on our best food and are kindly entertained; their talents, character and peculiar industry are immediately inquired into; they find countrymen everywhere disseminated, let them come from whatever part of Europe.”

How would such a newcomer fare? “He is hired, he goes to work…instead of being employed by a haughty person he finds himself with his equal…his wages are high, his bed is not like that bed of sorrow on which he used to lie…he begins to feel the effects of a sort of resurrection; hitherto he had not lived but simply vegetated; now he feels himself a man because he is treated as such; the laws of his own
country had overlooked him in his insignificancy; the laws of this cover him with their mantle. Judge what an alteration there must arise in the mind and thoughts of this man. He begins to forget his former servitude and dependence; his heart involuntarily swells and glows; this first swell inspires him with those new thoughts which constitute an American…If he is a good man he forms schemes of future prosperity, he proposes to educate his children better than he has been educated himself; he thinks of future modes of conduct, feels an ardour to labour he never felt before…Happy those to whom this transition has served as a powerful spur to labour, to prosperity, and to the good establishment of children, born in the days of their poverty…who had no other portion to expect than the rags of their parents had it not been for their happy emigration.”

That, at any rate was the idea.

Crèvecoeur was fond of seeing America as the regenerative asylum “of low indigent people who flock every year here from all parts of Europe.” The “promiscuousness” (his term) of its mix of nations he thought, in principle, entirely benign. Observation, however, modified this indiscriminate enthusiasm. The people who made up this new country were all Nordically pink: “a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes.” (Though Crèvecoeur was passionate on the subject of the treatment of both Indians and slaves, it never occurred to him, of course, to count them as members of the American nation.) But even within the relatively narrow range of peoples who had become American, he admitted, even as he insisted on the transformative effect of the country on all of Europe's poor, that some actually did better than others. Scots like his “Andrew the Hebridean” did well but the Irish were an altogether different story. When he wrote, there were probably around 400,000 Americans of Irish stock, but overwhelmingly they were Ulster Presbyterians. Yet Crèvecoeur's stereotype anticipates all the stock traits ascribed to the Irish who would sweep into America in the nineteenth century. “They love to drink and to quarrel; they are litigious and soon take to the gun which is the ruin of everything; they seem to labour under a
greater degree of ignorance in husbandry than the others; perhaps it is that their industry had less scope and was less exercised at home…the poor are worse lodged…than anywhere else in Europe; their potatoes which are easily raised are perhaps an inducement to laziness; their wages are too low and their whisky too cheap.” Thus in the mind of the greatest enthusiast of an immigrant America, the caricature of the shiftless, violent Irishman was already present.

The opposite of the Irish were not the English or the frugal Scots, but the “honest Germans” who, for Crèvecoeur, were the epitome of what it took to become true Americans. Escaping from the petty tyranny of some tinpot martinet, they arrive in America, “observe their countrymen flourishing in every place; they travel through whole counties where not a word of English is spoken and in the names and the language of the people they retrace Germany.” But by “dint of sobriety, rigid parsimony and the most persevering industry, they succeed.” From their labors have come “the finest mills in all America, the best teams of horses.” They were, for Crèvecoeur, an American success story.

But others had felt differently about the Germans and continued to do so, none more sharply than Benjamin Franklin. Of all the Founding Fathers, none had a more richly developed sociological sense of America's destiny, well before its war for independence. For Franklin, America was not just the unfolding of an idea of liberty. Its physical character—continental space, and a population that would double every twenty-five years—constituted sovereign reality. Against these two mutually sustaining facts of social economy, British pretensions to exercise authority in the same manner that it exercised it over, say, Wales, were absurd and doomed to fail. Franklin attempted to explain this unstoppable American future to members of Parliament in the 1760s but was met mostly with bored incredulity. Only in Scotland, where social philosophers like Lord Kames and Adam Ferguson were rewriting the laws of history in much the same way, did Franklin's projections receive an attentive hearing.

The frustration that Franklin felt at his message falling on deaf ears was all the more acute because he saw America essentially as a transoceanic Britain; even more narrowly perhaps, as a new England. (He had been born, after all, in the most racially homogeneous place in America: Massachusetts.) The Scots and Irish might find a place,
but America's imperial destiny would prosper insofar as it retained its Anglo-Saxon racial core. Part of his objection to slavery was that it diluted that essence. Quite apart from the multitudes of captive Africans themselves, the temptations of slave-owning sapped the reserves of can-do northern energy and replaced that vigor with degenerate indolence. That might suit the Iberian races who had first brought slavery to the western hemisphere, but it was a poor lookout for those whom Providence had entrusted with northern America. But then all kinds of immigration made Franklin uneasy. He rather hoped that the great population boom he projected for America would be served by lively natural increase. But Franklin's attitude to open immigration was, to say the least, ambiguous.

Unlike Crèvecoeur, Franklin was not an admirer of the Germans of Pennsylvania. They were coarse, and there were far too many of them. “Those who come hither,” he wrote, “are generally of the most ignorant and stupid sort of their Nation…why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanise us, instead of our Anglifying them and will never adopt our Language and our Customs?” It was Benjamin Franklin, then, whom we think of as epitomizing the cosmopolitan spirit of the Enlightenment, who as early as the 1750s sounded the alarm about the imperiled state of Anglo-American culture. It was expansive, inventive, gregarious Franklin who was the founding father of American paranoia. The most stridently anti-immigrant writers today like Pat Buchanan make sure to invoke Franklin to give their ethnic phobias a venerable pedigree, although they get him badly wrong in one important respect. It was the breadth of his intellectual imagination, not its narrowness, that could make him quirkily inhospitable. A sociological realist, he thought the ideals of universal brotherhood, admirable in themselves, were just that, and that human reason was always having to contend with tribal instinct and inherited affinities. Well-meaning attempts by Franklin biographers to pass off a notorious passage at the conclusion of his
Observations Concerning the Natural Increase of Mankind
(1751) as tongue-in-cheek drollery are unpersuasive. Franklin may have been layering the confession with a patina of roguish brazenness, but what he wrote was what he meant. “Why increase the Sons of Africa by planting them in America,” he wrote, “when we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all Blacks
and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.”

Surprisingly, most of the German “boors” whose presence Franklin found threatening and among whom he numbered the “swarthy” were that notoriously dusky lot, the Swedes. Only the true Saxons counted, along with the English, as true lily-whites whose numbers “I wish were…Increased.” The rest of the Germans, however, were a distinct threat to the American future. “Why should the Palatine boors be suffer'd to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together, establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?”

Whether Franklin became so vehement on the subject because, or in spite of, his short-lived experience as the first editor of the German-language
Philadelphische Zeitung
is hard to say. But there is no doubt that he was reacting against the advice given to German immigrants by the journal's proprietor, Christopher Sauer, that, as much as possible, they should keep themselves to themselves. Sauer advised the Germans that it would be in their interest to vote alongside the Quakers (and thus against deists like Franklin and Episcopalian English-stock Pennsylvanians); and to steer clear of “involvement with English-speakers that might endanger our language, our families, our customs and our faith.” In response, the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge and English Language among the German Immigrants in Pennsylvania was created to sponsor and monitor free schools. Eleven were operating by the mid-1750s, but the German community saw them as intrusive, mounted a campaign of resistance and the experiment at educational integration proved short-lived. More draconian proposals from the colony's Committee for German Affairs were made to ensure the Germans integrated themselves properly into Pennsylvanian society: forced intermarriage, the suppression of presses that published only in German, a prohibition of German-only schools, and the requirement that all legal documents be printed solely in English. For Franklin this was a step too far, and it belatedly brought out the ecumenical side of him. Only “methods of great tenderness should be used,” he wrote to his London Quaker scientist friend Peter Collinson, “nothing that looks like a hardship [should] be imposed. Their fondness for their own Language and Manners is natural; it is not a Crime.”

From the start, then, the assumption that America's unique alchemy was to make
E pluribus unum
, one nation from many, begged the question for many Americans about the cultural compatibility of some elements of the
pluribus.
In the year of the opening of the constitutional convention, 1787, John Jay (who was to become chief justice of the United States) clarified in a Federalist Paper his vision of who was and who was not an American. “Providence,” he wrote “has been pleased to give this one country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in manners and customs.” In his
Notes on the State of Virginia
, Jefferson made much the same point in the chapter on “Population” where he questioned the wisdom of “rapid…importation of foreigners.” Since, Jefferson argued, American government was “peculiar” in its adoption of the “freest principles of the English constitution,” it would be threatened by a mass of emigrants from the absolute monarchies, who even in escape “will bring with them the principles of the government they leave, imbibed in their early youth.” And even “if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, pass[ing], as is usual, from one extreme to the other. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp, and bias, its direction and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”

So while people in Belfast and Leipzig were reading Tom Paine and Crèvecoeur and imagining the social miracle by which the most oppressed peasant or laborer could be transformed in America into a free citizen, those who would greet them from the seats of power on the other side of the ocean were having serious second thoughts about the immigrant romance and looking for ways to weed out the more, from the less, acceptable newcomers. This cautionary approach to immigration would remain deeply lodged in the American mind, even as its public image was one of the indiscriminate embrace of the unfortunate. If involuntary political and cultural inheritance was a concern for Jefferson, the social background of immigrants was an issue for Madison. In the congressional debate over the first federal Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted accessibility to citizenship
to “free white persons” over twenty-one who had resided in America for at least two years, Madison expressed his anxieties about merely swelling “the catalogue of people” regardless of what skills or fortune they brought to the country. “Those who acquire the rights of citizenship without adding to the strength and wealth of the country,” Madison bluntly announced, “are not the people we are in want of.” Put the objections of the two Virginians together, and it's evident that no riffraff, and no one trying to escape the tyranny into which they were born, need apply. Put another way, only those who didn't need to become Americans in the first place would actually be welcome.

And yet, it would be Crèvecoeur's sweet optimism and not Jefferson's and Madison's pessimism about immigration that would ultimately triumph as one of the great motifs of American history; one of the reasons why the United States should exist at all. Mass immigration would turn out to be compatible with both liberty and prosperity (indeed a condition of the creation of American wealth). But the rumble of anxiety first expressed by the Founding Fathers, that the unwashed might overrun the purity of the political nation they had made, never really goes away. Every time the American economy hits a reef, the last on the boat are usually those whom nationalist politicians want to throw from the decks.

In the first decades of the republic's existence, naturalization acts were used to sift the desirable from the undesirable. In 1795, because of anxiety about the influx of politically dubious refugees from the European revolutions, the residence requirement for citizenship was raised to five years, and in 1798 it was raised again to fourteen. The Alien Act also allowed for the scrutiny of anyone deemed a possible enemy alien and for summary deportation. It was evidently John Adams's intention to deny the Federalists' opponents the support of immigrants whose more natural allegiance would have been to Jefferson's Democratic Republicans (and who presumably hadn't read
Notes on the State of Virginia
). Which is partly why in 1802 Jefferson, even as he prohibited the admission of foreign convicts, cut the residence requirement back to five years, with an obligation to declare the intention of seeking citizenship at least three years before obtaining it. And that is where the law has stood ever since.

The date of Jefferson's act is significant, though, for quite another reason: 1802 was also the year in which negotiations began in earnest
with Napoleon for the 828,000 square miles of territory that in the following year would pass to the United States. With the completion in April 1803 of the Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of so vast a territory—in effect its continental future—the United States abandoned precisely the tight little box of monocultural English politics, farming, laws, and religion in which Jay and Madison had wanted to confine it. Jefferson, on the other hand, stood (as he so often did) at the cliff-edge of a breathtaking gamble, his instinct for the spatial transformation of the country overcoming his cultural conservatism. Perhaps there might yet be a way for America to thrust itself into the alien body of Hispanic America and still produce Anglo-American issue.