The American Future (42 page)

In 1958, that was the way I saw America from afar, willing the number 226 to take a wrong turn down Cricklewood Lane and end up in Oklahoma: corn as high as an elephant's eye (I'd seen the show); a cloudless blue bowl of a sky; the whip-poor-wills doing whatever it was that whip-poor-wills did; prairie chickens ditto; a straight old empty road heading west to happiness.
Whooee!

I was right. If you want one word to describe the American state of
mind, it would be: “boundless”; the beckoning road trip, the shaking loose of fetters. Natural limits—mountains, rivers—have been there to be wondered at and then, in short order, crossed, forded, mapped, left behind. The country was invented to slip the bounds of parish, manor, estate; all the ancient jurisdictions of the Old World that cramped free movement. (In eighteenth-century France, for example, seasonal migrants needed papers signed by their parish priest to avoid the attention of the police.) America was about casting off the security of a nervously watchful church and state. Beginning with the moment you stepped on board and stared at the gray seawater out beyond the harbor, America told you to embrace the peril of unbounded space for the chance of starting over. In the Old World you knew your place; in the New World you made it. So American liberty has always been the liberty to move on. Whatever ails you, whatever has failed; whenever calamity dogs your heels or your allotted patch feels too small for your dreams, there's always the wide blue yonder, the prairie just over the next hill, waiting for your cattle or your hoe. Say howdy, give it a good poke, and up will pop your very own piece of plenty: a crop of corn, a magic glint in the stream, a gush of black gold. Come sundown you can rock on the porch and survey your little kingdom, the kingdom of the common man; your heart's content.

It was when eighteenth-century British governments decided that the line of the Allegheny Mountains would be the western limit of their American empire, any greater extent being expensively indefensible, that it doomed itself, irreversibly, to destruction. America has always been about the forward propulsion that will beat the confinement of the regulating state every time. Benjamin Franklin did his best to explain to friends and Parliament that the sovereign fact about America was territorial magnitude. It was, he wrote to his philosophical Scottish friend Lord Kames, “an immense country, favoured by Nature with all the advantages of climate, soil, great navigable rivers and lakes etc. and
must
become a great country, populous and mighty and will in less time than generally conceived, be able to shake off the shackles imposed on her.” “There appears everywhere an unaccountable penchant in all our people to move westward,” he wrote on another occasion, seeing in his mind's eye, even as he sat in his London house, the ax and the hoe, trees falling; deep woods cleared; the land put under the plow;
river valleys opening for traffic. But the lords of mercantile empire in London could not see it. For theirs was a calculus of national profits divided by the costs of defense and revenue collection. They were not much interested in the settlement business, except as a source of raw materials and a mart for British manufactures; and perhaps a sponge to draw up the “viler sort” of their own islands.

Continental North America was, then, a convenience (as distinct from the sugar islands of the Caribbean, which were a necessity). But if its value was not to be made worthless by the costs of perpetual warfare, it needed to stand on a fiscally defensible frontier. Nervousness about overreach elsewhere in the British Empire—in India in particular—affected decisions about America. In the official mind, pioneering was another name for strategic irresponsibility. But even as it tried to hold the line, the far-off government had no choice but to encourage some settlement on the western frontier, if only to preempt the French and protect the borders of British America from their soldiers and Indian allies. The snag was that there was always another interior line—the Mississippi, for example—which if taken and fortified by the enemy might yet put a chokehold on British America.

So British policy on the western frontier wavered between confinement and permissiveness. But in the end, American perception of territorial conservatism triggered the first revolution of disaffected real-estate agents who believed that the market for prime land must overcome geopolitical timidity. To map the backcountry had been to spin an investment. Washington's first career was as a land surveyor, and he had an almost mystical faith in the Ohio Valley as the crucible of American continental empire. For Franklin the Ohio Valley meant men and money, lots of both, and a nice cut for him.

In 1782, after the fighting had ended and backcountry land was open for sale, Franklin published
Information to Those Who Would Remove to America
, in which the cautionary note surrendered to the shameless come-on. After grandly disabusing potential immigrants of the easy availability of “profitable offices” and the myth, apparently widespread, that land and Negroes were given away free, Franklin made his beguiling pitch. “What are the advantages they may reasonably expect?” he asks. The first is that “Land being cheap in that Country, from the vast Forests still void of inhabitants, and not likely to be occu
pied in an Age to come, insomuch that the Propriety of an hundred acres of fertile soil full of Wood may be obtained near the Frontiers, in many places for Eight or Ten Guineas, hearty young Labouring Men who understand the Husbandry of Corn and Cattle…may easily establish themselves there. A little Money sav'd of the good Wages they receive there, while they work for others, enables them to buy the Land and begin their Plantation in which they are assisted by the Good Will of their Neighbours, and some Credit. Multitudes of poor People from England, Ireland, Scotland and Germany, have by this means in a few years become wealthy Farmers who, in their own Countries, where all the Lands are fully occupied…could never have emerged from the poor Condition where they were born.” To move west, Franklin implied, is to make money fast. He “personally knew” several people who bought large tracts of land on the western frontier of Pennsylvania for £10 per hundred acres and who, as the farmland boundary pushed west, sold the same land for £3 an acre: an American killing!

A generation later, in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville judged this “restless spirit” the great American peculiarity. No matter how prosperous the times, or how well the citizen might be doing, standing pat on what one had was out of the question for a true American. Dreading the possibility of loss, Americans were “forever brooding over advantages they do not possess,” compelled to find an expeditious way to something still better. Passive contentment was apparently not an American option. Tocqueville saw with his usual astuteness the tension in American life between settlement and stir-crazy impatience to be Getting On. They were, and are, two impulses in contention. On the one hand, there was the direction towards which the wagons rolled, the log cabin in the clearing; which as the land was opened and tilled, would give way to a picket-fenced yard and farmhouse. On the other hand, there was the irrepressible itch to be up and Improving. From the unresolved tension between the two instincts, Tocqueville thought, could come social madness: happiness as a malevolent will-o'-the-wisp, forever capering before the breathlessly pursuing Americans who were trying to catch it. How else to explain irrational habits that barely raised an eyebrow in America? “In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and sells it before the roof is on and lets it just as
the trees are coming into bearing…he settles in a place which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast expanse of the United States and he will travel 1,500 miles in a few days to shake off his happiness. Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which is forever on the wing.”

But America couldn't help itself. It was always moving toward Gatsby's “orgastic future,” signaled by the green light at the end of the dock. “It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further…And one fine morning—” Fitzgerald's boat, in the end is “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” But that end note of pessimism is tellingly misread by most of the high-school students assigned the book, at least according to the
New York Times.
In February 2008, the paper reported from a class of first-generation immigrant students at Boston Latin School, most of whom took the green light not as a tantalizing mirage, the glow that lit Gatsby's doom, but something like the opposite: a beacon of hope; their very own go signal. Jinghzao Wang, fourteen and a first-generation immigrant, told the
Times
that she had adopted Fitzgerald's green light as a symbol of her determination to get into Harvard.

You can see her point. No one has yet won an election in the United States by lecturing America about limits, even if common sense suggests such homilies may be overdue. In 1893, the Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner noted that the superintendent of the U.S. Census had declared that since the “unsettled” area of the country was so broken, there could hardly be said, for the purposes of the census, to be a frontier any longer. Turner took that as momentous, the end of the “first epoch” in American history. It was, he lamented, an end of repeated beginnings, since with each westward push, American society had had to start all over, thus giving the nation its bracing sense of perpetual youth. But all was not entirely lost. Three years later, in 1896, in an essay called “The Problem of the West,” Turner prophesied that some sort of robust American response to the closing of the frontier would shape what he called a “new Americanism”:
a “drastic assertion of national government and imperial expansion under a popular hero.” The frontier had given birth to democracy. Would its closing give birth to something more startling? “The forces of reorganization are turbulent,” he wrote darkly, “and the nation seems like a witches' kettle.”

Each time the United States has experienced an unaccustomed sense of claustrophobia, new versions of frontier reinvigoration have been sold to the electors as national tonic. In the 1890s, Teddy Roosevelt's muscular imperialism, the answer to Turner's prayers, was meant to get the country out of its end-of-frontier funk. And if the moving frontier could no longer generate democracy in, say, Montana or New Mexico, then perhaps it could do so in Slovakia, Latvia, or Cuba. That at any rate was the hope of Wilsonian internationalism; the irrepressible urge to pioneer through politics. In 1960, in the midst of the cold war, experienced once more as a constriction of national energy, Kennedy's inaugural speech promised another breakout. America's back was no longer against any sort of wall, Berlin or otherwise. It was Up and Doing; it would “go anywhere” and “pay any price” to defend freedom. Anywhere came to include the Newest Frontier of the moon, on which the astronauts of Apollos 15 to 17 took the ultimately meaningless road trip, cruising about the lunar surface in their big-wheeled buggy looking for cool rocks.

The great exception to the obligations of optimism was Jimmy Carter. His fate in the election of 1980 against the unshakably sunny Ronald Reagan became an object lesson in the penalties of candor. Carter gave no fewer than four television speeches on the subject of energy, which, prophetically, he saw as the arbiter of security. From April 1977 to his most dramatic speech in mid-July 1979 setting out a national energy policy designed to reduce dependence on foreign oil by a quota on imports, conservation, and tax incentives for investment in alternative fuels, his television audience went south (eighty million to thirty million). Press reaction to the extraordinary speech of 15 July, in which the born-again Baptist read admonitions to himself from perplexed citizens before he asked America to face the facts about oil dependence, was hostile. The
LA Times
took the president to task for “scolding his fellow citizens like a pastor his profligate flock.” William Buckley's
National Review
drolly confessed its surprise to discover that God was a member of the Carter Cabinet. On the
other hand, popular reaction to the speech as measured by opinion polls was positive, the president's ratings rising by 11 percent. The several disasters that overwhelmed the Carter presidency—not least the Iran hostage crisis, severe inflation, the gradual but unmistakable collapse of the president's own capacity to call on the country in ways that would balance frankness with optimism—all put the prescient courage and clarity of his energy policy under a cloud. In retrospect it became just another item on the preacher's sin list for which the solution was collective repentance.