The American Future (51 page)

Until somewhere around midnight, when at a fell swoop, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio all went blue, and a great cork popped from the pent-up city. Block parties improvised, Washingtonians usually not given to dancing in the streets did just that. Hip-hop and salsa ruled on the damp sidewalks of Adams Morgan. All around the cities of the United States, an effusion of relief and almost incredulous glee poured through crowds, as if the country that had not quite dared to believe that it could be possible for someone so unlike the usual specifications for occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would nonetheless be taking up residence there, come 20 January. At long last, the ignominious betrayal of the American promise, inherent in slavery, had been effaced; the moral vileness of segregation wiped clean. Perfect strangers in Washington coffee shops and diners high-fived and hugged. Around the world, disbelief was swamped by joyous relief. The America the world wanted but assumed it had forever lost had returned. The Statue of Liberty was no longer a bad joke. Conceding, John McCain looked happy for the first time since he accepted the Republican nomination and went out of his way to garland the victor with heartfelt appreciation, as if he had been secretly wanting to do that for some time. Even the incumbent, whose presidency was being repudiated, understood that America had suddenly become better for what had happened and had the decency, in so many words, to say so.

At the Lincoln Memorial the following morning, every so often, people would arrive with bunches of flowers and set them at the foot
of the statue. Some were paying homage to the memory of Martin Luther King and the day when his rhetoric rang out down the Mall like a great cathedral bell, calling to God for a time he said when the promise of America would finally be redeemed. Some were certainly acknowledging the stand Lincoln himself had taken and the mortal price he and the country had paid for it. Altogether, there was a mysterious but unmistakably budding sense of reconnection; a country remade through a simple, majestic act of popular will.

Acknowledging the magnitude of the disaster that has overcome the economy, and the frightening scale of what needs to be accomplished to restore even a semblance of normality to its prospects, I remain convinced that the American future, shaped by the epic of its past, will turn fair once again. On a London street six weeks after the election, a tall young man approached me, smiling. He was film-star handsome, in a purely American way: square jawed and open faced. He reminded me he had been my student many years before, at Harvard, right at the outset of the Reagan presidency. He had done all the things, chalked up all the points he had needed to be an American success. The doors of corporate law had been thrown open. He could be a deal maker. But, he said, he was going into government; into one of the institutions that would determine where the country's money went. He felt good about that, and so did I, since, anecdotally, I am hearing this news from all over the place: an unapologetic return by smart women and men, in their thirties, taking pay cuts to work for the people's government. It is as if a call had been answered, even though no one has yet thought to make it; a call to service that has been made so often in the American past and will be again, if the republic stays true to itself. So how bad can the American future be, when it is in their strong, young, hardworking hands?

Part One: American War

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Chernow, Ron.
Alexander Hamilton.
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Crackel, Theodore J.
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Ellis, Joseph.
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Oxford University Press, New York, 1974.

Faust, Drew Gilpin.
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Knopf, New York, 2008.

Giunta, Mary A., ed.
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University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2006.

Hancock, Cornelia.
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University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1937.

Harper, John Lamberton.
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Hofstadter, Richard.
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Kagan, Robert.
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Kaplan, Justin.
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Kramer, Paul A.
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McDonald, Robert M. S., ed.
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Morris, Edmund.
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Onuf, Peter S.
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Phibbs, Brendan.
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Samet, Elizabeth D. “Great Men and Embryo Caesars: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the Figures-in-Arms.” In Robert M. S. McDonald,
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University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville and London, 2004.

Silbey, David J.
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Yalom, Marilyn, photographs by Reid Yalom.
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Part Two: American Fevor

Ahlstrom, Sydney E.
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Billingsley, Andrew.
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Blue, Frederick J.
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Boles, John B.
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Boyer, Paul S.
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Bremer, Lenni, ed.
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Cross, Whitney R.
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Dreisbach, Daniel L.
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Fairclough, Adam.
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. Penguin, New York and London, 2002.

Finney, Charles G.
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Frey, Sylvia, and Betty Wood.
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University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1998.

Higginson, May Thacher, ed.
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. Da Capo Press, New York, 1969.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth.
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Hofstadter, Richard.
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Lambert, Frank.
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Levy, Leonard W.
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Marsh, Charles.
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. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1997.

Matthews, Donald G.
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University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1977.

McKivigan, John, and Mitchell Snay, eds.
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University of Georgia Press, Athens and London, 1998.

Meacham, Jon.
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Morgan, Edmund S.
Roger Williams: The Church and the State
. W. W. Norton, New York, 2007.

Noll, Mark A.
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Noonan, John T.
The Lustre of our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom.
University of California Press, Berkeley, and London, 1998.

Peterson, Merrill, and Robert C. Vaughan, eds.
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Raboteau, Albert J.
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Raboteau, Albert J.
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Snay, Mitchell.
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Williams, Heather Andrea.
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Wilson, Charles Reagan.
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Yellin, John Fagan, and John C. Van Horne, eds.
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. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1994.

Part Three: What Is an American?

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Allen, Gay Wilson, and Roger Asselineau.
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Anbinder, Tyler.
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Bailyn, Bernard.
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Baldwin, Neil.
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De Voto, Bernard Augustine.
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Francaviglia, Richard V., and Douglas W. Richmond, eds.
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. Texas Christian University Press, Fort Worth, 2000.

Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City
. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1970

Gómez, Laura E.
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. New York University Press, New York, 2007.

Gonzalez, Gilbert G., and Paul A. Fernandez.
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Handlin, Oscar.
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. Little, Brown, Boston, 1973.

Hardin, Stephen L.
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Haynes, Samuel W., and Christopher Morris, eds.
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Higham, John.
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Hudson, Linda S.
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. Texas State Historical Association, Austin, 2001.

Kwong, Peter, and Dwsanka Miscevic.
Chinese America: The Untold Story of America's Oldest New Community
. New Press, New York, 2005.

Lee, Erika.
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. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2003.

Martínez, Oscar J.
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University of Arizona Press, Tucson and London, 1994.

Massey, Douglas S.,ed.
New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration.
Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2008.

Montejano, David.
Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986
. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1987.

Ngai, Mae M.
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.
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Olmsted, Frederick Law.
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Pfaelzer, Jean.
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Philbrick, Thomas.
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Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén G. Rumbaut.
Immigrant America: A Portrait
. University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 2006.

Saxton, Alexander.
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Solnit, Rebecca.
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.
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St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector.
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Telles, Edward E., and Vilma Ortiz, eds.
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Truett, Samuel.
Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the US–Mexico Borderlands
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Truett, Samuel, and Elliott Young, eds.
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Waldinger, Roger, ed.
Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America
. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001.

Watts, Stephen.
The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century.
Knopf, New York, 2005.

Weber, David J.
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. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1982.