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The
power of modern America was built on the ruins
of institutionalised
slavery;
the
post-bellum generation they called ‘Big Money’
energised
the country, galvanised
its
desires, and began to glorify the enduring
mercenary strains in
American life.
Sarah
Churchwell,
‘It was no good just blaming
fascists, she concluded. ‘I accuse us.
I accuse the twentieth century
America. I accuse me.’
Dorothy Thompson, American
journalist
In William Faulkner’s 1929
novel The Sound and the Fury the
protagonist, Quentin Compson, has trouble living in time. He believes
in a world in which America is great. It was once. In that America
everything is as it should be, everyone plays a predetermined role.
But the novel’s opening sentence shows the protagonist speaking
of an ominous awakening. “When the shadow of the sash appeared
on the curtain it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was
in time again, hearing the watch.”
His
grandfather’s chain watch. And he recalls his father handing
the watch over to him, after having long experienced the betrayal.
Succumbing to the seductiveness of alcohol, he talks to Quentin of
“folly and despair.”
“[V]ictory
is an illusion of philosophers.”
In
the “shadow of the sash,” Quentin tries to forget the
watch only to find it around his neck once he steps outside. On this
second day of June 1910, he’s convinced time, represented in
that sun above which denies him the light of day, denies him the
right to be Quentin Compson, grandson of General Compson.
Time
is one long nightmare, lived in the shadows of what was once great.
There
will be the placing of “two six-pound flat-iron weighs”
under a bridge in shadow. He’s seen his reflection in the
waters of that river. He’s seen himself merge with his own
shadow. “The displacement of water is equal to the something of
something.”
The
22-year old Quentin is conscious of time passing, of time having
passed, of time approaching, as he walks around Boston. The first of
his family to attend college, Harvard, no less, will be no more. And
he remembers the discussions around the piecemeal selling of the
Compson estate for college. For survival. Aristocracy no more.
The
northern sun, appearing at a “slant,” mocks him as it
reveals black people conversing and walking about.
Quentin
tries to escape the streets by taking a train ride, but there appears
along side the train more black people. He thinks they are looking up
at him—how could it be perceived any other way. So the young
rebel leans over his window to toss coins down to the blacks who
follow the movement of the train to catch the coins. And it feels
familiar, satisfying, even if he can’t recall ever when he had
done this before.
But
whatever was conjured into existence briefly dissolved again. The
shadows never leave him, even in this moment of familiarity. Black
people are no more his to own than is the sun in the sky above them.
As
the day progresses, the sun slates until it slides away from him,
until, for Quentin, shadows appear on the sun itself. Tracks,
bridges, clocks materialize to his left and right, in front of him
and behind him. Bells ring from church steeples. By sunset, he and
the sun’s shadow are one, “and after a while the flat
irons would come floating up” from under the bridge where he
hid them earlier in the day.
Quentin
Compson imagines blacks unfettered from the myth of white
superiority; he sees himself chained to its absences. To shackle the
blacks to that myth of racial purity would be preferable to living in
what another incredulous character of Faulkner’s labeled, an
“unbearable reality” (Absalom, Absalom!).
What’s
to be done if not return to the river? Anger has called him.
This
story about Quentin Compson came to mind while I was reading Sarah
Churchwell’s Behold, America: The Entangled History
of ‘America First’ and ‘The American Dream’
(2018). He’s
haunted by what he perceives to be a nightmare, personal as it is
social, cultural. A defeated Confederate general, grandpa Compson,
looking on as enslaved blacks walk off Southern plantations.
I
thought of the young Quentin. Here’s a man unwilling to live
with the reality of human suffering, of injustice. Here the literary
representation of a man for whom the time is never right so long as
racial hierarchy isn’t the law of the land in order to
guarantee the social, political, and economic rights of white
Americans. Without the legalization of racial hierarchy America is no
more a paradise but a living hell. A nightmare.
Behold, America is
a reading that calls to mind Faulkner’s famous observation
about the past, which isn’t a matter of the simple
re-occurrence of events. Rather, its as if we are in a continuum,
contrary to all reason, all illusions of time passing. “The
past is never dead. It’s not even past.” No amount of
“flat-iron weights” resolves the way Americans entangle
the “American dream” and “America first”
(illusions) with what Churchwell calls the three fates: capitalism,
democracy, and race (equally illusions, useful to manipulate human
relations and resources into anything but an ordering life into a
just society. Truly, a nightmarish existence for everyone. But the
real nightmare is the continuation, generation after generation, by a
consensus, in the practice of cruelty and indifference toward the
plight of other human beings.
***
To
the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) in the 1920s, the “American dream”
was slipping away with every appearance of an “uppity”
black. Despite the increase in the spectacle of “economically
motivated” violence against blacks, including gruesome
lynchings and the forced return of blacks “to work in the
cotton fields of South Carolina,” it was not enough to
discourage blacks from walking about, unfettered—as if free
people. Lynching becomes a means to eradicate the problem of black
people talking “wild,” gambling, or arguing about wages
and debts, not to mention some possessing the audacity to circulated
literature. Aligning itself with the political front, first with
President Wilson and then the Republican candidate for president
Warren G. Harding, the KKK adopts “America first.”
A
“fig leaf,” writes Churchwell. The move toward “America
first” is a way for the KKK to brandish an anti-immigrant
rhetoric, the vocalization of a normalized xenophobia, one “socially
and politically acceptable” while serving as a cover for “a
vigilante racism that was (at least officially) not, as they
protested that they were purging ‘alien elements,’ and
that they had nothing against black people.” Sounds familiar.
And yet, the victims of vigilantism were rarely foreigners.
Employing
a euphemism, the KKK brands “the wrong kind of American”
as anti-American. And by “the wrong kind” the KKK meant
the “hyphenated kind,” writes Churchwell, “the kind
with alien ideas, an alien name, an alien religion, or of an alien
race.” (Let’s not forget how “the wrong kind,”
the hyphenated identity troubles many Americans today. Then as now,
however, some Americans are not troubled by a call for borders and
walls. “America first” implied then as now “pure
blooded”). A brand of nationalism for white Anglo-Americans, in
other words.
Churchwell
notes the concern of Americans who feared the “one-drop rule”
wasn’t enough to prevent a black person from passing as white.
After a rumor became a national hysterical debate about the racial
make-up of the presidential candidate, Harding, leaders called for
the disqualification of any presidential candidate who isn’t
“one hundred per cent American.” Harding passed the test
and became President Harding, America first all the way! One
hundred per cent American. “The
pure blood of the white man,” possessing a long cultural
ancestry that could be proven most obviously by “splendid
patriotism” and “high achievement.”
Jews,
blacks, Indigenous, Latinx people needn’t apply!
“From
the ‘pure Americanism’ of ‘America first’ to
‘the pure blood of the white man’ in a few easy
rhetorical steps,” writes Churchwell. Fascism in America is
easily attainable.
And
indeed the fascists boarding ships to arrive in America wasn’t
necessary; Americans donned black shirts and sewed on their chests
swastika patches and, engaging in the usual brand of American racism,
as fascists, white
Americans attacked
black Americans. It’s not long before it becomes necessary to
disempower the feared—creating and developing Jim Crow
legislation to force “segregation” between black and
white people. Make the South, at least, great again!
America
merges with its own shadow. Don’t mind that the American
fascists’ pamphlets denounce communists. Look to the banners
that read: “Back to the cotton patch, Nigger - it needs you; we
don’t!”
A
decline in KKK membership, opened the door to a more virile grouping
of the anti-democratic. The leader of the American blackshirts,
Churchwell writes, was a former member of the KKK!
The
“American dream,” first version, intended to
“differentiate American democracy from totalitarian or
authoritarian projects and from the prejudices and racism,”
Churchwell argues, drives the country to fascism.
A
native of Chicago, Churchwell, a professor of American literature,
currently teaching the humanities in London, gives us a mosaic of
literary voices, including those of Walter Lippmann, Dorothy
Thompson, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, Faulkner,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, and W.E.B. DuBois. Of DuBois, she quotes: “the
question of why socialism never took firm hold in America can be
answered in once word: race.’” As in “race”--imaginary
but the emerging fascist regime in Germany managed to coerce a
majority of German citizens to acknowledge that fellow Jewish
citizens were sprouting horns. Images of cartoon-ish heads with horns
were painted on the sides of buildings in Germany—buildings
soon to be no longer owned by or occupied by Jews. Behold,
America exhibits a grainy,
black-and-white photo of “the lynching of Lige Daniels…
Texas, 3 August 1920.” The “difference” between the
man hanging above the crowd of whites, including children, is that
matter of “race.”
Did
I mention the rallies? Pro-Nazi rallies. Rallies south and north of
the Mason-Dixon line. Rallies sponsored by Friends of New Germany by
the 1930s. And these rallies were not just in the South: New York’s
Madison Square Garden saw plenty of action, including, Churchwell
writes, a rally at the Garden “authorised by Rudolf Hess and
officially recognized by Hitler.” The rallies are as
antisemitic as they are racist.
By
the 1930s, Hitler has advocates in the free world!
As
Churchwell writes, the original meaning of the “American dream”
gave voice “to principled appeals for a more generous way of
life.” It was a term used to “describe a political ideal,
not an economic one; and when it was used to describe an economic
aspiration, it was with the pejorative meaning of ‘dream’
as illusion, not ideal.”
In
other words, the “American dream” didn’t mean get
rich quick. “The American dream was about how to stop bad
multimillionaires, not how to become one.” The “American
dream” discouraged the multimillionaires who challenged the
idea of “principles” and democracy in the 1900s.
According to newspapers of the day, this moneyed class desired
nothing short of “special privileges.” They want to be
treated like “an elite class,” and, if given power the
wealthy will only “wreck havoc on democracy without
consequences.”
Behold,
America is a page-turner. But we
know we’ll not reach an end on the finally page of the book.
Before the end, however, I’m at a lost as to why Churchwell
mentions the Indigenous Americans only two or three times. Briefly at
that. She references the Founding Fathers as first responsible for
giving voice to the “American dream.” Even if the phrase
appears nowhere in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander
Hamilton, James Madison, Washington Irving, Herman Melville or Mark
Twain, she argues, the above notables and others of their ilk wanted
no part of promoting “economic” success. Yet, the
Indigenous are steadily being removed from their land! “This
land is my land...” Is a
quite dreamy folks song! The conquest of the Indigenous people is
tremendously profitable for America’s dream of “ownership”
and the future of American industry.
Jefferson
didn’t “hire” hundreds of gardeners at Monticello;
he engaged in the acquisition of enslaved blacks just as he did land
and a house and a wife and, yes, an enslaved black mistress. And
Hawthorne, disgusted by what he witnessed when he traveled south,
returns to his home in New England, shuts his doors, and creates
tales about the haunting of mansions, and of the families residing
uneasily within them.
The
Founding Fathers owned plantations on which toiled enslaved black
people -for the economic benefit of not just the individual
slaveholder but also for the nation’s progress and rise in the
world. Even the good version of the “American dream”
served the United States up to a point.
So
where are the Indigenous people while the Founding Fathers calibrate
the tenets of the “American dream,” the one standing for
principles and “social justice”? The original inhabitants
of the New World, from north to south, were Indigenous people - not
European immigrants. How did the European’s imagined nightmare
sit with the savage destruction of native land, livestock, homes,
families? The conditions of Indigenous reservations, the memory of
forced removal and long treks to nowhere, the memory of children
separated from mothers and fathers. Abused and mistreated because
America had a dream, the memory of which Faulkner’s
quintessential slaveholder once shared with General Compson. In that
dream, a design, really, worthy of the established order of things:
“‘a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally
of course of wife.’” The slaveholder thinks: because it
seems improbable that the dream ever happened, maybe it didn’t.
Maybe he had given 50 years of his life to the “‘design,’”
the “‘plan’” that, in the end, it may “‘just
as well never have existed at all.’”
Enslaved
black people. Not Indigenous people. After Reconstruction, if not
before, blacks become as expendable as the Indigenous people. That’s
the problem of reading while black: it’s difficult to allow the
sun to slide away!
The nightmare
haunts this book. In Behold, America, Americans,
former European immigrants, fight to the death often in pursuit of
what they desire - the house, the plantation, the submissive black
and Indigenous, the migrant workers, the family, and the wife - but
not the democracy for all. The
American dream of democracy can’t exist for all! Then - was
“democracy” ever a goal to organize American society and
structure its institutions?
In
fact, we aren’t talking about “democracy,” at least
not the way I’m reading this book. Fearful Americans,
disappointed Americans, greedy Americans, mean “dream”
not “democracy.” So it’s the “American dream”
that’s dead, once again. As if it never existed. And for some
Americans, it never has! Asks the Indigenous people, for openers.
Churchwell
weaves the now of a Trump, announcing the death of the American
dream. Don’t worry! America needs me to revive it.
Me, the self-made billionaire. And
by “American dream,” he means the latter version, the one
in which it’s required of the nation and everyone in it to turn
inward. When the First Lady, Melania Trump, exhibited her “I
really don’t care, do U?” jacket, the sentiment had
already gained ground again in the run up to a Trump victory. A
woman in the building where I
live, purchased and then wore a sweatshirt that read: “I
understand. But I don’t care.”
With
“America first,” there’s no talk of organizing to
effect policy to confront the global
eco-devastation already underway. Americans stuck on displaying their
anger over “race” and the dissolving of the racial
hierarchy would rather focus their attention of the Second Amendment.
Behold, America!
The
racist dream of building walls and fueling American fascism. As
historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in 21 Lessons for the
21st Century (2018),
the imminent problems threatening the lives of Americans in the
US--”nuclear war,” “ecological collapse,”
“technological disruption,”--threatens all life forms on
the planet.
So
how will “the American dream” (get rich frenzy) and
“American first” (nationalism/fascism) address any one of
those global problems?
Reading
List
Sherwood
Anderson, Windy McPherson’s Son
Gloria
Anzaldúa,
Borderlands/LaFrontera
James
Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
Charles
Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition
Theodore
Dreiser, American Tragedy and
Twelve Men
W.E.B.
DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880
Sylviane
A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in
the Americas
William
Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Darlene
Clarke Hines and Kathleen Thompson, A Shinning Thread of
Hope: The History of Black Women in American
Sinclair
Lewis, Babbitt and It
Can’t Happen Here
F.
Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Walter
Lipmann, Men of Destiny, Public Opinion and
Drift and Mastery
John
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Albert
McCoy, Policing America’s Empire
Robert
J. Miller, Native America, Discovery and Conquered
Heather
Cox Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road
to An American Massacre
John
Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
and The Grapes of Wrath
Tanya
Talaga, Seven Feathers Fallen
William
R. Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee: The Old South and
American National Character
Sinclair
Upton, 100%: The Story of A Patriot
Ida
B. Wells, Crusade for Justice
James
Whitman, Hitler’s American Model
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