I first arrived in America from Britain in the middle of a hot August night in 1974. There was nobody to meet me–arrangements had gone awry–but a student returning from a year in Paris invited me home. We were soon in Great Neck, on New York’s Long Island. I was shown to my room, slept, and then went downstairs for breakfast with my hosts (whose name was Cohen, and whose address I promptly lost: ff you read this, thanks). It was a classic August day, dripping with humidity. We were on a patio, beyond which a perfect lawn swooped down to a pool, and then to a dock, and then to a blue-gray slab of water, shimmering in a heat haze: Long Island Sound. I was almost precisely on the spot which, in “The Great Gatsby,” Scott Fitzgerald described as a “fresh, green breast of the world,” which is just how it felt. Then came breakfast: huge jugs of coffee; bagels (bagels?); gallons of orange juice. I felt like a horn of plenty had been emptied into my lap, and I’ve never lost the feeling.
“Plenty” is a dangerous quality on which to base one’s love for somewhere, It can sound grasping, as if the only true measure of a place is what it can give you: the more the better. Yet the idea of plenty captures America’s enduring appeal better than anything else. “Whatever it is,” Bill Bennett once said to me, “America has more of it: more good, more bad, more beauty, more ugliness, more everything.” Crucially, more space: the magical emptiness of the intermountain West still fills me with awe.
Paradoxically, that endowment of “more” has proved tricky. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Americans thank divine providence for their good fortune, rather than hard work or, as the Australians do, dumb luck. In “People of Plenty,” a brilliantly prophetic book written in 1954, David Potter warned that America’s success bore within it the seeds of its own destruction. Americans, Potter argued, had grown to expect that life would keep on getting better–which would leave them at a loss when, as was bound to happen, their luck ran out. And, of course, luck did nm out. In the awful five years between 1963 and 1968, political stability and social cohesion both collapsed, and then the economy stopped growing at its post-1945 rate. My arrival in the United States coincided with the end of the long postwar boom, and in large measure American opinion has never come to terms with that truth.
This inability to cope with something less than unbounded plenty has left America a place strangely unable to see its own strengths, with a mood which runs from dyspepsia to anger and then paranoia. In 21 years, nothing has so upset me as the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, as the television screens filled with first, those who had grown to hate their government, and then with their sharp-suited apologists. Yet–and perhaps immigrants understand this better than natives there is no government on earth so hemmed in by constitutive rules which limit its power to do harm. The stability of American institutions should be the wonder of the world.
And, to a large extent, is. Immigration is the acid test of a society’s character; people do not immigrate to lands where they will be less free, less able to realize their dreams, By that measure, modern America is a startling success. The success, to be sure, has come at a price; America is a more messy, Babel of a place than it was in the 1950s. My children have friends whose parents were born in India, Turkey, Guatemala, France, Ireland and other countries too numerous to list. This delights me. In the next century, everywhere is going to be multiethnic–it’s just that in this respect (as in so many others) America has got there first. My kids are learning, better than they would anywhere else, what it means to grow up in an ethnic mosaic with shared values.
Shared values? Aren’t we supposed to be “Balkanizing,” or something? Oh, gosh. America has a remarkable unity on the things that really matter. In May I asked my 89-year-old aunt, visiting America for the first time, what had most impressed her. “They love their country,” she said (as I knew she would).
This Independence Day, I’ll be on Long Island Sound once more, on the “most domesticated body of saltwater in the western hemisphere” (Fitzgerald again, inevitably). There’ll be barbecues and flags and fireworks and ice cream (how sensible to have a national day in high summer). I will think no great, solemn thoughts; Independence Day is too much fun for that. But at some point I will allow myself an old wish: that native-born Americans could have as much confidence in their nation as those of us who willingly came here from elsewhere. We are indeed a people of plenty: why can’t we enjoy it?
