Giving thanks for America’s pioneering spirit

In July of 1931, Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, set out to fly to the Orient. Four years earlier, Lindbergh had flown alone across the Atlantic Ocean, a Homeric odyssey.

Their route together that summer would take them from North Haven, Maine, through Canada to Alaska, Siberia, China and Japan. Aviation was still young, and the flight was perilous. They were mariners of the skies.

When they reached Ottawa, they dined with a company of aviators, travellers, explorers, meteorologists, scientists and surveyors, who, Anne recalled, “knew Northern Canada as no other group in the world.”

Predictably, with this expertise came advice from the Canadians to the Americans — and an object lesson, perhaps, in the differences in national character.

Lindbergh wanted to fly to Alaska via Hudson Bay, the shortest route. His hosts resisted, arguing that there were few settlements to stop at along the way. There were swamps, tides, quicksand and mosquitoes. The magnetic pole would fool them and banks of fog would blind them.

Lindbergh’s route would be risky. Theirs was prudent. But he rejected “organized air routes.” He wanted to mark his position and mark his destination, draw a straight line between the two and just go.

“I would rather prepare for the difficulties,” he told them. In counselling caution, the Canadians were sensible. In following instinct, the Americans were audacious. Peter C. Newman’s comparison endures: We are a nation of life-insurers. They are a nation of risk-takers.

We are both successful. But our equanimity and complacency make us a good country, while their restlessness and curiosity make them a great country. It is fashionable today in Canada to lament the decline of the United States. Canadians, with their capacity for envy, resentment and schadenfreude, enter each example in their ledger of lament.

God knows, America has its afflictions in 2018: a mercurial, ignorant president; a contagion of gun violence; a reign of fire and flood; a broad income inequity; a swelling distemper in public life; a vulgarity and vanity in popular culture; a broken criminal-justice system; and a loss of faith in institutions, including the media.

None of this is new. All are a part of America. But it is only one part. For all their flaws, Americans are a people of resiliency, decency and generosity. Lindbergh’s America settles a continent, pioneers flight, explores space, maps the human body, cures disease, splits the atom, invents the light bulb and builds the Interstate Highway System. It dares greatly, which is why it alters the course of both world wars, develops the Marshall Plan and casts the postwar liberal international order.

It fails greatly, too. Lindbergh’s America First is ridden with anxiety and prejudice. It evokes genocide, slavery and segregation, the attachment to guns and money in politics, the folly of Vietnam and Iraq.

Canada does many things right: open immigration, affordable public education, universal health care, gun control. We are good at banking, communications and compromise. It’s why we reject the Winter Olympic Games in Calgary, we refuse to rebuild 24 Sussex Drive, and we give less to aid abroad and charity at home.

Americans are profligate, flashy and showy, with a love of display. They are wildly creative and industrious. This is why they have the Hudson River School, the Chicago School, and the New School for Social Research.

It isn’t just that we’re a fraction their size. We are not world-beaters in innovation like Scandinavia and Germany. We lack an instinct for excellence and are comfortable with mediocrity. We accept bad highways, antiquated trains, middling health care, ugliness in our cities and public works timetables that rest between not yet and not ever.

We prefer the road well travelled, rutted and pockmarked, charmingly with a covered bridge. We will get there — yes, we will — but we will learn less and discover little. We like authority and conformity.

The Americans dare. They desire. Their way is often stormy, messy and reckless, but they create. On their Thanksgiving, we give thanks for America.