Identity crisis
BENJAMIN HOUSTON is impressed by a timely history of two slogans that have shaped debates about the American nation
Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream by Sarah Churchwell Bloomsbury, 384 pages, £20
History books overtly crafted in response to pressing present-day issues are a mixed bag. They often lapse into either reductionistic polemics or laboured narratives. Sarah Churchwell has instead provided us with a book that is genuinely timely and broadly insightful about the past, with neither characteristic doing a disservice to the other. In Behold, America – which she calls an extended “genealogy of national conversations” – Churchwell traces the backstory of two phrases central to American identity and political discourse: ‘the American Dream’ and ‘America First’. The latter, of course, is rather superficially identified with the US’s isolationist stance during the First World War. But Churchwell eagerly traces how the phrase was always contested, becoming a catchphrase or reference for varied groups of people with diverse motives – including, among others, the Ku Klux Klan.
The more amorphous ‘American Dream’, however – today equated with the siloed comforts of typical US suburbanism – was actually first used in exactly the opposite sense. Conceived as a warning against rampant capitalism, the phrase was meant as a moral appeal for Americans to protect opportunity for all, rather than facilitate the ascendance of a few. That such a central notion to the American sense of self has morphed so dramatically is telling. In tracing the origins of these terms further back than most do, and charting their evolving twists and turns amid the fierce debates of what those terms should mean, Churchwell provides a mirror to American history itself.
What joins these two phrases together – and gives this book a looming importance for today – is Donald Trump, who used both these phrases in his campaign and presidential inauguration. In personifying this history with Trump, Churchwell gives this history an urgency for now. But that is not just a narrative strategy – it is a reminder that fascist tendencies, white supremacy, and economic and political exploitation have always been firm muscles supporting the dark underbelly of American society.
Churchwell ably mixes the crushing weight of numerous examples with
‘ The American Dream’ was first used as a warning against rampant capitalism
engrossing side-turns into American literature and lashings of prescient journalists Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Thompson. She favours elegant parallels neatly juxtaposed with an occasional arch observation.
The book’s salient reminder is that the American values of liberty, equality and justice usually work at crosspurposes to each other rather than in harmony. Rarely does a book speak so compellingly to the present moment while also narrating a wider history in such a direct, purposeful, and necessary way.