Here’s how America First could work to benefit us all
Twelve years ago I ate lunch in a Tokyo bistro and heard on the music sound track one word rise again and again over the clatter of diners. The voice belonged to a lady from Detroit who had been a girl in Memphis, Aretha Franklin, and the single word in her song piercing the restaurant din in clear and true American English was this: Freedom.
The next day would bring Japan an important anniversary commemorating those who perished after a single U.S. Army B-29 long-range bomber incinerated Hiroshima. Tokyo is famously proper. No one stares at Americans. My host, a Japanese auto executive, paid the exorbitant bill and, if he sensed any irony, politely said nothing about a woman longing for freedom in a land that once had enslaved her people and bombed his.
I doubt he felt any irony. I know I didn’t. I felt proud.
Aretha, Elvis, Stax, soul, jazz, the music of Memphis and the Delta are America’s authentic voice, spreading around the world an enduring idea of free and egalitarian people. It is not that Americans are this way. They aspire to be. Sometimes they succeed. They call this American exceptionalism.
It means a girl from 406 Lucy in South Memphis can make a living singing hard truths. She can make a fortune, be heard even in a society that once forced 75,000 unarmed enemy soldiers down a long jungle road. Only a few thirsty Americans survived. They named their ordeal the Bataan death march.
We won the war. When we did we bought almost every clock, transistor radio, television, integrated circuit and automobile Japan could send us. We call this trade.
And it has brought the world to the point where Aretha Franklin can serenade Tokyo diners, while Japanese tourists routinely dine in Memphis on the Rendezvous’ ribs. This is a world at peace.
America First
President Donald Trump returned to his America First theme last week in a speech to Congress. Pro-trade advocates again aired concerns. They worry of lost sales, import walls, perhaps a slide back into the trade wars that teed up World War II.
Trump is right on this: Parts of our country are hollow. Jobs, skills, ambition and confidence are eroded. Anxiety ripples through the wider culture, glimpsed in books like the 2015 novel about World War III titled “Ghost Fleet.”
This piece of fiction stirred talk in business circles by pointing out the importance of Wal-Mart in a deindustrialized nation fending off China in war. The Arkansas retailer was the only large enterprise able to quickly ramp up vast munitions production by organizing its legion of suppliers.
Wal-Mart: Our new secret sauce. Times have changed. When U.S. Admiral Chester Nimitz reached Tokyo Bay in 1945, the U.S. Navy had 6,000 commissioned ships. Today, Trump favors increasing the fleet by 29 percent to 350 ships. That’s stirred controversy: It’s unaffordable and unnecessary, they say, in an age when cyberwar will rule.
We fret about China, taxes, obsess over ridehailing apps, shopping online and the new world of robots and machine intelligence. What we need are businesses that re-skill our people and build our society. We can still trade with the world. We can't trade if we are broke.
If Trump can get America First right, we’d get entrepreneurs willing to fight imports head on and in the process create new jobs. To do that we need what we have too few of now -- risk-takers, builders who can expand the tax base, people like the late John Correnti.
He was in the news the other day.
Arkansas exceptionalism
You might not see the connection between an Arkansas Delta factory launched by Correnti before he died and a near mystic thread in our society, though one lady did.
“I read your article about the new steel mill in Osceola and I must say you made my day,” her email says. “I love reading and hearing about American exceptionalism.’’
She said she was 77 and I would guess if you asked Memphians half her age what she meant, many would ask, "Exception to what?"
That she saw in John a pioneer wasn’t unusual. His career ran against the grain. Even as the U.S. steel industry foundered under imports, he built steel mills in the United States, including the new Big River Steel in Osceola, Arkansas.
Connecting the pioneer to American exceptionalism, though, this thought rings true even though
it is not immediately obvious. America's Constitution establishes our freedom. What we do with that freedom is something else. I'd say to see American exceptionalism takes a certain frame of thought, maybe a certain age.
If you watched that TV show set in the 1960s, "Mad Men," this was the reader’s generation, an era often dismissed as cynical, violent, maniacal with war, riots and assassinations. It was also something else. Never was there a civilization as wealthy as the Americans in the 1960s. An average factory hand earned what would be $42 per hour expressed in the buying power of today's dollar.
For the first time in the history of the world factory workers by the millions could afford college for their children. It would be hard to imagine the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passing in any other era. The country was rich, confident and expected it always would be. American exceptionalism bloomed.
Trump these days and before him Barack Obama and Mitch Romney and important sociologists such as Daniel Bell – they all have spoken of this exceptionalism. They mean we are better than Europe because we don’t lose our way in class strife and intolerance.
We don’t really think of ordinary Americans like Correnti as exceptional even though they aren’t ordinary at all.
If you can find it on this page, you can see a photograph by The Commercial Appeal’s Mark Weber. His image shows white pickup trucks dwarfed by the massive blue exterior of Big River Steel.
It isn’t that we need big steel mills and rich guys like Correnti to build them.
We need ordinary guys like Correnti to succeed and pull along the rest of our society so girls from 406 Lucy can remind the world of the hard truths.
That's American exceptionalism. It's leadership really.
Ted Evanoff, business editor of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and (901) 529-2292.