Commentary: What is America to me?
By Arthur J. Magida Once there was a house grand enough to shelter our lives, our dreams, our passions, our hopes. Frank Sinatra knew about the house. It was the house he lived in, the house that embraced "the grocer and the butcher/and the people that I meet/The children in the playground/the faces that I see/All races and religions/that's America to me."
By Arthur J. Magida
Once there was a house grand enough to shelter our lives, our dreams, our passions, our hopes. Frank Sinatra knew about the house. It was the house he lived in, the house that embraced "the grocer and the butcher/and the people that I meet/The children in the playground/the faces that I see/All races and religions/that's America to me."
In a 10-minute paean to brotherhood (a rarely used word today) released in 1945, Sinatra asked:
What is America to me?
A name, a map, or a flag I see?
A certain word, "democracy"?
What is America to me?
Good question: What is America to me, to you, to everyone? And a fine question to ask today as we celebrate the birth of America, a birth that consumed - since our always-evolving national experiment has too often demanded new deaths and new wars - 1.4 million Americans who died in our multiple wars. That figure includes the dead in every American war, including the 25,000 killed in the Revolution, the 750,000 slain in the Civil War, and the 521,000 killed in the world wars. It also includes the one casualty killed in each of two little-known incidents: the Sheepeater Indian War of 1879, the last Indian war fought in the Pacific Northwest; and the Santo Domingo Affair of 1904, a brief altercation between U.S. and Dominican armed forces. These last two may seem insignificant adventures, yet the deaths were equal to anyone killed in other wars since; if each soul is equal in a democracy, then each casualty is equal to every other. And if not, then what are we fighting for anyway?
"America" - the nation, the concept - is a problem if only because we're not done defining it, and yet the memories of the dead and the wounded (wounded physically and psychologically, in foreign wars and in strife of all sorts here at home) keep pushing us toward some resolution about what we are and what we might be, as does a smash Broadway show about the only Founding Father killed in a duel, and as does a certain presidential candidate who is testing our moral elasticity and our tolerance for intolerance.
Being an American is a conundrum and a test. As Langston Hughes wrote in 1935, looking both backward in time and toward the future:
O, let America be America again -
The land that has never been yet -
And yet must be - the land where every man is free -
The land that's mine - the poor man's, Indian's,
Negro's, ME -
. . . Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Four years later, Paul Robeson also catalogued what it meant to be a citizen of this nation in his cantata "A Ballad for Americans," listing, as had Hughes, our vast multitudes: engineer, musician, street cleaner, carpenter, teacher, farmer, office clerk, factory worker, truck driver, miner, seamstress, ditchdigger, all from many origins and all with many creeds. After hearing this civic litany, a member of Robeson's chorus drew a deep breath and said admiringly, "You sure are something."
Yes, we are, we Americans. We are a motley crew who came from hither and from yon, and fought like hell for these mountains and these valleys and these plains and for the rights and the privileges that America confers on and obligates of us. But let us be honest, even today, July Fourth. Some of that blood was just and some was not. Some came from the blast of an enemy's cannon and some from the lash of a whip. That is our glory and that is our sin. But also let us recognize that each drop of blood built our house - rickety one day, well-scrubbed another, desperately in need of paint the next, yet tall with the promise that it will welcome all and shelter all.
And still we ask in the 240th year of this nation: "What is America to me?" The best answer to this ageless question may be Sinatra's: America is a house for "all races and religions . . . a name, a map . . . a flag I see ... A certain word, democracy." Let us hope, for those alive and for those who perished, for those who suffered and for those who still suffer, that this is not only "America to me." This is America to us.
Arthur J. Magida's most recent book is "The Nazi Séance: The True Story of the Jewish Psychic in Hitler's Circle." He is a writer in residence at the University of Baltimore. amagida2@aol.com