By Madeleine Kando
I am an immigrant who has turned into an American over the past 50 years.
All my childhood I was a political refugee from the East Block. First, in France, then in Holland. I finally wrote to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and asked her for Dutch citizenship. She told me to send her a hundred guilders and she sent me back a Dutch passport.
I expected something special to happen, a carillon bursting forth from the ‘Wester Church’, whose steeple I could see from my rear windows. Or confetti raining down on my head, but all that fell was the usual dreary Dutch rain. I didn’t feel more Dutch than before. In fact, I realized at the tender age of 20, that Holland was not going to be my final destination.
I tried London for a while, a beautiful city where I could disappear and become totally anonymous. Then on to Malaga, but the southern European culture did not fit my personality, whatever that was. So instead of trying out different countries, I decided to change continents.
I moved to the US in the late 60s. In those days, moving to America literally felt like moving to the ‘New World’, a world so vast that you were guaranteed to find yourself, if not in New England, then somewhere else.
The thing that attracted me the most, was the knowledge that 15.7% of people here are born somewhere else. That's about 53 million people, more than the entire population of many countries, such as Canada, Poland, or Spain.
But the US has always been a country divided. The South and the North are still almost like two countries. The “tribalism” is not just North vs. South. As Heather Cox Richardson demonstrated in How the South Won the Civil War, reactionary nationalism is thriving in other regions as well, for example, the West (Cowboy country).
Surprisingly, this division hasn’t caused it to break entirely in two. Maybe because of its size, America can accommodate this division, like two brothers fighting under the protection of their mother’s large hoop skirt.
The United States is and always has been a bunch of nations trying to unite themselves into a State. Like the Roman Empire, which spanned three continents at its height, America is a collection of cultures, races, and religions. It is an enormous tent. Some people want to decrease the size of this tent, arguing that the true America is for just a select group. What they would do with the millions who don’t qualify, is a mystery.
But since I moved here, almost 40 years ago, Americans have gone down the road of self-doubt. It is visible everywhere, from anti-Americanism on campuses to the left’s self-flagellation on matters of race and other sources of ‘political correctness’.
There is more anti-Americanism in America than anywhere else. Yes, the US has done many terrible things. Its history includes slavery, the biggest peccadillo a country can commit. It had Jim Crow and Japanese Internment camps.
But then, millions of Americans gave their lives to protect the Union and abolish slavery. The thousands of young men who landed on D-Day, barely old enough to shave, died for a cause that didn’t even threaten their country.
In her article ‘A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story’, historian Jill Lepore describes how and why America is turning its back on its own history. Her explanation is that historians have given up on writing about America’s history for fear of being labeled ‘nationalists’.
Just as a person’s history is important to give someone an identity, so do countries need a historical narrative. To see who they are themselves. Nationalism is bad, but being aware of your own nation’s history is good. A lack of national history creates a vacuum that will soon be filled with nonsense. Make America great again? By closing the borders? Isolationism? Bigotry and racism will soon follow.
According to Lepore, the rampant divide today has always been there: the South with its illiberal ideas, the North with its liberal ideas, and the unending struggle between the two. That still goes on today.
This made me think hard about my immigrant relationship with America. I came at a time when the US was looking hard at itself and did many things right. It had passed the Civil Rights Amendment 5 years earlier and the year I emigrated, the Equal Rights Amendment passed both houses of Congress.
I realize now that it is people like me, the new ‘Americans’ that see America as a nation that is trying to come to grips with its own demons, a country that has both good and bad. Like President Abraham Lincoln said in his acceptance speech before four years of hell broke loose:
‘We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’
Many people will point to the rise of nationalism around the world and defy Lepore’s call for an American nationalism. But there is a difference between ‘love of country', which she calls civic patriotism and ‘illiberal nationalism’, which she says is hate of other countries.
She calls for the old liberalism that America is founded on, inclusion, equality, equal rights, the common good as well as the rights of the individual. America has a unique history, one that is not founded on nationalism but on a set of universal ideas. It is also a nation that is trying to live up to its own ideals, often failing.
Many first-generation immigrants see this duality and accept it. I came here to find myself and became an American in the process. It is MY America, lock, stock, and barrel.
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