This is must read

This is a must read for everyone regardless of political leanings, The American Future by Simon Schama. The American Future is an excellent, well written cultural history of the United States framed within the context of the 2008 presidential election. Schama, a professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, looks at the culture of "god, guns, and country". "God" is defined as the history of religion in America, "guns" is our warrior culture, and "country" is a concise summary of the history of immigration and "America as the land of plenty". Although Schama takes a decidedly secular liberal approach, nonetheless, your intrepid reviewer would ask the intelligent reader to set that aside and read this book with an open mind.

As a latter day Alexis de Tocqueville, Schama opens his book with the Iowa Caucus, held January 3, 2008. It is at this caucus, where Schama pronounces the return to American democracy to the living. Taking his position at a the Theodore Roosevelt High School gym, he observes the comings and going to the town as they cast ballot for one of the half dozen candidates for the Democratic and Republican nominations. At the caucus, Schama introduces the reader to Jack Judge, a farmer from nearby Melrose Iowa. Judge, a life long Democrat, was first introduced to the political process when John Kennedy came through the town in 1960. Here Schama begins a recurring theme in his book, the introduction of an American, who is/wasn't well-known, but has impact on the cultural landscape. What kind of impact does a farmer from Iowa have on the cultural landscape? In the macro-sense, not much at all, but in the micro-sense, Jack Judge is the very embodiment of what Thomas Jefferson had in mind; the farmer-citizen. A person connected to the land yet active in the political sphere.

Professor Schama continues this motif in the section titled "American War" where he examines America's warrior culture. Here, we are acquainted with the Meigs family. This chapter is a discussion of the contrasting views of the necessity of a standing army as posited by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson believed that the United States did not need a standing army, rather a corp of engineers dedicated to nation building. On the opposite side, Hamilton believed that the United States required a standing army. It is within these antipodes that we have the story of the Meigs family, who have had a member fight in every war since the Revolution. This family symbolized both the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian position on the primary job of the soldier. Perhaps no one member of the Meigs family captured this than Montgomery Meigs.

Montgomery Meigs was both a soldier and engineer. It was he that re-built the Capitol Dome following its destruction in the War of 1812. Meigs also served as Union quarter master during the Civil War. His sons fought on both sides of that conflict and Meigs senior was a class mate of Confederate general Robert E. Lee at West Point. A quick digression on West Point, Jefferson believed that West Point would be the place where liberalism would trump militarism and deny America its Caesars (Jefferson suspected Hamilton of aspiring to such). On the one hand, Meigs was the type of soldier that Thomas Jefferson envisioned, an engineer dedicated to nation-building. On the other, he held fast to the West Point creed "Duty, Honor, Country." It was this steadfastness to the creed that led him to join the Union cause and view his life-long friend Lee as a traitor. This section is a fascinating read not only because of the Meigs family history but also the way the reader can take the lessons of the past and apply them to future direction of the warrior culture.

Perhaps the section most applicable to the 2008 election is "Part Two: American Fevor." Here, we have a nice summary of the history of not only religion in the United States but of the rise of the African American churches and the conditions that made it possible for Barack Obama to even consider running for President of the United States. It was from slavery, "The National Sin" according to Charles Gandison Finney, that the African American churches arose. Finney believed that slavery was a hindrance to the Christain revival of America. In his Lectures on Revivial, Finney refers to slavery as "pre-eminently the sin of the church and thus denied Communion to slave owners. It was ministers such as Finney and John Rankin who preached a brotherhood of white Americans and the persecuted slaves. Their abolitionist evangelicalism crossed the line between religion and politics and directly appealed to the Christian conscience of a nation.

The African American church movement began with itinerant preacher. Both men and women, such as Jarena Lee whose diary Schama excerpts, traveled a circut spreading the gospel in tents or the open air, in all conditions and in the face of white hostility. Following the Civil War, these churches, now in a more settled situation, preached self-determination in direct opposition to the white churches which were fonts of despair. It was from black churches that the Civil Rights movement began to take substance and form. Out of all this not only did the iconic figures of the movement such as Martin Luther King evolve but also less known figures such as Fannie Lou Hamer, a delegate to the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, NJ evolve.

Hamer was a member of Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Here, Schama brings in his own recollections of being a nineteen-year old reporter for the Cambridge Opinion on assignment in America to cover the convention. Hamer had traveled from the Delta to Atlantic City to demand the right to be seated as delegate at the convention. She stood before the Credentials Committee and publicly demanded that Freedom Party be seated. Although the Freedom Party was denied a seat, their under taking would not been possible with the support of the churches. It was through the churches that African Americans raised their voices in support of Civil Rights and it was because of the churches that Barack Obama came under fire for his association with Jeremiah Wright.

Here Schama connects Wright to the resolve set down by King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Joseph Lowery. This ministers refused to run or hide even in the face of threats or fire bombings. They were determined that they should be a "staunch for freedom." They saw themselves as the inheritors of the clandestine churches on the plantations. These churches were/are places where one could celebrate without shame, where religion and politics were inseparable, where the Reverand Wright refused to step away from the issue. In summarizing Obama's April 2008 speech on race and religion, Schama cites Obama's epiphany from the shouts and the clapping and the "reclamation of a 'moment we didn't need to feel shame';..." The anger was still there but often unproductive. Again quoting Obama, "To wish it away...without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races." Dear reader, please understand this, the rage is there and Professor Schama's book only provides a historical summary. Please do not walk away thinking that now that Barack Obama is president all is well. There is still much work to be done and the lessons of the Civil Rights movement apply to the current issues surrounding immigration as well.

Immigration and nativism is another subject taken up by Schama. Professor Schama chronicles Ammerica's ambivalent history with immigrants from before the revolution to the present. In an attempt to define what an American is the reader is left with the impression that there is no real definition of what an American is. There is no ethnicity called American. Rather we are the sum of our ancestors and their experiences. Yet, in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries there have been attempts to create an American identity through the shedding of previous customs, mannerism, dress, language, and religion and the adaptation of a fluxuating definition of American. Professor Schama goes on elaborate how an American was defined in the previous centuries but the common thread is the adaptation of the English language. As someone who grew up bilingual, your blogger can attest to the fact that language is an an important way to keep a culture alive but English is the native tongue. What is perhaps the most cringe inducing passages is the attempts by individuals to force immigrants into conforming to the accepted definition of what an American is. It is a lesson worth heading during the contemporary debate on immigration.

In short, The American Future is a book worthy of any individual who would like to enlighten him/her self about the cultural history of the United States. It is clearly and intelligently presented without being smug or condescending. For those of you of the conservative mind set, again, I urge you to keep an open mind. If there is one conclusion to be drawn it is that nothing in our history is black or white. Our history is in the shades of gray.