[Over the last
few months, I’ve had the chance to take part in a number of interesting
AmericanStudies conversations, each hosted by a unique and significant
organization or space. So this week I wanted to follow up those events with
some further thoughts and reflections, leading up to a weekend post looking
ahead to the NeMLA
Convention later this month!]
On what I tried
to bring to a vital conversation, and what I took away from it.
In mid-February,
I had the chance to moderate a panel discussion co-sponsored by the Leominster (MA) Public Library (particularly
Special Services Librarian Ann
Finch) and the Fitchburg
State University Community Read program (a program directed by my colleague
and friend Joe
Moser). Our Community Read book for the 2016-17 year has been Robert
Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in
Crisis (leading up to an April event where Putnam himself will visit
campus and speak on these themes), and the subject of this panel discussion—building
on a high school essay contest that the library had sponsored—was a pair of
interconnected and crucial questions: What is the American Dream? And, is it
achievable for all Americans (the original question’s wording was “still
achievable,” but I asked them to consider also whether it ever had been)? The
panel featured four voices across four distinct generations and sets of
experiences, from the winner of the high school essay contest up to a retired
teacher (and frequent student in my Adult
Learning courses!), as well as a recent college graduate (now working as a
school committee member in the area) and a man who had fled genocide and
oppression in Africa, become an asylee in the U.S., and recently graduated with
his law degree.
Besides
providing some framing questions and getting the great discussion going (and
then staying out of the way), my job was to offer a few brief introductory
comments on the histories and images of the Dream. As with so much I’m thinking
about these days, I connected those questions to the duality between more
inclusive and more exclusionary narratives of American identity and community.
So, for example, I noted that the phrase “the American Dream” was first used in
historian James
Truslow Adams’ The Epic of America
(1931), a book published at the heart of the Great Depression and thus in a
period where Adams’ vision of opportunity and equality for all seemed far
removed from reality for many Americans
and communities. I noted one origin point for the Dream’s images of
mobility, opportunity, and success, Ben Franklin’s Autobiography—and added that both
the Boston from which Franklin ran away as a teenager and the Philadelphia in
which he made his fortune and fame were, as were all of the colonies in that
early 18th century moment (and through the Revolution), slave
societies. Fifty years later, Andrew
Jackson came to exemplify a new addition to the Dream’s images, the “self-made
man”—yet Jackson also embodied attitudes
and policies that entirely excluded Native Americans from American narratives
or identity. Remembering the American Dream, that is, means remembering both
some of our most cherished and shared ideals and some of our darkest, most
contrasting histories and realities.
So that’s a bit
of what I tried to add to this complex and crucial conversation. While unfortunately
I had to leave before the ensuing discussion concluded (parenting duties
called), I was nonetheless deeply impressed with the nuanced and thoughtful voices
and contributions of all four panelists, as well as many audience members. They
certainly engaged with some of our darkest current realities, from the rising
and deepening economic inequalities that are a central subject of Putnam’s book
to the anti-refugee
and –immigrant policies that seek overtly to deny the American Dream—to deny
America itself—to communities who in
many ways embody our history. They also continued to advocate for the
possibility of the Dream and what it can still mean, most especially through inspiring
individuals both personal (such as the high school contest winner’s father,
himself an African immigrant) and public (such as Barack
Obama). But (to my mind) most inspiringly still, the panelists and the
audience and discussion all modeled a willingness to think critically and
actively about these national narratives and ideals, to consider both their
limits and their value, and to work together to better articulate such ideas
and to actively pursue questions of both how they affect our own lives and how
we can respond to and strengthen them in our communities. In a terrifying
moment such as this one, civic dialogue might seem entirely insufficient—but while
it’s not the only mode of resistance and activism, it remains a vital and
hopeful one, and I felt that throughout this excellent event.
Next reflection
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this conversation? Conversations or events you’d share?
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