The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter September/October, 2001, Vol. 8, Number 5. Americans: A People Who've Forgotten Who They Are by Judith Kleinfeld

E ver since terrorists turned American airliners into bombs, a new educational seriousness has seized our students. This is what educators call a "teachable moment." Emotions are running high, the stakes are high, and students are paying attention.

What should we be teaching students at this teachable moment? One of the things we should be teaching them is what it means to be an American. We need to take students who have been deeply shaken by the terrorist attack and give them a sense of America's greatness.

To listen to some educators these days, the American way of life is hardly worth defending. "The great power of the United States, the attractive power of its political and social ideas--seen as 'offensive cultural messages' --understandably provokes hatred, " Yale history professor Paul Kennedy is reported to have said at a panel at Yale University. In other words, if people in other countries freely choose American political and social ideas, like freedom and education for women, then hatred and terrorism is justified.

"Why do some people hate America? Because we're bossy." That's what my teacher said. She said "it's because we have all the weapons and we think we can boss other countries around." This was the account a twelve-year old gave to the Washington Post of her teacher's explanation for the terrorist attack.

We are people who have forgotten who we are.

"What is an American?" This is the famous question J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur asked in 1782 in Letters from an American Farmer. Crevecoeur waxed rhapsodic about the way America transformed the people who chose to become part of this new nation. In the Europe of his time, the common folk had to doff their caps to their "betters." But in America, a sense of equality held sway. People no longer had to bow and scrape. Even domestic servants wanted to be called "the help" like people who had come to help their neighbors.

In the Europe of his time, ordinary people did not have much chance to advance. A landed, titled aristocracy kept their wealth and social position all in the family. But in America, common people had an opportunity to rise and to fall. "He no sooner breathes our air than he forms schemes and embarks on designs he never would have thought of in his own country," said Crevecoeur. "Thus Europeans become Americans."

Before the attack, when I asked my own students this famous question, "What is an American?" many gave embarrassed answers: "Americans are materialistic." "Americans are wasteful." "Americans are egocentric and aggressive." Although students have learned much about Americans' negative qualities, they haven't learned much about America's virtues. Our virtues and our vices are intertwined. Americans have a distinctive psychological signature that observers have recognized for over three hundred years, since before the country's founding. No one has described it more eloquently than the American historian Henry Steele Commager in his sweeping study, The American Mind:

1. The belief that anything is possible and anyone can be anything. "[The American] planned ambitiously and was used to seeing even his most visionary plans surpassed; he came at last to believe that nothing was beyond his power and to be impatient with any success that was less than a triumph."

2. Buoyant optimism and a comfort with risk. "The American had spacious ideas, his imagination roamed a continent, and he was impatient with petty transactions, hesitations, and timidities."

3. A spirit of rebellion and dissent. "He knew that America had been founded in dissent, that the Republic had been born of dissent, that every pioneer who pulled up stakes and headed for the frontier registered a voice of dissent from the past."

4. A heedless waste and extravagance. "To the abhorrence of Old World observers, extravagance and carelessness flourished from generation to generation, and both were explained by the same good fortune, for in a country so richly endowed there was no need for parsimony."

The spirit that built and will build again the World Trade Center is expansive and energetic and, yes, extravagant and wasteful. As with people, countries have the vices of their virtues. But if we lose confidence in ourselves because, yes, we are not morally perfect, our nation will fall. Great civilizations have fallen before. We undermine the American experiment when we dismiss as flag-waving the celebration of American virtues and American greatness.