The Ritual of American Consensus

Abstract

I discovered America in 1968. By then, I had been living in the United States for a few years; but that was a different matter. As Elizabeth Peabody, the transcendentalist, said, after she walked into a tree : "I saw it, but I did not quite realize it." Ten years ago, I realized that I was living inside the myth of America. Not of North America, for the myth stopped short at the Canadian and Mexican borders, but of a country that despite its arbitrary frontiers, despite its bewildering mix of race and creed, could believe in something called the true America, and could invest that patent fiction with all the moral and emotional appeal of a religious symbol. I felt then like Sancho Panza in a land of Don Quixotes. Here was the Jewish anarchist, Paul Goodman, berating the Mid-West for abandoning the dream; here, the descendant of American slaves, Martin Luther King, denouncing injustice as a violation of the American Way; here, an endless debate about national destiny, full of rage and faith, conservatives scaveng- ing for un-Americans, New Left historians recalling the country to its sacred mission. Their problem was not what is usually called identity. They never asked "Who are we?" but—as though deliberately avoiding that common- sense question—"When is our errand to be fulfilled? How long, O Lord, how long?" And their answers invariably joined celebration and lament in reaffirming America's mission.