John Steinbeck and America

Today is the 108^th birthday of John Steinbeck, one of my favorite authors.  He gave us The Grapes of Wrath, one of the great American novels that became one of the great American films.  He also gave us eighteen other novels, including Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, and Cannery Row.

            Lately, I have been reading his nonfiction, especially America and Americans, his last book, where he delves into the American “character”—what makes us all Americans, regardless of where our families came from—and the foundations of America’s sense of community.  In the chapter “Government of the People,” he writes about the unique qualities of American politics and has this to say about the role of the President:

The power of the President is great if he can use it; but it is a moral power, a power activated by persuasion and discussion, by the manipulation of the alignments of many small but aggressive groups, each one weak in itself but protected in combination against usurpation of its rights by the executive; and even if the national government should swing into line behind Presidential exercise of power, there remain the rights, prejudices, and customs of states, counties, and townships, management of private production, labor unions, churches, professional organizations of doctors, lawyers, the guilds and leagues and organizations.  All these can give a President trouble; and if, reacting even to the suspicion of overuse or misuse of power, they stand together, a President finds himself hamstrung, straitjacketed, and helpless.”

He also has this comment on folksinger Woody Guthrie:

Harsh-voiced and nasal his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings.  But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression.  I think we call this the American Spirit.

Steinbeck, John. America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction. Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson, eds. Penguin Books, 2003.

Going Global: Lessons from Stephen Ambrose and Walter Isaacson

In 2002, historian Stephen Ambrose published To America, a collection of essays on American history and the spirit of American life. In one chapter, “The Legacy of World War II,” he describes how World War II opened the door to an exciting new future.  

Two world wars had made the first half of the twentieth century “the worst century in the whole history of mankind” (p.118). The victors’ actions after World War I had been to punish the Germans with a severity that opened the door to Hitler. However, after World War II, Dwight Eisenhower took a dramatically different approach. He encouraged open communication with both Germany and Japan, including a free press and public education, an approach that he continued into the 1950s and the U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Eisenhower argued, “We cannot subscribe to one law for the weak, another law for the strong; one law for those opposed to us, another for those allied with us. There can be only one law—or there shall be no peace” (p. 122). 

The Marshall Plan provided the resources that the postwar communities—both the victorious and the defeated--needed to move ahead and create a new future. The second half of the twentieth century thus became a period that saw new global alliances, economic growth, and the flowering of the Information Age as technological innovation brought about a mostly peaceful transformation in which old enemies became productive partners in technological, social, and economic innovation.

            Ambrose notes that, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower addressed the spirit that led to America’s postwar success:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease, and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love” (p. 124).

            This week, a month into the second decade of the twenty-first century, that vision is being challenged. This week saw the United Kingdom formally leave the European Union, creating new stresses among countries whose partnership had helped to ensure peace in Europe over the past 50 years. This week also set the stage for the culmination of an impeachment trial that put party politics ahead of respect for the Constitution, weakening the power, not to mention the spirit, of the document on which American self-government has been based for the past 250 years. In recent months, the United States has walked away from an international agreement on climate change. It has walked away from a treaty that we and our allies created with Iran. It has played politics with the goal of a workable two-state solution in the Middle East. Two decades into the twenty-first century, we find ourselves on edge as a society, not knowing which way events will take us.  It is especially worrisome in a Presidential election year. 

            In a 1998 essay called “Our Century . . . and the Next One,” Walter Isaacson celebrated the achievements of the twentieth century and looked ahead to the twenty-first century. He noted that, while the digital revolution was one of the defining breakthroughs of the last century, our new century would be affected most by another scientific innovation: biotechnology.  However, he also observed that the challenges will be more moral and ethical than specifically scientific (p. 203).  In the political arena, what Isaacson called “democratic capitalism”—which overcame both fascism and communism in the twentieth century—will face three new challenges as the global economy and culture mature in the twenty-first: tribalism, as national and ethnic groups resist the old ideal of integration in favor of protecting their identities in an increasingly global society; fundamentalism, as people reject the impersonal and materialistic values of global capitalism; and radical environmentalism if the struggle for economic growth continues to threaten the environmental health of the planet (ibid.). In the United States, some observers project that the white population will become a minority by mid-century. The movement toward a “minority majority” nation may exacerbate the other tensions of living in a global community in a time of radical technological, economic, and cultural change.  

            This week’s news about Brexit and impeachment are troubling on many fronts. Let us hope that we find ways to protect the foundations of our society as we try to respond to the technological, scientific, and social innovation that are driving a new global economy and culture.