Long before the revolution, there were two Americas, implicitly at odds. The first, sponsored by Walter Raleigh, was fiery, maverick and piratical, based in Virginia, the colony named for Elizabeth I. These freebooters would become the Americans who opened up the frontier to the south and west. The second America, to the north, was inspired by the chillier steel of New England’s Puritan settlement. In 1630, its thin-lipped ideologue John Winthrop declared that this new society should welcome “the eyes of all people upon us” and shine as a beacon of hope – “a city upon a hill”.
Almost four centuries of conflict between the Raleigh and the Winthrop versions of America – one red-blooded and nativist, the other liberal, humane and egalitarian – reached a bizarre climax on 16 June 2015, when presidential candidate Donald Trump declared “the American dream is dead” and proceeded to run a campaign that promised to put “America first”, a pledge he renewed at his inauguration in January 2017.
In the US, all history is contemporary history and its rhetoric is integral to the American experiment. Not only is this centuries-old conflict still potent today, the vehemence of its expression remains as quintessentially American as ever. Ever since Thomas Jefferson raided the writings of John Locke and the intellectual treasure trove of the Enlightenment to write the Declaration of Independence, possibly the ultimate American sales pitch, this has been a society made by, and articulating itself through, the complex wrangles of language – and the fruits of language, laws.
Sarah Churchwell, a prominent critic and a professor of American literature, is perfectly placed to explore the latest disruption from a literary point of view and to do it through an examination of the two loaded phrases exploited by Trump: “America first” and “the American dream”. Her tale will probably upend what we thought we knew about America and offers history’s traditional consolation of nothing new under the sun. The past, indeed, turns out to be not only similar in many ways, but sometimes much worse and more disquieting.
Behold, America tells a story of outrageous bombast braided with the most violent arguments about capitalism, democracy and race. It’s a ripping yarn (“a genealogy of national conversations”, says Churchwell), which puts Trump and Trumpism in a category that is perhaps less sinister than we might have feared and more intelligible than we might have imagined.
Churchwell comes to her subject via an acclaimed study of The Great Gatsby, perhaps the supreme articulation of “the American dream”. Her alternating chapters on an idea that was not even invoked as an expression of the American creed until the late 19th century make for some topical and fascinating revisionism. She shows that this “dream” has little to do with a nostalgia for a golden past, but is really about a fierce ongoing argument about the nature and practice of US democracy.
The American dream was not to be found, for instance, on the lips of Woodrow Wilson, a great Democrat idealist. Wilson, surprisingly, was the first to appropriate “America first” as the slogan that expressed the ambitions of a self-confident society on the brink of world war. Once again, American rhetoric was bent to the realities of its 20th-century role.
The interwar iteration of “America first”, an angry and instinctive isolationism, became fused with the new ideal of a “100% Americanism”. Far from being a shocking aberration, it strongly appealed to the old nativist element of US society, now exemplified by DW Griffith’s notorious 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation. When the Ku Klux Klan and widespread lynchings followed, the American dream might have rallied blue-state Americans appalled by the corruption and coarsening of their society, but America first was in the ascendant. This, protested the president of Harvard 100 years ago, “is the lowest estimation of the intelligence and good sense of the American people.” Soon, it would be Charles Lindbergh’s quasi-fascist “Americans! Wake up!” that offered the greatest threat to the dreamers and it’s Churchwell’s achievement to demonstrate that this was less a horrifying anomaly, more a belated liberation of America’s dark side.
By the 1940s, the promises of the American dream were not what they were, if they ever had been. The ideals of justice, liberty and equality were morphing inexorably into a justification for selfishness and greed. By the second world war, that faltering dream had shrunk to a vague, intermittent corrective within the national conversation whenever the forces of inequality and oligarchy seemed too oppressive to ordinary Americans.
For more than a decade, once the war was over, it seemed as if the visceral side of the American psyche had overwhelmed its softer, more humane and idealistic alter ego. But when the unresolved race question burst on to the nation’s consciousness with the civil rights movement, the old rhetoric came roaring back to life. “I have a dream,” declared Martin Luther King Jr at the March on Washington in 1963. America’s internal debate about itself was – and still is – alive and well. A society made of words had not forgotten the power and consolations of language. Thus the fearsome inarticulacy of George W Bush became answered by the soaring eloquence of Obama, who was in turn trumped by… Trump.
Behold, America is an enthralling book, almost a primer for the ferocious dialectic of US politics, inspired by the events of 2015/16. It will no doubt take an influential place on a teeming shelf of Trump-lit. Much of its force derives from the echoes of the present it finds in the thunderous caverns of the past, blurred by the distortions of history. Passionate, well-researched and comprehensive, it is both a document of our times and a thrilling survey of a half-forgotten and neglected dimension of the American story – a tale full of sound and fury currently being narrated by an idiot.
• Behold, America by Sarah Churchwell is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To order a copy for £14.49 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
