Building American Heritage

 

"In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.”

– Alex Haley, American writer and the author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Do we have a national heritage? I believe we do; however, I don't think it's rooted in any one particular legacy. Understanding a shared culture of America is not as easy as paying attention in American history class or doing the family genealogy. Finding the true heritage requires an open mind and a tolerant, inquisitive disposition.

Why do I say this? The United States of America has one of the most complex cultural identities in the world. Millions of immigrants from all over the globe have journeyed to America since the Europeans discovered and colonized the land. The blending of cultural backgrounds and ethnicities in America led to the country becoming known as a “melting pot.” As the third largest country in both area and population, America’s size has enabled the formation of subcultures within the country.

Award-winning author Colin Woodard, in his book American Nations, says there are 11 distinct cultures that have historically divided North America (Canada is included in his overall analysis). Woodard proposes a framework for examining American history and current events based on a view of the country as a federation of eleven nations, each defined by a shared culture established by each nation's founding population.

(Andy Kiersz and Marguerite Ward. “This map shows how the US really has 11 separate 'nations' with entirely different cultures.” Insider. July 04, 2020.)

A nation is a group of people who share the same culture. Woodard’s book traces the development of these nations, which often conflict with each other. He shows that state and national boundaries on maps cut through some of those cultures.

Woodard illustrates and explains why "American" values vary sharply from one region to another. Woodard reveals how intranational differences have played a pivotal role at every point in the continent's history, from the American Revolution and the Civil War to the tumultuous sixties and the "blue county/red county" maps of recent presidential elections. American Nations is a revolutionary take on America's myriad identities and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and are molding our future.

American Nations contends that, on most matters, two major alliances of nations are commonly opposed to each other: the northern alliance of Yankeedom, the New Netherlands and the Left Coast, and the southern alliance of the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and Tidewater. The remaining nations – Midlands, New France, El Norte, and Far West – generally swing individually toward the views of either alliance, depending on the issue. The positions of those "swing" nations determine shifts in the balance of power in the US. For example, the southern alliance is reliably in favor of foreign wars and the northern alliance is generally opposed.

(Steve Kettmann. "Colin Woodard's 'Eleven Nations' Shows a Less Than United States.” The Daily Beast. November 05, 2011.)

Also a person's recognition of heritage does not often consider its evolving nature – the endowment is alive, and constantly changing. To view a national heritage (or even an individual heritage for that matter) as merely a single, stagnant entity – a cold and expired artifact of inheritance – is to misjudge its pertinent utility.

To comprehend that the American heritage is a living legacy, a reformulation still evolving with recent understandings, makes the inheritance even more precious to each new generation – then a sense of heritage becomes an enduring gift that keeps on giving.

Nature of Conceptions

It is easy to see how a person's understanding of heritage may be fraught with myths and misconceptions in the divergent United States.

Consider our conception of that so-called “American heritage” and how little we really know about the culture of other fellow citizens – their countries of origin, their traditions, their beliefs – especially those cultures of minorities that represent a rich and vital diversity in our national fabric. As our ethnic and cultural diversity is becoming more complex, the American heritage changes and expands.

Historically, minority status has been linked with visibility as a non-White person, and such visibility has marked people in terms of racial stigmas and discrimination. But definitions and claims to minority status are increasingly complicated (and contested) by immigration and the growth of multiracial people, many of whom are racially ambiguous, and some of whom look White.

As the multiracial population in the United States continues to grow and diversify to include multigeneration multiracial people whose non-White ancestries are more distant, questions about recognized minority status will become more pressing.

(Mini Song. “Rethinking minority status and ‘visibility.'” Comparative Migration Studies, 8. Article number 5. 2020.)

Science and DNA tell the story of our unique human connection. For example, the average African-American genome is 73.2 percent African, 24 percent European, and 0.8 percent Native American. Latinos, meanwhile, carry an average of 18 percent Native American ancestry, 65.1 percent European ancestry (mostly from the Iberian peninsula), and 6.2 percent African ancestry.

At least 3.5 percent of European-Americans carry African ancestry, though the averages vary significantly by state.

(Katarzyna Bryc et al. “The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States.” American Journal of Human Genetics, Volume 96. January 08, 2014.)

New statistics by the United States Census Bureau project that the nation will become “minority white” in 2045. During that year, whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population in contrast to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations.

Minorities will soon be the source of all of the growth in the nation’s youth and working age population, most of the growth in its voters, and much of the growth in its consumers and tax base as far into the future as we can see.

And, multiracial Americans are at the cutting edge of social and demographic change in the U.S. – young, proud, tolerant and growing at a rate three times as fast as the population as a whole.

Is is evident Americans are a mixed, diverse people who have in many cases the same bloodlines, and that we need to learn to honor the ties that bind us versus those that seek to divide us.

Heritage In Motion

Heritage is the full range of our inherited traditions, monuments, objects, and culture. Most important, it is the range of contemporary activities, meanings, and behaviors that we draw from them.

An accurate perception of a true heritage Americans is in constant change, In fact, I think the only constant of that perception is a willingness to adapt to the changes we experience.

Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) like me sound ridiculous to the Gen Alphas (2013-2025) when we use dated iconic symbols like “baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolet” to define a living heritage as we know it five generations later. When is the last time we saw kids play the games we played as children? Cowboys and Indians? Marbles? Sandlot baseball? Or damned near any outdoor activity, for that matter?

Ask young folks about sock hops, party lines, Iron Curtains, returnable pop bottles, or the counter culture and you'll get blank stares. Hell, they don't even remember our early TV staples of Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo, or Romper Room.

As part of the magazine's look back over the past forty years (Published in 1994 – some 28 years ago. So, imagine the changes since then.), American Heritage asked a wide range of historians, journalists, writers, and public figures the following question: “What do you think is the most important, or interesting, or overlooked way in which America has changed since 1954, and why? And what does this change say about us as a people?”

(“How Have We Changed?” American Heritage. Volume 45, Issue 8. December 1994.)

The answers turned out to be as various and provocative and illuminating. Allow me to share some of them.

“Americans believe that every time the country undertook a major project—to defeat the British, to settle the West, to control the secessionist South and abolish slavery, to institute a variety of social reforms, to defeat the Second World War Axis – the project turned out well. But not Vietnam.

“Attitudes about “life station” have evolved. When I was born, in 1947, the American dream was essentially defined in terms of the capacity of white males to challenge the social and economic class into which they had been born and to participate in a fluid class structure that was based on notions of a meritocracy. Women, blacks, the disabled, and gays and lesbian were for all intents and purposes “invisible people” and were considered the “exceptions” to the American dream. That is no longer the case. The combined effects of the 'movements' for civil rights, for gender equity, for freedom of choice for abortion, for disability rights, and for gay rights all have altered irrevocably the notion of 'station' and have given new meaning and breadth to the parameters of the “American dream.” No longer are some Americans consigned to limitations on the basis of the circumstances of birth; today the notion of a meritocracy is more inclusive than it was in 1954. This development has far-ranging consequences, reflected in the work force and otherwise, but it may well represent the most fundamental redefinition of American life of this century.

“And the new immigrants come from every continent but Antarctica. You see it most vividly on both coasts, but it’s just as true in the heartland, where it’s more apt to surprise you – the Indian family operating a motel in rural Mississippi, the cluster of Vietnamese restaurants in Denver, the Hmong craftsmen in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

“Most of us lived in intact, nuclear families. Many of us were the first members of our families to attend college. The family is evolving, with women in the work force and men taking on more parenting responsibility.

“In other ages it was all there: crime, libertinism, self-centeredness, infidelity. But it was viewed as departure from the correct standards. Now we get such as the Surgeon General, whose answer to the question Is it wrong to conceive out of wedlock? was “No. Everyone has different moral standards.”

“Divorce has become commonplace, and the stigma attached to unwed motherhood has disappeared, creating an underclass of fatherless children and poverty-stricken families.

“In the last decades there have been marked overturns of settled traditions and habits in American life – the growing power of women, the entry of many African-Americans into middle-class society, the openness of homosexuality, the national conflict over abortion, the nervous emphasis on health, sensible eating habits, and cancer, the anti-smoking crusade, the growing intrusiveness of the media, the replacement of learning in the universities by political correctness, the centrality of the computer.”

“Society is transient; more people are moving more frequently. There is no sense of permanence or obligation to community.

“Moral relativity” has impeded the teaching of values and ethics to our children. Society expects the schools to handle the upbringing of our children. Schools emphasize 'self-esteem' at the expense of personal responsibility and community obligation.

“Life is moving at a quicker pace. Computerization has enabled information to be transmitted in the blink of an eye around the world. Society has become technologically sophisticated – cellular phones, fax machines, computers, VCRs, et cetera, et cetera.

“The most important change in this country in the last forty years took place in 1973, when the upheaval of Watergate triggered a shift from presidential government to congressional government.

“Local places with all their contingent characteristics give way to universal spaces sustained by electronic webs. These transformations are not to be explained by technological determinism. They result from countless Americans’ choosing to have affairs with computers rather than automobiles and restlessly exploring information networks instead of earthbound highways. Only an optimist would insist, however, that Internet surfers today are more fulfilled than Sunday drivers yesterday.

“There is less respect for human life—a hopelessness that devalues everything. This, combined with the barrage of violence on TV and in movies, desensitizes our children and glamorizes violence.

“Americans talk more than they used to. We are now such a garrulous nation! Talking on the talk shows, on talk radio, calling in to 'America’s Talking' and Bob Grant and Joy Behar, chattering away live with astrologers on public access, telling absolute strangers that our mother is a lesbian biker, that we’re having an affair with our brother-in-law. . . . There’s a whole lot of sharing going on out there, and just one of the interesting things about it is it doesn’t seem authentic—i.e., the secrets people are sharing don’t seem like real secrets but like narrative constructed to give us a claim on the national microphone. One wonders also, Who’s listening? Who is learning, being heartened, instructed, shocked? Hemingway once said: Do not confuse movement with action. We are becoming a people who confuse chatter with communication. One can endlessly explore the implications of this change in the American personality, but I’ll offer only two.

“Of course poverty and neglect were at the heart of the matter then as now, and it could be argued that the separate nature of the present crisis is only a matter of degree. Still, the bloody terror convulsing American cities today is largely due to the appearance of drugs and the vast spawn of high-powered weapons that slaughter people—mostly young and nearly all black or Hispanic—by the thousands. This exponential increase in murder is the worst social development in America in the last forty years. The inability of politicians to cope with the problem is partly due to their craven capitulation to the National Rifle Association, one of the most evil organizations to exist in any nation, past or present. It is a seemingly incurable situation that says that, as a people, we are at best immoral and at worst totally mad.

“We contemplate our navel so closely, we survey ourselves and write about ourselves so intensely, it is difficult to believe there can be any overlooked change. There may, however, be an undervalued change, and this is in our shortened attention span, our declining educational expectations, and our thirst for spectacle.”

(“How Have We Changed?” American Heritage. Volume 45, Issue 8. December 1994.)

Read the entiree American Heritage article by clicking here: https://www.americanheritage.com/how-have-we-changed

The vast changes in American culture reveal how much a national heritage has changed in the last several decades. Our heritage is our inheritance – what the past has conceded to us, what we value in the present, and what we choose to preserve for future generations. That heritage enables us to communicate on a deep level with each other and to express ourselves in a unique way to the outside world.

Yet, as our society changes – our jobs, our environment, our norms, our beliefs – we cannot fail to acknowledge the effect those changes have on a heritage that unites us. Tradition and custom are a large part of that heritage, but so is positive transformation. The identity of the country is constantly affected by the passage of time, the movement of people, and the development of new art and technologies. We – all of us, not some – must become good stewards of that precious identity.

Heritage

By Arthur Guiterman

Here are the grooves of their plows and the mounds of their graves;
These are the hills that they knew and the forests and water,
Glorious rivers and seas of rejuvenant waves.

This is our heritage, this that our fathers bequeathed us,
Ours in our time, but in trust for the ages to be;
Wasting or husbanding, building, destroying, or shielding,
Faithful or faithless — possessors and stewards are we.

What of our stewardship? What do we leave to our children?
Crystalline, health-giving fountains, or gutters of shame?
Fields that are fertile, or barrens exhausted of vigor?
Burgeoning woodlands, or solitudes blasted by flame?

Madly we squander the bounty and beauty around us
Wrecking, not using, the treasure and splendor of earth;
Only is grief unavailing for glory departed —
Only in want do we count what the glory is worth.