Mother said, "See America First," and she was absolutely right. Traveling around one's homeland is a good warm up for international travel. I don't remember my first plane ride, back in the 1950's, but I have seen air travel go from being an elegant treat to a gawdawful cattle car of an experience -- so I've always been comfortable with flying, even if flying itself has gotten less comfy! But more usually when I was young we would go on driving trips, the family in a VW van traipsing around the country.
When we did travel abroad together Mom always wore a little American flag pin. She was ever critical of our government, had been arrested in a civil rights demonstration, and opposed our interventionism, but having been an army brat during WWII she always had a sense of America having the capacity and at least some track record for promoting human rights. For whatever disagreements she had with government policies, Mom was always proud and grateful to be an American. If her vision of America was out of WWII, mine was out of the Vietnam War, and I always had a darker vision of our nation's capacities, but I am at least very proud of my American roots that reach back through four continents and countless nations. As we drove together across 45 American states and 5 Canadian provinces, Mom often had stories from the family history, which was deeply interwoven with America's history.
Mom was born in Washington, DC on the 4th of July, and our American roots go back centuries. Our earliest known ancestors on this continent were Cherokees, and our white ancestors started coming over from England to the Carolinas in the 1600's, to Maryland and Virginia in the 1700's. Some fought in the American revolution. One Irishman even came down from Nova Scotia in 1776 for the privilege of fighting off the Brits, and he settled in New York. His progeny moved on to Missouri and then to California. Others fought on both sides of the Civil War, homesteaded in Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado, followed the 49'ers to California and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. There's a rumor of a light-skinned black woman who passed for white and crossed the color barrier, so my ancestors may include African-American slaves. Irish came over to escape the famine. My grandfather loved the story about being descended from a Dutch princess who came to America as a bootlegger. French, German, Welsh, and others added into the mix. Some circled the Horn and one took a short-cut across the isthmus of Panama where her daughter, another of my ancestors, was born.
Mom lived as a small child in San Francisco, but The War turned my grandfather from a young lawyer in San Francisco into an army officer, leading his family on a nomadic life moving often from one army base to another. After the war they settled in Virginia, close to the Pentagon where Granddad worked a while before switching over to the Department of Labor.
Granddad's work also had them living in Paris for a time, so my ardently francophile grand-mère and Mom became conversant in French and would teach me the language when I was small. (Granddad was part French, but Grandmother was mostly Irish, German, and Dutch. Her father was said to be the first white child born in Pocatello, Idaho.)
With a couple of very domineering grandmothers in the Bay Area, Mom broke from the family tradition of attending Berkeley (where her parents met, and Granddad's mother had graduated in 1900!) Mom chose instead to attend the University of Chicago. There she got involved in politics, fighting McCarthyism and segregation; and married a Sephardic Jew whose parents had come to America from Germany. (They were out well before Hitler was a problem, but much of our Jewish family never made it. My great-grandmother was taken by the Nazis to a death camp in Minsk. Uncles, aunts, cousins met similar ends.) I was born on the U of C campus, mixing mother's Bay Arean blood from America, perhaps Africa, and western Europe with non-Aryan blood from eastern and southern Europe.
My politics and attitudes have often been described as anti-American, but -- even if America keeps inching towards fascism as it has been steadily since the Reagan administration -- my politics and ideals are those of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Bill of Rights, the rebellious spirit of Tom Paine and the secular ideals of Thomas Jefferson. My American heroes include Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Paul Robeson, Joe Hill, Mother Jones, Langston Hughes, Emma Goldman, and Pete Seeger; Wobblies and Quakers, Mollie McGuires, slaves who rebelled, and the dykes and drag queens at Stonewall. Growing up with the ideals of Kennedy and Johnson's "Great Society" I believe that our country has the duty and capacity to invest fully in all its people, that our security and prosperity are best served by guaranteeing every American a good education and proper health care. Whatever anyone says, I am as American as anyone can be.
From Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson our nation developed a progressive tax code that promoted a vision of fairness and equality, that funded a strong infrastructure, built hospitals and schools, and made steps at least towards racial justice. From Reagan to Bush we've been backsliding, giving the rich obscene tax breaks at the expense of poor and working Americans, letting roads, hospitals, and schools deteriorate while building prisons and war machinery. Our "free press" has been bought and paid for. The watchdog of our liberties has become the lapdog of an Orwellian oligopoly.
Sadly, Langston Hughes' poem is still as relevant as ever:
Let America be America again
by Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
Travel Directory