The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  The tipping point came when Thurgood Marshall persuaded the Supreme Court in 1954 to reach beyond state lines and rule that the public provision of “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites according to the Plessy ruling was unconstitutional. Although the decision in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka only concerned public education, the principle applied to the provision of every kind of service, including hospitals, transport, and housing.

  Among the pictures of the desegregation era, one stands out—the 1957 image of troopers from the 101st Airborne Division, sent by their Second World War commander, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with their Second World War rifles on their shoulders, escorting nine black students into Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. The moment represented the boundary between old and new. It harked back to Reconstruction, the last time that the federal government attempted to impose Lincoln’s inclusive Constitution on the south by force, but it also pointed forward to the post–Civil Rights future, when it would be normal to expect all Americans, of every race, creed, and gender, to enjoy equal rights.

  The critical piece of legislation turned out to be the 1965 Voting Rights Act striking down the legal niceties of “grandfather” clauses, literacy tests, and tax payments that prevented African-Americans from voting. The results were startling; in Mississippi alone the ratio of African-Americans registered to vote jumped from barely 6 percent to more than 66 percent, and nationwide the number of black voters almost tripled to nine million. It was not the end of discrimination, but the crucial watershed in the journey undertaken by everyone else who had crossed the frontier. Once African-Americans could make their voting power felt, they could ensure that the constitutional guarantees of personal and economic freedom were not subverted by some new version of Jim Crow legislation.

  What made the black American demand for their share of liberty different from that of other immigrants was that throughout Anglo-American history their inferior status had been inseparable from the exclusive freedom enjoyed by other Americans. So long as they, who had arrived almost with the first colonists, were denied equality, the privileged nature of the freedom enjoyed by all others would not have changed.

  The Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s that guaranteed equality of rights to African-Americans signaled a turning point of immeasurable significance. It enacted the measures needed to bring about Lincoln’s inclusive freedom, and its consequences have permeated every section of U.S. society ever since. Native Americans, not even recognized as citizens until 1924, asserted their rights in the 1975 Self-Determination Act to educate their children in their own way free of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Women, who had secured the vote in 1920 to safeguard their interests, now used the legislation to extend their rights as individuals. They were followed by other sections, defined by gender, ability, or interests, who felt themselves discriminated against.

  What it has produced is a paradox. The liberty that should be an inalienable human right has only become available to everyone within the United States as a result of an intricate mixture of constitutional, political, and legal forces driven for generations by an equally rich cocktail of courage, optimism, and a stubborn belief in human dignity. The evolution of American freedom runs through the country’s history and represents its crowning achievement. But it could not exist beyond the borders of the United States.

  Chapter 14

  The End of Frontiers?

  All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

  FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT, U.S. Constitution, 1868

  A yellow line in the highway between Tijuana and San Diego marks the point at which the United States ends and Mexico begins. After nearly an hour trapped in the middle of seven lanes of traffic inching toward the immigration and customs channels at the San Ysidro crossing, it feels as though the transition from one country to the other should be more momentous. So much has been invested in maintaining the difference—border patrols, security cameras, fences, identity checks, computer systems, and enough uniforms to clothe a small army—and then … just a lick of paint.

  When William Emory and José Salazar first marked it out, this stretch of the line would have run through dry scrubland identical on either side. Now it cuts across the metropolitan area of San Diego–Tijuana, home to around four million inhabitants, most of whom live in the same combination of concrete high-rises and rancho-style villas, choose between the same fast-food chains offering burgers or frijoles, and work for the same borderland economy offering transport, warehousing, and financial services. The division of this part of North America into Mexico and the United States seems artificial compared to its obvious unity. It begs the question whether the old importance attached to frontiers, as inviolable limits of sovereignty, is now becoming misplaced.

  A century ago, when the imperial frenzy was at its height and new boundaries were being drawn wherever an industrialized power could impose itself, Britain’s George Curzon, a former viceroy of India, could declare, “Frontiers are indeed the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace, of life or death to nations.” Just seven years later, the razor slipped when the German army crossed Belgium’s frontier and the world’s empires tumbled into the carnage of the First World War. In 1939 Adolf Hitler’s decision to march the Wehrmacht across the Polish frontier triggered Britain’s declaration of war against Nazi Germany and the start of the Second World War. Two years later, the violation of the U.S. frontier at Pearl Harbor catapulted her into war with Japan and Germany. And all through the Cold War, the moment when missiles crossed into national airspace would have unleashed the program of Mutually Assured Destruction. But when the Berlin Wall came down, literally the most concrete representation of the divisive boundary in the world, the influence of economic, technological, and political forces all contrived to undermine the significance of national frontiers.

  In his widely quoted, much misunderstood 1989 essay “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama provided a philosophical background for the way he thought the world might develop. With the end of the Cold War, the old clash of ideologies that had marked history—the battles between empires and monarchies, between communism, fascism, and democracy—would end and be replaced in the long term by acceptance that the world was developing toward a single model. “The state that emerges at the end of history,” he wrote, “is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man’s universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed.”

  Just a year later, the economist Kenichi Ohmae claimed in The Borderless World that the global economy “made traditional national borders almost disappear, and pushed bureaucrats, politicians, and the military toward the status of declining industries.” Since then the effects of globalization have become commonplace, so that it is hardly surprising to find that an electric toothbrush sold around the world by Philips, a Dutch company, is actually assembled in Snoqualmie, Washington, from components made in China, Japan, Malaysia, France, Germany, and Sweden.

  Driven by the logic of separating manufacture from assembly, global trade grew in the five years up to 2005 by nearly one third to $9.12 trillion. Fifteen years after Ohmae’s original thesis, Thomas L. Friedman argued in The World Is Flat that the growth of Chinese and Indian corporations into world companies had created additional forces to weaken the concept of national sovereignty. International supply chains—to companies such as Philips and Wal-Mart, and from providers such as the Indian computer giant Infosys or the Chinese auto-parts maker Wanxiang—now dominated international relations. “No two countries that are part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war,” Friedman predicted, “as long as they’re each still part of that supply chain.”

  In Europe, for centuries the cockpit of warring nation-states, growing economic integration has led to greater politi
cal harmony, with effects that are immediately visible. Since 2001, the Schengen Agreement among most of the nations in the European Union has made it possible to drive from Cádiz in the south of Spain to Norway’s North Cape crossing seven international frontiers but without encountering a single border control. And at San Ysidro almost fifty thousand people a day commute to jobs, schools, and entertainment that happen to be on the other side of a border that barely registers in their daily routine.

  It has become a commonplace to say that “everything changed” on September 11, 2001, but nowhere was it more true than in people’s feelings about the frontier. Quite suddenly a line that had been virtually ignored and deemed beyond assault was shown to be terrifyingly fragile. “Protecting borders was not a national security issue before 9/11,” the national commission report on Al Qaeda’s attack stated succinctly. In the years since, border protection has become the single most important security issue in the war on terror.

  At home it underpinned the introduction of a blizzard of measures to strengthen security, including putting the Department of Homeland Security in charge of border crossings. Abroad, as President George W. Bush repeatedly made clear, the need to protect the frontier justified a wide range of actions far beyond the actual boundary of the United States, including the war on terror and the Iraq campaign. “We cannot find security by abandoning our commitments and retreating within our borders,” he argued in his State of the Union address in January 2006. “If we were to leave these vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone. They would simply move the battlefield to our own shores.” Yet the sense of vulnerability persists, and the conservative commentator Glynn Custred, for example, still maintains that “the longest undefended border in the world now looks like a 4,000-mile-long portal for terrorists.”

  The border crossing between the United States and Mexico at San Ysidro

  Yet for many Americans, anxiety about terrorists comes second to fears about illegal immigration. The estimated eleven million illegal Hispanic immigrants pose a more insidious danger because, it is claimed, they threaten to subvert the very identity of the United States. Images of lines of illegal migrants heading through the scrub, led in some cases by organized criminals also shipping in drugs, produce a deep unease even among those who recognize the human instinct that drives ordinary people to risk everything in the hope of a better life. There is a sense of chaos breaking in, and the overrunning of the frontier represents the undermining of order within the United States itself.

  Contributors to Internet discussion groups often quote the words of Mexican author Elena Poniatowski—“Mexico is recovering the territories yielded to the United States by means of migratory tactics”—and they draw the violent conclusion that illegal crossing of the frontier amounts to “a declaration of war.” Echoing their sentiments, Harvard’s Professor Samuel Huntington found in the level of Mexican migration “a unique, disturbing, and a looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to the future of our country.” The great swath of the Southwest, sometimes known as MexAmerica, home to five hundred radio stations and more than a hundred newspapers whose first language is Spanish, would seem to provide powerful supporting evidence.

  Nevertheless, the history of Mexican-American immigration has very much followed the pattern set by other nationalities entering the United States. While almost twenty-eight million Americans speak Spanish at home, the majority are first-generation immigrants. Follow-up studies in Los Angeles indicate that almost three quarters of second-generation immigrants prefer to speak English at home, rising to 97 percent among third generation. That is a classic transition that was experienced and mourned by German speakers in the 1880s, by Italian and Polish speakers in the early twentieth century, and by Yiddish speakers in the 1950s. The difference today, according to Professor Rubén Rumbaut of the University of California, is that exposure to the Internet and other types of English-language technology is bringing about the change to English faster than before. Among more than fifty-two hundred second-generation immigrant children studied in the Miami and San Diego school systems in 2005, 99 percent spoke fluent English, and less than one third remained fluent in their parents’ tongue by the age of seventeen.

  “The fate of all these languages is to succumb to rapid assimilation,” Rumbaut commented. “Demography will take care of the problem itself—it is not really a policy issue.”

  In the past, fears of cultural change have sprung from the assumption that the United States was formed by a single set of unchanging values, an assumption implicit in Huntington’s question “Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture?” Set in this static context, the identity and culture of the United States inevitably appear fragile and vulnerable to any sort of change. Yet throughout history, the reverse has been true. The core values of American society have evolved through a dynamic, often confrontational, process, directly affected by those already inside the frontier who naturally wish to preserve what is there, and those who want to cross the frontier and will inevitably alter the existing state of things.

  Huntington’s alarmist note bears an uncanny resemblance to the fears expressed by his Harvard predecessors in the 1880s when they threw their academic weight behind the Immigration Restriction League. At the end of the nineteenth century the United States faced a choice, according to the league, between being “peopled by British, German and Scandinavian stock, historically free, energetic, progressive, or by Slav, Latin and Asiatic races, historically down-trodden, atavistic and stagnant.” Since there was no precedent for such large-scale immigration of non-English speakers with an alien culture, the nineteenth-century doomsayers had some reason for apprehension. Indeed, the 1890 census indicated that the proportion of Americans unable to speak English was about three times as great as it is today. Late-nineteenth-century American values were undoubtedly changed by their arrival, but they remain unmistakably American.

  Seen against the long perspective of the frontier’s history, the process of Americanization becomes clear. Ever since Andrew Ellicott drew the first national boundary enclosing the fractious inhabitants of Natchez, immigrants have become American by a process of reciprocity—a constitutional guarantee of individual rights that could be secured only in exchange for participation in government. For all the tensions that the process entails, it has worked to awesome effect for more than two centuries.

  That long history suggests that a modern Frederick Jackson Turner might take the 2000 census as a starting point for a new frontier theory. Reviewing the main patterns thrown up by the census, the former director of the Census Bureau, Kenneth Prewitt, concluded, “The U.S. has become home to people from, literally, every civilization and of every nationality, and speaking almost every language. Not in recorded history has there been a nation so demographically complex. So it falls to us, the American citizens of the 21st century, to fashion from this diversity history’s first ‘world nation.’”

  The frontier of the United States has never been the outer defense of Fortress America. Its purpose has always been to mark the extent of a system of government, law, and individual rights unlike any other in the world.

  The tensions will always exist between immigrants and existing citizens, between new demands for equality and the protection of old habits. But the unparalleled commitment to democracy and individual liberty, and the values of inclusion, for which so much blood was spilled, have proved capable of creating Americans from every nationality under the sun.

  Envoi

  Before the snows of 1819 came, Andrew Ellicott left the forty-fifth parallel where he had been running the frontier with Canada and returned to the familiar discipline of West Point signaled by drums and marching cadets in smart gray uniforms, braided vests, and tall shakos. His health remained sound—he boasted to Sally that on the Canadian border he had maintained the arduous schedule of late-night observations and daylight calc
ulations without fatigue, but his young assistants “could perform the laborious duty of sleeping eighteen hours out of 24 if not interrupted.” With Thayer, Mansfield, and with increasing frequency his son-in-law Douglass, he drew up the regulations that molded the academy’s future—no admissions except on ability decided by exam, promotions strictly on merit, two months’ camp in the summer, no winter vacation, and at Douglass’s insistence the self-regulating honor code that guided cadets’ personal lives. In West Point as on the frontier, the rule of law had taken the place of wayward savagery.

  In the summer of 1820 as Ellicott returned on the steamboat from New York to West Point, he was felled by a massive stroke. A doctor on board looked after him and he was still alive when the boat reached West Point, where his wife, Sally, took him up the hill to their house. “Everything that skill & tenderness could devise was afforded but without the wished for effect,” his son-in-law wrote on August 28. “He died this morning (Monday) 1/2 past 12 o’clock & will be interred tomorrow afternoon. I am surrounded by affliction which added to my own is beyond expression.”

  Ellicott was buried near the northeast corner of the bluff overlooking the Hudson River, a place of savage beauty. A military funeral was read over his coffin, and a cadet honor guard fired a volley of shots as it was lowered into the grave. He would have liked the wildness of his resting place and the precision of the ceremony, but the raised gray slab that marks his grave is not his true memorial. That is to be found in the very fabric of the United States. The lines he drew in the wilderness did not simply define its states and its frontiers, they carried values of government and order and public service that molded his country’s identity.

  Andrew Ellicott’s grave at West Point