Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  Perhaps the most significant aspect, finally, of this countervailing pattern was the existence of groups of men and women who had a strong sense of place. These people heard the message of “go out and get yours” but did what they could to stay put. At one end of this scale were many corporate managers who, even after World War II, showed loyalty to their workers and their communities, managers whose very identities were bound to the places where they prospered.49 At the other end of the scale were the many inward-looking religious communities, such as the Amish or Mennonites in Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Illinois, who epitomized ties to place. Indian tribes also belonged to this group; even in the face of countless efforts to terminate their cultures, many tribes stood the test of time, holding fast to their traditions to become faithful custodians of the land.50

  In the middle of these two extremes of community-oriented corporation and local tribe stood the largest of these place-oriented groups: the working-class men and women of America’s cities and towns. Among them were evangelical Protestants, black and white, as well as working-class and lower-middle-class Catholics who organized their lives not around “the culture of capitalism” or the “culture of acquisitiveness and personal gain” but around their churches and religious beliefs, their families, their schools and holiday fairs, their sports teams and scout groups, as well as their television sets and movie houses.51

  It would be foolish, of course, to try to make this age look any better than it was or to idealize these working people. Many were beleaguered by debt, by conflicts over money, by unpredictable, awful episodes of unemployment, and by a commercial dream-life over which they had little control, except to turn their backs on it. Discrimination existed, bias of all kinds existed, often so grating as to force people to leave their hometowns, as many Southern blacks did for much of this century, going North or elsewhere for more freedom and decent work. Consumerism, or that truly American prejudice of constant production and spending, and constant improvisation, had assuredly taken its toll in shaping the way Americans organized their time or spent their money. At the same time, many people, however much they may have behaved according to established patterns of consumption or shared some of the age’s prejudices, lived decently, paid their taxes, took care of each other and their children, and stayed, for the most part, where they were, sometimes protecting their communities and forging bonds of faith and trust.

  A NEW DAY FOR DRIFTERS

  Today, this achievement—the centripetal pull that always seemed to check the centrifugal side of the American experience—no longer has the strength it once had. As early as the late sixties, in fact, many Americans worried over the corrosion of the social fabric and the emergence of disconnectedness as characteristic of American society. Peter Schrag, in his Out of Place in America, observed in 1970 that Americans were living in a society where the “bulldozers of modernization invade the neighborhood like tanks.” “We are refugees in our own country,” he said.52 In 1972, two writers—Vance Packard, the noted free-lance journalist, and George W. Pierson, historian at Yale University—both published books on mobility as the most pronounced feature of American society. Pierson, in The Moving American, observed that “ours has been the mobile society par excellence.… We don’t seem anchored to place. Our families are scattered about.… No locality need claim us long.”53 Packard’s A Nation of Strangers described the “loneliness” that marked a society constantly on the move, a theme also picked up by Ralph Keyes in We the Lonely People (1973) and Suzanne Gordon in Lonely in America (1975). Sociologist Peter Berger wrote in his 1973 book The Homeless Mind that “American society represents a climax to the movement toward mobility.” “A high proportion of people in America,” he said, “plan their lives against the geographical backdrop of a continent.” At the same time, Berger thought that this very freedom had caused what he called “a deepening condition of homelessness.”54

  The irony, of course, was that the 1970s was the decade in which mobility rates had decisively dropped, not risen; yet Americans nevertheless felt increasingly decentered. Mobility in and of itself, in other words, was no measure of feelings of placelessness. One could feel centered—feel at home in the world—and yet still move, still travel great distances, still leave home and never come back.55 What these books were telling us was not that mobility was inherently bad but that the conditions behind it—such as the weakening of the family, misguided wars, political scandal (to name a few mentioned in these books)—were eroding an older, more optimistic sense of place. And they were pointing to trends that would only worsen, when the migratory behavior of Americans actually did begin to contribute to the transformation of the country.

  After 1980 the centrifugal side of American life began to return in earnest. As never before, Americans—especially educated professionals whose services commanded a national market—were free to go wherever they wished in the country, a freedom promoted by employers who enticed them with job offers; by biological technologies to manage their fertility; by such governmental programs as social security and federal housing loans, both portable (not place-specific) and thereby helping to give people the confidence to move; by family-care providers (i.e., nannies and servants); by no-fault divorce laws, allowing couples to cancel their marriages without placing blame on one another; by telephones and computers which seemed to overcome distance; and even by the growth of police forces to pick up the burden of “protecting” communities left behind or ignored by residents too busy to care.56 Not all of these factors were commensurable, nor did they always invite mobility, but their cumulative effect was to discredit anything that might inhibit movement. In any case, whatever the cause, internal migration rose again, reaching post–World War II levels when 20 percent of the people were in motion.57

  Mass immigration after 1970 also approximated turn-of-the-century levels, as a result of a 1965 law that ended all quotas, and of a 1990 law, backed by a coalition of business groups, liberals, and ethnic lobbyists, that greatly raised the numerical cap for all immigrants and created a new gallery of visa categories to meet the demands of business. When the original 1965 law passed, no one anticipated the volume of immigration that ensued, but in time it was “revolutionary,” to quote historian Louis Winnick, averaging well over one million people a year and in some states surpassing the record levels set in the 1910s.58

  This immigration also differed from the old, and not only because migrants were arriving from parts of the world unfamiliar to most Americans. It differed because of the context in which people came. The America of the post-1975 era was not the America of the nineteenth century, when an industrializing country employed migrants in factories and mines and when much of the continent was still unoccupied. Post-1970s America was a developed country with a population of more than 250 million people, most with skills equal (or potentially equal) to the demands of the economy.59

  The modern context differed in yet another way: it tended to assist immigrants in a multitude of ways. In the past, immigrants confronted many obstacles, from aching loneliness and despair to sickness and extreme poverty (which they often had to face alone). After 1970, however, newcomers entered a world that offered many advantages—a system of government-transfer payments, entrenched ethnic lobbies and pro-immigrant groups (from the Ford Foundation to a countrywide army of immigration lawyers), a transportation system that made it easy for many to come and go (thus reducing the “trauma” that once afflicted nearly all earlier migrants), affirmative action, an array of schools, colleges, and universities that welcomed them, and so forth—which previous immigrant generations never enjoyed.60

  From one point of view, this flow of people into the country has had a positive impact. As they had in the past, many immigrants brought with them an aversion to moral corruption, a passion for their new country, and energy and inventiveness. Sanford Ungar, dean of communications at American University, observes in his book Fresh Blood that “immigrants bring us new foods and original ways to look at old pro
blems.” “They are the valedictorians of today,” writes Ungar, “the concert pianists and rocket scientists of tomorrow.” They have restored life to old neighborhoods abandoned by earlier migrants; without them, cities such as New York and Los Angeles would have continued their decline.61

  From another angle, however, the new arrivals have had an equally centrifugal impact. Many spoke languages and practiced religions (Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism) unknown to most Americans. More than 70 percent of all Asians and more than 45 percent of all Hispanics who now reside in the United States arrived here after 1970, with the vast majority coming after the late 1970s. Almost overnight they transformed neighborhoods into foreign enclaves, set off from the rest of America.62 They helped disrupt shared cultural memory, undermining community unity and adding to pressures that have induced millions of native-born Americans, white and black, to leave cities for the suburbs and small towns.63 Their existence, moreover, contributed to the income and wealth gaps in this country by, above all, helping to keep down the wages of both skilled and unskilled workers.64

  The presence of so many new migrants also tended to aggravate racial-ethnic tensions, especially at a time when so many Americans actually opposed assimilation, supported group differences, and were tolerant of dual citizenship (which many migrants themselves have demanded).65 In 1904 Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Forward on New York’s Lower East Side, exhorted his immigrant readers “to be Americans,” not foreigners. “We shall love America and help to build America,” Cahan insisted. “We shall accomplish in the New World a hundred times more than we could in the Old.”66 In 1996, Bill Clinton, on a visit to Ireland, spoke glowingly of “my people,” by which he meant the Irish, not the Americans—a measure of how far we have come. Two years later, the editors of the New York Times celebrated in New York City a “new phenomenon”—the emergence of a “transnational immigrant culture,” which helps “many people maintain lifelong relationships with their ancestral lands.”67

  Migration, then, both internal and from abroad, returned in force after 1980, but I want to make clear that it was not the decisive fact that has helped make the country more decentered. The migrants themselves, in other words, were “not to blame.”68 Population movements should not be seen as governing causes but as related to other more fundamental changes that have occurred since the late 1970s. These changes constitute the central subjects of this book—the return of the global economy with its cohort of transnational businessmen and businesswomen; the spread of a landscape of the temporary populated by skilled and unskilled people alike, willing or compelled to go anywhere to find work; and the expansion of a service economy (above all of tourism and gambling) that has replaced manufacturing as the primary employer of unskilled workers.

  To get a sense, moreover, of what has been happening to America over the past fifteen years, one need only look at some unlikely places in the country, which have only recently evolved into major centers of historical change.

  I am thinking here of three centers in particular—marine port terminals, research universities, and Indian reservations. Since 1970 the great port terminals on either coast, from the Port of Long Beach/Los Angeles in California to the Port of Elizabeth/Newark in New Jersey, have become sprawling gateways of international trade, each enormous, nearly autonomous, and crucial to the movement of a vast diversity of cargo. Research universities, too, from Stanford to MIT, have grown bigger. Today they approach city-states in scope, with billion-dollar budgets, close ties with transnational businesses, and even their own foreign policies. Most surprising of all have been many Indian reservations, enriched by the boom in casino gambling. From the Viejas in California to the Pequots in Connecticut, these tribes have acquired nearly sovereign power, each able to change, irrevocably, the character of their surrounding neighborhoods.

  Such ports, universities, and reservations have much in common and, perhaps, few analogues in America. They form a new breed of semi-sovereign political institution, complementing the greater power of the transnational corporations and the federal government.

  Finally, a new cosmopolitan mentality has taken shape over the last fifteen or so years, which, perhaps more than anything else has challenged traditional perspectives on place. In the chapters that follow, I approach America as a place or as human geography with a history. But looking at the country as a place is not an easy undertaking, since so many Americans throughout history have preferred to see the country not as a place but as an idea and as a process.69 They have argued that Americans were a people not because they shared a common place, past, or language, but because they shared a set of abstract universal principles or ideas generated by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and articulated in the country’s founding documents. This argument, of course, often fudged the difference between the Constitution, a decisively provincial and place-making document because it built the foundation for the nation, and the Declaration of Independence, which appealed to the universal experience of all peoples to justify a revolution.70 At the same time, given the newness of the country and the radical nature of the split from the British, it made sense for Americans to emphasize the universal side over the place-building side as the critical cohesive force in American life.

  In our time, however, long after the early rationale for it had disappeared, the notion of the country as a philosophical (rather than historical) entity has still overshadowed any claim to the contrary. Robert Dole, in a farewell speech he delivered to the Senate in May 1996, before embarking on his failed bid for the presidency, described “America as much more than a place on the map, it’s an idea.” “America is an idea,” said Newt Gingrich, in his 1995 To Renew America, “the most idea-based civilization in history.” Therefore, “anyone can be an American.” “America is a set of ideas and if you believe in those ideas, you are an American,” said Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, in Washington, D.C., in 1997.71

  Many Americans, then, insisted upon describing America as an idea. But they have taken the further step of claiming that the country has always been “an idea in the making,” an idea always being “reinvented,” an ideological promise yet unfulfilled, on the verge, never quite there. “We’re sort of constantly in the act of becoming,” said President Bill Clinton in a 1997 interview with the Wall Street Journal.72 Michael Walzer, political thinker at Princeton University, has asserted that America is a “radically unfinished society,” a “continually negotiated and contingent” culture.73 “If America is about nothing else,” Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s magazine, said in a 1992 essay “Who and What Is an American?”, “it is about the invention of self. Because we have little use for history, and because we refuse the comforts of a society established on the blueprint of class privilege, we find ourselves set adrift at birth in an existential void, inheriting nothing except the obligation to construct a plausible self.” “Who else is the American hero if not a wandering pilgrim who goes forth on a perpetual quest?”74

  Not surprisingly, current immigrants have embraced this view. Thus Janet Wolf, professor of English at the University of Rochester and a recent British migrant, declared in her book Resident Alien that she was drawn to America because it was “a site for a potential self,” rather than a country with a past.75 Bharati Mukherjee, Indian-born novelist, said in 1997 that “I am an American for whom ‘America’ is the stage for the drama of self-transformation.”76

  There is much truth, of course, in all of this. Ever since there was an America, it was an idea and a process, above all for those who have wanted to begin again or dreamed of starting over. But this can be carried too far.

  In the current jargon, the country is never done, never there, never truly together, a setting suited best to those able to adapt painlessly to life’s shifting demands. In this context, no practical difference exists between those who colonized and settled here and those who immigrated here, between those born here and those en route, between hotels and historical monuments. As Newt
Gingrich says, “anyone can be an American.” Or, as Michael Walzer insists, “anyone can come here.” In this context, fresh blood is always preferable to old blood, getting out always superior to remaining, new models always better than last year’s washed-up specimens, because all these resonate with the idea of becoming, of what it means—for some people anyway—to be an American. In this context, moreover, the conception of a place lodged in time and space, in which people share many of the same things, remember the same things, has no meaning. If America is an idea, then any place can be America. Such generalizing obscures the way countries are concrete places, have people in them, have histories of conflict and sacrifice in them, and have been literally sustained by “historical memories real and imaginary,” to quote philosopher Isaiah Berlin.77

  The countervailing trends that so marked the country before 1970 seem to have lost much of their potency. Placelessness, therefore, presents a greater challenge to the country than ever, far more so than it did at the turn of the last century, which for all of its chaos and change, was still a world of boundaries—in moral life, in politics, in the relations among men, women, and children, in national cultures and geographies. In our time, it is no longer a question of settling countries or continents but of standing ground against the placeless and learning how to marshal the power of centering against the landscape of the temporary.