by Simon Schama
Jarena Lee, itinerant black preacher in the Atlantic states; frontispiece from her autobiography.
African American schoolchildren in North Carolina around the time of emancipation, 1863.
Very early photograph of First African Baptist Church, probably Savannah.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, preacher, literary editor, colonel of the 1st South Carolina (black) Volunteers and the first anthologist of black spirituals.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers as they would have looked at the time of their recital before Queen Victoria, 1875.
Poor white itinerant evangelicals, Louisiana, 1938.
Frontispiece portrait of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur from the first edition of Letters from an American Farmer, 1782.
The beauteous Citizen Know-Nothing, imagined as the frontispiece to sheet music for the party at the height of its political power, 1854.
Anti-Mexican newspaper cartoon at the time of the Mexican War, complete with lustful, dagger- wielding Latinos.
Chinese railroad construction workers, Montana, 1870s.
Illustration for a song sheet, the musical version of Bret Harte’s “The Heathen Chinee.”
Colonel Fred Bee, Chinese consul, in his familiar plug hat, with Chinese and U.S. Army investigators into the Rock Springs, Wyoming, massacre.
“Where the Blame Lies”: anti-immigration cartoon, 1891, the complete gallery of ethnic caricatures of the “inferior races.”
Graduation Day, 1916, at Henry Ford’s English School in Dearborn, Michigan. E Pluribus Unum is the name of the steamer bringing immigrants to the “Melting Pot,” in which the graduates stand, holding their Stars and Stripes.
Grace Abbott, 1925, two decades after founding the Immigrants Protective League in Chicago.
Immigrant matrons from eastern Europe, doing their bit for wartime America, 1918.
John Gast’s American Progress , 1872, a much-reproduced image from the years leading up to the Centennial, embodying the inevitability of western manifest destiny: the telegraph and railroad completing what covered wagons and stagecoaches had begun.
Franklinia alatamaha, native to western Georgia, from William Bartram’s Travels, 1791.
Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs Sr., at the time of his residence among the Cherokee.
Seal of the Cherokee Nation, 1839.
John Ross, chief of the Cherokee Nation, Jackson’s antagonist, during the years of their independence and mass deportation over the Mississippi.
George Healey’s portrait of President Andrew Jackson, author of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
The last great land run, Cherokee Strip, Oklahoma Territory, 16 September 1893.
A Cherokee family, photographed in the 1930s in North Carolina, in a rural setting much like that from which they had been expelled a century earlier.
Major John Wesley Powell, one-armed explorer, geologist, and ecological prophet, with Tau-gu, chief of the Paiutes, Colorado Basin,1873.
Dorothea Lange’s great portrait of a migrant mother from the Dust Bowl, 1936.
“Bath rings” and boat trapped in the dried bed of the drought-depleted Lake Mead reservoir, 2007.
The Klan’s perversion of faith was extreme but it was a characteristic response to the experience of defeat and dispossession, clinging to a nostalgia for a form of Christian gentility that had only ever existed on the backs of slaves. Both black and white churches in the century after the Civil War were life rafts for people living in poverty and alienation. But while the black churches were constructive and forward-looking, emphasizing education and economic skills, planting in country and city the germs of self-determination, the white churches that ministered to the hard-up were most often defensive, fighting a furious rearguard action against the assembled forces of modernity: secularism, alcohol, Charles Darwin, and the latest satanic monster, showbiz. The answer to the last threat, of course, was to fight fire with fire, and launch what was in effect the Third Great Awakening: using the techniques of mass entertainment to steer the weak and sinful away from Babylon. It was a priceless gift that Billy Sunday, the battler against liquor, had been a professional baseball player (his name helped too). Movies of his revival sermons show Sunday using his slugger’s swing to maximum effect when demonstrating what he would do with demon drink and those who profited from it.
White Pentecostalism, the Holiness movement, all made their deepest inroads, though, in the regions of the United States most vulnerable to economic distress: the prairies where corporate agriculture was uprooting the ancient American ideal of the family farm; the Great Plains where the dust storms blew away the hopes of the small farmer along with his topsoil; the Appalachians where coal miners were paid by “tickets” redeemable only through the company store, and were unprotected from the brutal emphysema and lesions that erupted in their bodies after years of toil at the coal face. Small mining towns like Pocahontas, West Virginia, where immigrant labor came from Hungary, Poland, and Ireland, became the theater of an all-out struggle between vice and salvation; the number of churches struggling to keep up with the saloons and whorehouses that competed for the miners’ Sundays. The mining and railroad companies that wanted to protect their investment often funded the building of churches and the expenses of the minister. But the appeal of religion to all the Americans living hand to mouth in good times and disasters did not need the sanction of the bosses to make it compelling. Very often—whether in big-city tenements or broken-down coal towns—it was the church that ministered to the sick; looked in when pantries were empty; made sure the kids were in school. And, to the dismay of management, the unorthodox fringe churches would often help out strikers when times got really rough. Near Birmingham, Alabama, the pastor of the Mount Hebron Baptist Church, where the congregation were mill workers and small tenant farmers, was Fred Maxey, who made no apology for showing up at union rallies, going out of his way to minister to black and white alike. Needless to say a Klan cross was burned outside his church.
The twentieth-century church of the white poor, then, was not monopolized by reaction. There had been, in fact, a change in party identification. The great Christian revival orator and Democrat populist William Jennings Bryan had mobilized a huge rural constituency behind his attacks on the bastions of capitalism: Wall Street, the banks that, in the name of the gold standard, made credit tough for the little man. Conversely, after Theodore Roosevelt left the White House, the Republicans cozied up to business. By the time the roof fell in on American capitalism in 1929, the natural alliance between Irish Democrats and the Catholic Church had been augmented by another between white rural Protestants in the South and Midwest. In the harder-hit areas of the industrial South, joining an evangelical revival church was a way to cut loose from management-endorsed Sunday worship and establish an independent sense of community. One disgruntled textile mill owner complained that holy rollers “tear up a village, keep folks at meetings till all hours at night so they are not to fit to work the next morning.”
A remarkable Alabama woman, Myrtle Lawrence, illiterate white sharecropper, stalwart of the Taylor Springs Baptist Church and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, came to New York in 1937 for National Sharecroppers’ Week, organized by New Deal government agencies. What the united ranks of union organizers and government progressives would have liked, as the historian Wayne Flynt observes, was someone beauteous in poverty, straight out of a Dorothea Lange photograph. What they got instead was toothless Myrtle Lawrence, snorting snuff, chewing quids, and hurtling gobs of juice into her pink-wrapped spit box before plunging into prayers and hymns with raw Old Time gusto. But on one principle, Myrtle could not be faulted by the high-minded New Dealers: she thought blacks fellow Americans, welcomed in the love of Jesus. At the YWCA Summer School in North Carolina, she told an English class, “They eat the same kind of food we eat; they live in the same kind of shacks that we live in; they work for the same boss men that we work for; they hoe beside us in the fields; they drink out of the same bucket t
hat we drink out of; ignorance is killing them just the same as it’s killing us. Why shouldn’t they belong to the same union that we belong to?” Myrtle and Fannie Lou would surely have got along.
23. Ruleville, Mississippi, 31 August 1962
She knew why she had to get on that bus, and it wasn’t because no out-of-state kids who’d come to Mississippi had told her to. No, sir, it was what she’d heard in the little chapel in Ruleville from Reverend Story that Sunday; God speaking directly to her, though the words came out of the mouths of all those young men with their fine hopes. Fannie Lou was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She had had enough of breaking her back every day in the fields so she could put bread on the table; enough of being frightened she might be put out of her house if she so much as went near the folks organizing in Greenwood for the vote; talking about sitting in on lunch counters; in the front of the bus. Wasn’t it enough that she couldn’t have children of her own; that they had taken her and done something to her that made sure of that without so much as asking her first? And now what was she supposed to do with all that welling up of feeling; knowing that it was more than high time that promises made should be promises kept; that she and people like her could have the decencies of life, starting with the vote? And if she got scared at the thought of what she was going to do, she just did what she couldn’t but help: she sang. She would lean over the cot and sing to her little Vergie. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” she would sing, and her adopted girl would smile and sleep.
They were going to Indianola, twenty-six miles down the road, the road that went straight through the cotton fields past W. D. Marlowe’s plantation where she sweated for her share or kept time for the croppers. In Indianola, Mr. Charles McLaurin had said, they would all register to vote as was their born right and something would get started in the Delta. The yellow bus rolled up by the water tower, and on they all got, mostly the folks of the church and a few of the organizers to see everything went as it should. But there was a pit in their stomachs and they sat there, low and quiet like the children who would usually be in the seats. The drive seemed endless. Every time a pickup went past, they could see pink and red faces looking hard at the bus, some of them scowling, the trucks making a swerve to bother them. Those twenty-six miles seemed the longest ride of their lives.
When they got to the city offices by the bayou, out they climbed. Word must surely have got out as there was a whole bunch of state troopers and highway patrolmen there, looking at them hard as if they were taking photographs. And they made it plain to McLaurin that there would be just two of them let in for the registration that day and if they didn’t care for that, well, that was just too bad. Now Fannie Lou had worked her hardest at preparing herself for all the complicated questions she knew would be put in her way like a briar patch, but they had sure done a good job in making it hard and she was beat if she knew when this and that clause of the constitution of the state of Mississippi had become law and others had not. There was a good deal of head and pencil scratching; hours of it, the August sweat made worse by her nerves, before she handed in the papers to the hard-eyed white man at his desk. Ushered outside to wait, she already knew she wasn’t going to be given what she had come for, not that day anywise, so it was no surprise when Fannie Lou was told she had failed the test the state needed to verify her credentials as a voter. One day soon Fannie Lou knew it would be different, so when they climbed aboard the bus she could not take it as defeat.
The bus pulled out of Indianola, but as the evening closed in, so did the bad feeling. They all sat there in the bus as quietly as they had come; but then the traffic outside on the road picked up, and much of it was men in trucks who had taken the shotguns off their racks and were waving them in the air at the bus, hollerin, “Fuck you niggers, we’ll kill you niggers before you EVER get the vote.” And then came the police cars flashing their lights and cutting them off, and the officer got the driver out and told him he had no right taking passengers seeing as the bus was too yellow; that it was “impersonating a school bus.” There was a fine to be paid; and there was a go-round the bus for the money and it got handed over, but still they took the driver away.
So how were they to get back home now? No one on the bus had ever driven anything, that’s for sure. So there they sat, in the thick Delta night, a stew of fright and despair. Even McLaurin seemed to have lost his voice. No one knew what to do; what might become of them. They could feel their own sweat go cold. But then, from somewhere in the back of the bus, a sound started; a voice, pure and low, just easing out into the air; Fannie Lou’s voice.
“This little light of mine,” it sang,
I’m gonna let it shine
This little light of mine
I’m gonna let it shine
And the voices joined in. They were sovereign; invincible. They had the Lord with them. They would overcome.
PART THREE
III: WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?
24. Twilight, Downing Street, June 2008
The evening was winding down. The British-and-damned-proud-of-it grub (minty pea soup, salmon, roast beef, berries) had been polished off. The last of the daylight was fading through the sash windows. Some fifty or so guests, faces shiny with satisfaction and wine, were pushing chairs back and slowly making their way into the adjoining room for coffee and a dram, though neither the prime minister nor the president would touch a drop. We were a mixed bunch: cabinet ministers in varying states of merriment or beleaguered solemnity; the World’s Most Important Media Tycoon (saturnine, imperiously unfriendly); and an unlikely prattle of historians. Invitations had gone out indicating passionate interest in the subject on the part of both chief executives. This is certainly true of the prime minister, who has a PhD in history, but it was a stretch to imagine George Bush with a heavily thumbed edition of Gibbon on the bedside table, even though a chronicle of the fate awaiting overextended empires might not go amiss.
Some of the tribe of Clio were loyal enthusiasts of the president, whose popularity ratings at home were sinking even faster than the Dow Jones. Others among us had reconciled our uneasy consciences by telling ourselves that if we were in the history business, how could we possibly stay away? But what sort of business was that? In what, precisely, were we being implicated? The general idea of the evening seemed to be that if a gathering of historians was convened in sufficient density, the moment itself would, by some act of cultural osmosis, become Historic. We who had communed in our pages with Churchill and de Gaulle, would now sprinkle a little Significance around like air freshener in the parlor of exhausted power.
Into the drawing room—a Quinlan Terry extravaganza in terra-cotta, edged with gilt reliefs, the result of a decorating epiphany experienced by Mrs. Thatcher in Nancy Reagan’s White House—strode the hurting titans. During the early stages of the dinner, Bush seemed oddly ill at ease, especially for someone getting a respite from the gloomy sibyls at home. A generously fraternal speech by Gordon Brown, lauding the bond between the two democracies and ending in a toast, was met with an aw-shucks response as POTUS got to his feet, evidently underbriefed about this particular moment in the proceedings. “Guess I’d better say something,” he thought out loud before offering the communiqué that “relations between the United States and the United Kingdom are good…[long pause] in fact, damned good.” And that was pretty much it for hands across the sea. He seemed oddly diminished, someone who, for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, had discovered the armchair he’d been sitting in for years was now too big and his legs no longer touched the floor; the incredible shrinking prez. Over the pea soup, the shoulder-slapping bonhomie withered to a dry little tic of humorous coughs, eyebrows suspended between hilarity and uncertainty, like a stand-up comic sweating through a tough house on a Monday night in Milwaukee.
For a minute or two after the photo op, George Bush was left to his own devices and came my way. (Improbable, but true.) He looked unmistakably like a man in need of a drink
; but since he had sworn off ever having one, and since I had a glass of cognac in my hand, the least I could do was say a word that would get him through the rest of the evening, and that word was: “Texas.” The pick-me-up worked an instant transformation: the officially synthetic grin replaced by the real thing. Our television crew was off there soon, I explained, to make a film about immigration history. Then I reeled off a string of place names that were country music to his ears: “El Paso,” “Brownsville,” “Laredo.” Some of the earlier discomfort, I realized, was that of a man who traveled abroad only so that he could feel a little pop of joy when he got within honking distance of the Houston freeways. “Your policy on immigration,” I said, the cognac making me cheeky, “is about the only policy I’ve agreed with; and that’s because it put you way to the left of your party.” It was true, if patronizing. The line in the Republican Party over what to do about the twelve million illegal immigrants in the United States, the overwhelming majority Hispanic, runs between those for whom fencing, discovery, and deportation are the beginning and end of policy, and those like Bush and McCain, who have long been in the world of the Hispanic Southwest, and want to find some way to get the illegals to citizenship. Even the lamest of lame-duck presidents didn’t need a pat on the head from someone who was not going to be lining up anytime soon for the job of ghosting the memoirs. But Bush took the condescension in good part because, I suspect, his head was off somewhere far away from Whitehall, mooching around the chaparral, where the lights of Houston oil refineries were still benevolent twinkles on the unlimited horizon of Texan plenty.
