by Simon Schama
Bringing him back from the sagebrush, I asked, “So why do you suppose immigration turned out not to be the hot-button issue for your party?” I mentioned the standard-bearer of anti-illegal hard-line enforcement among the candidates, the Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, who, despite the ranting of hard-core radio demagogues prophesying the End of America, had gone nowhere in the primaries. “Tancredo,” said Bush, incredulously, rolling his eyes and lightly snorting like one of his own horses, adding under his breath, “is an idiot.” He then complained a bit how he could have got a benign immigration reform bill enacted, guaranteeing medical and social services to at least the children of illegals, had it not been for the Machiavellian obstructionism of the Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid. Then he made a suggestion for our film shoot. “I knew the border real well, back when it was just about the worst, dirt-poor place in America; I could tell you stories of those days in the fifties; of how people who’d jumped the line survived, what they worked for day and night.” He paused, brows knitted again, and then suggested we take a look at old stills of the way Brownsville and the pueblos the other side of the border were half a century ago—shacks and rats—and compare them to the way those towns are now; which is, for all the trouble and grief, materially better. There had been, he reminded me, a huge shift within Mexico itself; people from the country moving steadily, unstoppably north, to the world of the Norteamericanos.
Back in the States at that very moment, two sure things were going down. Someone at a gas station was jacking up the price to as close to five dollars a gallon as they could get it, and along the Rio Grande, and in the unforgiving desert, coyotes (people smugglers) were trying to get a hundred souls every hour to make that crossing. Homes were being repossessed every time you looked; banks were hitting the deck, taking the bankers with them. Suddenly there might be a lot fewer center-hall colonial McMansions to clean, or prairie-size lawns to cut. The job lines would rise, skyrocketing oil prices would hike transportation costs, and the cost of food would head north too. Though one had nothing to do with the other, the pressure on jobs would spur hard-core right-wing radio ravers, like the comically self-named Michael Savage, to yet more foaming waves of abuse. The immigrants were parasitic vermin, barely human, battening on the wasted flesh of the body politic, sucking taxes from law-abiding citizens, taking jobs away from lunch-pail Joe.
But none of this matters to the unstoppable stream. On it comes. Twelve million undocumented and around a million more each year for the foreseeable future; right now the biggest human migration on the face of the planet. And they come not just from Mexico and Central America; but to New York from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, from Cambodia and Liberia and Senegal. If they could only get out of the prison their government has made for them, the entire population of Myanmar would fetch up in New York Harbor tomorrow. And why? Because of two dramatic utterances. The first was Tom Paine’s pronouncement in Common Sense (1776) that the “New World has been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty.” But that was to define America as the abode of free conscience and would have been a little lofty for those just wanting to climb out of a Pomeranian mud hole, let alone a corrugated-roof shack in Guatemala City, into something approximating a human existence. For them, another work was written, by a native-born Frenchman on his farm in Orange County, New York. The book, which seemed like a memoir but was at least as much romance, was called Letters from an American Farmer (1782), and it was the first great work of American literature. Chapter Two of Letters is titled “What is an American?” A whole century before the Sephardi Jewish poet Emma Lazarus declaimed in words graven into the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty that America would be decent enough to receive the “wretched refuse of the teeming shore,” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur had already lit the candle of hope that would reach across oceans and continents to millions. The emblems of American self-sufficiency, the log cabin and the homestead farm, were already declared by Crèvecoeur to be the social cells of democracy.
And they were within the reach of anyone who had the gumption to choose to live a free life in an open country. In Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, the servile peasant and the human effluent of the cities would be reborn as John Citizen. (Jane was not discussed.) Released from having to defer to aristocrats and ecclesiastics, common humanity would be liberated to realize its true, boundless potential. Happiness was on the horizon. “We have no princes for whom we toil or bleed,” wrote Crèvecoeur. “We are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as it ought to be.” Now why, then, should a man remain in the social prisons of European tradition? Why would anyone with a grain of common sense or self-respect feel attachment to the accidental geography of his nativity, for “a country that had no bread for him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails, punishments, who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of the planet?” To leave such vexation behind was to experience social rebirth. What is an American, then? “He is an American, who leaving behind him, all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the government he obeys and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received into the broad lap of Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” Let such melting commence! And the misery-stricken of the world would no longer be the defenseless creatures of the mighty. In America they would be something else: self-made men; citizens.
25. Citizen Heartbreak: France, August 1794
How they haunted him, those words written twenty years before. “What, then, is the American, this new man?” he had asked. Not him, apparently, not according to the mirthless James Monroe, the new American minister to the French Republic. Since Crèvecoeur had been the first to ask that rhetorical question in print, the sour irony was not lost on him. He, who had bidden the unfortunate of the world to come to America, who had promised that any of them might become that new man, was being denied that opportunity. But at least he had given voice to a universal ideal, something the impoverished and the harassed wanted. They would want it in blighted Ireland and pogrom-terrorized Russia; in famine-struck south China and arid Mexico. Perhaps Crèvecoeur, for whom Americans were mostly English, German, Dutch, Scottish and Irish, had an inkling of this epic immigration to come? Certainly he supposed that being American was, in the first place, a state of mind—the rejection of geographic fatalism—as much as an occupancy of a place on the earth. But then what was he himself? A true American, in spite of Mr. Monroe’s rejection? Or was he, in his marrow, still French: Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur, heir to the estate of Pierrepont near Caen in Normandy (land that would be watered by American blood in 1940)? That old birthright he had left behind, more from circumstance than any act of will. Remote though he became from his pays and mother tongue, Crèvecoeur never forgot the loamy Norman soil, the high hedgerows walling the narrow lanes, the clannish rooks in the orchards. But two revolutions on either side of the ocean had turned him from seigneur to cultivateur, squire to farmer. It was imprudent in such an altered world to indulge in pastoral nostalgia. Those who did so usually betrayed themselves as having lived off the sweat of the peasantry. So many liberal ci-devants, former gentry, had lost their liberty and then their heads, for less. Poor Condorcet, the social philosopher, had been captured by the Terror when, offered an omelette by the farmer sheltering the fugitive, he politely asked for it to be made from a dozen fresh-laid eggs. Force of habit had exposed the marquis beneath the trappings of the republican citizen. So for the moment it was better that he be just plain Citizen Crèvecoeur.
Or did he dream in English? In his heart of hearts was he still the husbandman of Pine Hill, New York, husband to Mehitable Tippet; known in Chester and the townships of Orange County as Mr. Hector St. John? Or had that old honeyed ex
istence of his, the bee swarm beneath the locust trees, been consumed in the flames? Was it his lot now to eke out his days as Citizen Heartbreak, eccentric survivor of wars and revolutions, dimly remembered as botanizer, occasional man of letters, sometime consul, a one-man chamber of commerce who had created the packet-boat run between L’Orient and New York; who had introduced alfalfa (luzerne) to America, imported along with cargoes of cognac and human hair?
There were days when he scarcely knew himself. But he did know that he yearned to follow the setting sun across the sea, just once more before he died, to revisit the country he had delivered to the world from his mind’s eye. But in the summer of 1794 Crèvecoeur couldn’t just ship off. The French Republic was at war with Britain even if the United States had stayed neutral. To be anglophone was itself a cause for suspicion now, and it was no longer as delightful to be an American in Paris as it had been in the days when court and city had been thrilled by the sight of Benjamin Franklin’s beaver cap. Too many conspicuous Friends of America had fallen foul of the Jacobins and Robespierre’s Terror. Quite apart from the tricky nature of the language, the government in the United States had signed a peace treaty with the British; had apparently forgotten its debt of gratitude. Amérique perfide! So how could he, Crèvecoeur, who had been a soldier for the monarchy, a squire in British America, who seemed to change nationalities and languages with his linen, be trusted to travel to the United States? Many of his friends had suffered for the same complications of allegiance. The philosophical La Rochefoucauld had been stoned to death by a mob. Guillaume-Louis Otto (erstwhile Count Otto of Strasbourg), married to Crèvecoeur’s daughter America-Francès, had been imprisoned. Had he somehow been responsible? At the height of the Terror, fearful for the rest of his family, Crèvecoeur had tried to use the goodwill of the American agent, Joel Barlow, to get them out of the country, but neither Barlow nor the irascible minister, Gouverneur Morris, had any goodwill to spare. Now, at the end of August 1794, matters should have been different. Maximilien Robespierre had been forced to stick his head through “the republican window” where so many had perished for the crime of insufficient patriotic ardor. Parisians, including those with suspicious American connections, now breathed a little more easily.
And there was a new American minister to the French Republic: the Virginian lawyer and senator, James Monroe, who, naturally, like others before him (John Adams came readily to mind) spoke not a word of French and was dependent on the kindness and translations of Crèvecoeur to get his bearings. It was easy for Crèvecoeur to sympathize. When he himself had first returned to France in 1781 after quarter of a century in America, he had all but forgotten his native tongue, and the process of reacquiring fluency had been unexpectedly painful. He made himself write a French edition of his book, not just a translation, but a manuscript almost twice as long, and given a different tonal music from the original, with lashings of strategically anti-British sentiments. Monroe seemed appreciative of his editorial and translating help, and Crèvecoeur’s hunt for a summer house suitable for the representative of the United States. So Crèvecoeur dropped hints about his past standing as an American citizen-farmer; of some mission perhaps he might usefully perform in the United States. When no forthright response came back, the hints became broader. In the summer of 1794, Crèvecoeur took it upon himself to supervise the making of three American flags. The largest was intended for the French legislative chamber, the National Convention, where it would hang beside the tricolor. A second was for the American Embassy, and the third for Monroe’s diplomatic carriage. It was the new flag, the revolution’s circle of thirteen stars increased by two more representing the newly admitted states of Kentucky and Vermont, arranged in an irregular oval pattern while fifteen alternating bands of red and white made up the field. It was very beautiful, and Monroe was happy. But not happy enough to oblige Crèvecoeur, who, raising the matter once more, was met by so chilly a rejection that it would have to be the last. The man who thought old identities could be struck off like chains from the slave, that to wish to be an American was already a license to become one, was being disabused of his romance. He had been born a Frenchman and would die in, of all places, the rustic district of Sarcelles, today neither rustic nor peaceful but the scene of uneasy Jewish-Muslim coexistence.
The boy Michel-Guillaume had been no runaway. He had gone where his parents had pointed: first to the Jesuits in Caen, and then a place as un-Jesuitical as could be imagined, Salisbury, where the family had distant relatives and where he was to learn English. Since it is well known that the most expeditious road to fluency is driven by amorous energy, and since there were few more charming lures in Wiltshire than a young French beau attempting to say “thee,” Michel-Guillaume caught the ear and eye of a local merchant’s daughter, and in turn became smitten with her. They were each other’s; they would be betrothed and have little milkmaids and shepherds. But before the romance could flower, the girl died, and for the first time the boy, thinking how it translated into Wiltshire English, was lanced by the irony of his name. The sensible thing, of course, would have been to go home to Pierrepont, to his parents and the imperturbable herds. But instead Crèvecoeur took ship for New France in 1755, arriving just in time for a war; the one which lost Quebec for Louis XV. The soldier in white smartly turned into Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, who charged, as ordered by the irrationally gallant General Montcalm, directly at the British guns lined up unsportingly on the Plains of Abraham. The young soldier was badly hit but not killed. One of the hobbling wounded, he was now, whether he chose it or not, a Briton. If this mortified the survivor, he would not say, not then, nor ever after. But at many points in his life, Crèvecoeur the Franco-American would speak tenderly of the qualities of the English, the very ones Frenchmen despised: their taste for liberty, their habit of moderate manners and genteel decorum. Well, he never spent time in the bagnios of Covent Garden.
When his wounds allowed, Crèvecoeur left the ruins of Quebec and made his way south into deep British America, doing what pleased him most: sketching, mapping, botanizing; closely observing the fauna. Sometimes he walked, sometimes he rode through the granite Allegheny passes, down ancient Indian hunting trails choked with sumac and overhung with wild grapevines. Around the black reflecting lakes he paddled, listening to the loons at dusk, the rasp of a million segmented legs at night, squatting by the fire with Oneida Indians who named their adopted son Cahio-ha-ra. In the upper Hudson Valley, the mountain peaks were softened fringes of conifers; below, the forests had been cleared for sheep pasture. Church spires rose by the ponds; woodsmoke drifted over the valley, and the clink of a blacksmith’s hammer carried over the Hudson Gorge. Dark-rigged sailing barges plied the stream. And there, the wounds of Crèvecoeur’s heart and body, love, loss, and battle, finally became bearable. The possibility of a new American life intimated itself as delicately as a candle’s glimmer.
Crèvecoeur became a tenant farmer in the uplands. He fished and kept cattle, poultry, and a prolific beehive. He was now someone else: J. Hector St. John Esq., “St. John” pronounced in the proper English fashion “Sinjun.” He neither bared his wounds nor told campaign tales, but instead joined the company of the country at horse fairs, county assemblies, and taverns, and went to church in their Protestant way. At some point his path crossed with the mercantile Tippets of Tippet’s Neck, lower Yonkers, whose grand house welcomed him down its poplar-lined carriage drive. A daughter, Mehitable (a name favored by her family over many generations), received Crèvecoeur with particular tenderness, and they were married by a Huguenot pastor in September 1769. And in the way of now being a solid Anglo-American, St. John earned enough credit in the eyes of his neighbors and, more important, his in-laws, to buy himself and his wife an uncleared property of some 120 acres, thirty-five miles west of the Hudson, three miles from the village of Chester. Husband and wife began their farming life as every American was supposed to, in a self-built log cabin. But as the first crops came in, Mr. St.
John wanted something more enduring and set a new house upon sturdy brick foundations, broad enough for five upper-story windows, which looked down on a little rustic “piazza,” as he called it. The place was called Pine Hill, for behind the house there were both, lending a picturesque aspect to the property. A year after her marriage, Mehitable bore a girl, whom in recognition of his happy double identity Crèvecoeur called America-Francès (Fanny); and then, at biennial intervals, two boys, Guillaume-Alexandre (Ally) and Philippe-Louis. Mrs. and Mr. St. John prospered and had honeybee days beneath their locust trees undisturbed by intimations of rebellion.
To read the first fifty or so pages of Letters from an American Farmer, one would never know anything could ever be amiss with the idyll. Crèvecoeur insisted that he had not written a true memoir—that characters like “Andrew the Hebridean” were invented—but he knew very well that there is nothing much to separate him from his alter ego “James” other than the fiction of having inherited fortune and land from a benevolent American father. (Was Crèvecoeur projecting what still whispered to him from Normandy?) The voice yearns for what Thomas Jefferson would declare to be an American, indeed a universal, natural right: the pursuit of happiness. “Where is that station,” Crèvecoeur wrote, “which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of an American farmer possessing freedom of action, freedom of thoughts, ruled by a mode of government which requires little from us?” Each year he kills 1,500 to 2,000 hundredweight of pork, 1,200 of beef, and “of fowls my wife has great stock; what can I wish more?” What indeed, although the fact that “my Negroes are tolerably faithful and healthy” may have helped maintain the arcadia. “When I contemplate my wife by my fireside while she either spins, knits, darns or suckles our child, I cannot describe the various emotions of love, of gratitude, of conscious pride, which thrill in my heart and often overflow in involuntary tears. I feel the necessity, the sweet pleasure of acting my part, the part of a husband and father, with attention and propriety which may entitle me to my good fortune.” When he plowed on low, even ground, the father set his little boy on a seat screwed to the beam of the plow, in front of the horses; and he prattles away while Crèvecoeur leans over the handle…“the father ploughing with his child to feed his family is inferior only to the emperor of China ploughing as an example to his kingdom.” In the evening as he trots home he can see a myriad of insects “dancing in the beams of the setting sun.”
