A Tale of Three Americas ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
July 4, 2021
I was taken by surprise the other day while I was driving down Route 128. I was listening to an NPR interview with Keith Lockhart, the conductor of the Boston Pops, about plans for the annual Fourth of July concert. And during a break the station began playing John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. I hadn’t heard it in awhile, and suddenly I began to cry. In the car, driving down Route 128.
Now, the pandemic has affected us all emotionally, and it’s going to take time to understand all the feelings that we’ve probably been shoving under the rug for the past 16 months. We’ve coped with fear of a vicious virus, we’ve coped with disruption and isolation, not seeing family and friends. We’ve lost out on traditions and events, such as the Fourth of July concerts. We have also watched our country practically come apart at the seams during this time; with violence, police brutality, protests, an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and a presidential election that many have refused to accept. It has been a scary and sad time for many reasons, and there’s a lot to cry about. It takes moments such as the one I experienced on Friday to come to terms with the losses and the grief.
In that moment in the car I pictured holidays at the Esplanade in Boston, or watching on TV as a giant flag unfurled at the Hatch Shell while the Sousa march played. I always loved that moment. It’s moments such as this that can stir us to feel love and pride for our country. It’s why we celebrate on the Fourth of July; to remember that we are unique, that we have made tremendous contributions to history, and have tremendous potential.
But in recent years I increasingly approach Independence Day as a time for contemplation, not celebration. As I have preached other times, I am too aware of how often our lofty words have not rung true, how many times we have failed to live up to our ideals. And this has never been more true than it is this year, when the United States feel so divided. I find myself wondering more and more often why that is, why we see some very basic things, such as the idea of liberty for all, as divisive. What keeps us unable to share a vision for our future?
Since I had a little more time for reading this past month, I returned to the book American Nations, by Colin Woodard. Some of you probably remember that Mr. Woodard was a guest speaker at a symposium on gun violence sponsored by the Gloucester Meetinghouse Foundation a few years ago. He addressed this lack of cohesiveness, this lack of common vision in his talk, where he introduced the history of the United States in a very different way.
Woodard shared that what has determined the cultural differences in the United States was the identity of the settlers in 11 distinct regions, or nations, he called them, and he maintained that those differences are still present today. Looking at those early settlers and their cultures helps us to understand why it has been so difficult for us to put aside our differences and truly be philosophically united, despite what our Founders wrote in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
To help explain this, I am going to offer a glimpse of three of the 11 different American cultures; tales of three different Americas, so we can see how the cultures and attitudes persist today.
Early in the 1600’s, settlers from England arrived along what is now the Virginia and Maryland coast. Often they were the younger sons of English nobles, unable to inherit property in England, and were seeking wealth and position in the New World. Their aim was to recreate a country gentleman’s lifestyle, a new aristocracy with manor houses, servants, and later, slaves. They were not interested in creating cities, or governments, but rather a very decentralized rural economy that was governed by a tiny number of elites. Colin Woodard calls this American Nation the Tidewater. Ironically, many of our Founders came from this nation, and this culture. These people modeled their vision for a republic on the ancient Greeks and Romans, and sought personal liberty for themselves, not freedom for all.
Often we use the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ interchangeably, but in fact they can mean different things. To the Tidewater elite, liberties were privileges granted by a heirarchy, not birthrights. By contrast, freedom, a concept adhered to by Germanic and Dutch peoples, was considered a birthright, and ensured that people were equal before the law.
Far north of the Tidewater, Pilgrims and Puritans landed on the coast of what is now Massachusetts, and established a very different kind of society. These were not gentry, but mostly hailed from East Anglia in England, which had the highest percentage of educated people in the country. Their economy was tied closely to that of the Low Countries in Europe, and they had absorbed many of the ideas of Dutch culture. The Puritans arrived in the New World with the intention of creating heaven on earth, as they defined it, anyway. They brought their families, and their religion, and established towns and cities, with an emphasis on self-government and on education for their children. Towns, as well as congregations, should always have autonomy; no kings, or bishops. Colin Woodard named this nation Yankeedom. Its influence on the United States has always far exceeded its size.
Settlers of Yankeedom had a very different view of freedom: since they rejected traditional hierarchies of government or church, they did not regard freedom as being granted to them by superiors.
Our third nation is what Woodard named the Deep South. This nation was profoundly different from the other two from the beginning. It was not settled by people from England or France, or the Netherlands or Spain, but rather, by people from Barbados. These arrivals were descendants of settlers from England who had emigrated to Barbados to establish sugar plantations. There they had created a culture and economy based on slavery. Woodard wrote that Barbados was ‘notorious even in the 17th century for its inhumanity.’ (American Nations, p. 83.) As land became scarcer in Barbados, people emigrated to what is now South Carolina, with the intention of recreating a West Indies-style slavery economy there. Since they arrived fairly late in the 1600’s, the importation of enslaved people from Africa had already begun. The white settlers set about creating plantations and bringing in enormous numbers of Africans to work on them.
So there we have three Americas: three visions of how to build a new world. A vision of landed gentry and a rural economy, with the gentry creating the laws and the government among themselves. A second vision of people covenanting to create stable self-government, and to follow the dictates of their religion and education. And a third vision of a slave-based economy with vast numbers of enslaved people brutally controlled so they could not revolt against the tiny minority who held the power. These visions, these nations, are only three of the 11 set forth by Colin Woodard, but they have perhaps the most influence over the United States as it is today, and offers us the most insight into why we struggle so much to achieve a common vision. It’s why we see, over and over again, how some of us are so unwilling to treat everyone as equal, why some are so unwilling to give others basic rights such as the right to vote. “No wonder,” I kept thinking as I read. “No wonder we are still so far apart.”
The American story remains still largely unwritten, and we are at something of a crossroads right now, with loud voices trying to maintain political power at the expense of our democratic ideals. It’s sobering to realize that so many don’t share those ideals, that there is so little that we believe in common; how little we can count on each other to work toward a common vision. I am not offering ready solutions this morning. But like Frederick Douglass, I still have hope: hope founded in truth, and in knowledge of our history. Our past holds a key: we can study it, and develop insight as to why we remain so divided. It helps to have a clear understanding of where we have come from.
My friends, it’s time to put aside the idealistic grade-school stories about our founding and look at ourselves with honesty. We can admit to our fear, and our grief over what has been revealed to us in the past few years. We are not who we thought we were, and that is saddening and disturbing. As I so often say, let’s not turn away; let’s face the truth and together work toward the country we dream of, with liberty and justice for all, so that when we hear the stirring strains of patriotic songs, we feel like smiling and singing along, together.
May it be so.
Source: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard, Penguin Books, 2011.
