'With All Its Philistinism and Coarseness'

My roommate freshman year was the son of a Slovak father and an Austrian mother who had emigrated to the U.S. after World War II. Mike was trilingual from birth, without an accent unless it was a Cleveland accent that I couldn’t hear because it was mine as well. His tastes often seemed “European” to me. He listened to Smetana and Janáček, composers I had never heard of. I introduced him to Charles Ives and Thelonious Monk.

Before I shared a dormitory room with Mike I never thought about my nationality, my Americanness. My father’s family had come from Poland, my mother’s from Ireland. My father spoke no Polish and enjoyed Polish jokes. My mother’s one concession to Irishness was pinning a cloth shamrock to my shirt on St. Patrick’s Day when I was in grade school. There was no shame but neither was there much pride. Unlike Mike’s family, we were thoroughly assimilated, all-American.

I read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) over the summer between high school and university. I loved its evocation of the Midwest, of a fictional small town located seventy miles west of where I was born. I was reading it a second time in our dorm room when Mike asked me what it was about. I suppose I rhapsodized the rural Midwestern setting and the “career path” of the budding journalist George Willard. Mike’s response: “You are so American.” His tone still puzzles me. It wasn’t precisely dismissive but neither was it strictly neutral. Was he suggesting I was a hick? I didn’t get defensive but thought about it and concluded he was probably right.  

I’m proud to be a patriot and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and proud my middle son is a Marine. To behave otherwise would be an ungrateful act. Sure, I love my country but I’m no jingoist caricature. In some quarters these are unfashionable admissions but I’ve never run my life according to the opinions of others. Joseph Epstein wrote a remembrance of Edward Shils, “My Friend Edward,” after the sociologist’s death in 1995. It later served as the introduction to Shils’ posthumously published Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals (1997). Though born in Philadelphia, Epstein tells us, Shils “did not seem particularly American -- in fact, as he once told me, he had deliberately set out to make himself European.” Epstein writes:  

“[H]e loved America, with all its philistinism and coarseness, and he once cited it to me, approvingly, as ‘the country of the second chance.’ He reveled in the country’s ethnic variety, its inventiveness, its mad energy. He loved the sort of American who could build his own house. He admired Americans when they showed they would not be buffaloed by ideas put into play by academics or intellectuals . . . He knew how vast our country is, how full of surprises: that it contains people hipped on grammar from Tyler, Texas, people who read through the Loeb Classics in Santa Rosa, California, and people in other unlikely places who demonstrate heroism, a winning bullheadedness, or radical common sense.”