A COMMON CULTURE? SYDNEY WILLIAMS
Many Americans bemoan a decline in culture. But what do we mean by culture? Are we speaking of the arts, religion, traditions, or a shared history? Are we referring to behavior? In a review of Eliot Stein’s Custodians of Wonder, Brandy Schillace wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Our lives are connected to the land and the animals. Yet we are also threads in the tapestry that stretches back into prehistory, a part of a superorganism that is culture itself.”
So, what is culture? Definitions have changed. Noah Webster, in his 1828 dictionary, defined the word according to its etymological roots: “The act of tilling and preparing the earth for crops.” Forty-three years later, Edward Burnett Tyler, in Primitive Culture, defined the term in words we better understand today: “Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” From the Oxford English Dictionary: “Culture –The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.” In 1952, U.S. anthropologists A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, cited 164 definitions of culture. I think of culture, first as a system of shared beliefs, values, behavior and practices – based on our Judeo-Christian heritage and embedded in our founding documents – and second as works of art, literature and music.
For most of our nation’s history differences ruled. Rural and immigrant communities were often distinct entities. Until the mid-19th Century, most Americans never ventured far from their homes. But from the mid 19th Century on, technological advances unified us in a way unknown to earlier Americans. First we had steam ships, trains and then, later, the automobile, which allowed people to experience the size of our country. Radio then television brought other parts of the country and the world into our lives. The number of newspapers began to shrink. So that by my generation, people read the same news, listened to the same music, watched the same TV shows, saw the same movies, and heard the same nightly newscasts. In 1956 (in a country half the size it is today), Elvis Presley sold 10 million copies of a single song, “Hound Dog.” According to Pew Research, every evening during the 1960s between 27 and 29 million people listened to Walter Cronkite’s news on CBS, an audience greater than today’s combined daily audiences for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.
While we had differences back then – the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, the Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and early ‘60s and the anti-War protests of the late 1960s and early ‘70s – the country was, generally, unified, at least in terms of what we read, listened to, and watched. That has changed. The expansion of social media posts, podcasts, YouTube and other platforms have meant we listen to and watch entertainment and news that fits our biases. A Pew research study from last September suggests 91% of Americans aged 18-49 get their news, “at least some of the time,” from digital devices.
While it is estimated that more than 350 languages are spoken in the U.S. today, English is our common language. To be successful, one must adopt it. Even in colonial America a variety of languages and dialects were spoken, including German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, Irish and Welch, along with myriad variations. The roughly 450,000 African slaves then in America spoke numerous languages. As well, the estimated 250,000 Native Americans spoke approximately 300 different languages. Because of an anti-British sense, a few founding fathers preferred adopting German as the new nation’s language. But English prevailed and Webster’s Speller was published in 1783. In The Forgotten Founding Father, Joshua Kendall quoted Noah Webster: “Our political harmony is therefore concerned in the uniformity of language.”
We will not return to a time when we all listened to the same music, read the same newspapers, and watched the same television programs. As Americans we are not hindered by a class system that is integral to Europe’s and many other societies’ history and traditions. We are a nation of immigrants, born of multicultural parents. We are beneficiaries of a unique government and society, birthed during the Enlightenment, one that cares more about the individual than who her or his parents were. In his 1931 history, The Epic of America, historian James Truslow Adams wrote of what we all yearn: “The American dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” In August 1790 President George Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island. Afterwards he wrote a letter to Newport’s Hebrew Congregation, founded in 1763: “For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean[1] themselves as good citizens.”
In my opinion, the answer to the question posed in the title is yes, the United States does have a common culture. Besides our Judeo-Christian heritage, we have a common language, rooted in the words so eloquently expressed in The Declaration of Independence; it is fostered by a government elected by the people, which secures those rights, and operates under the rule of law. It is reflected in a society that promotes tolerance and respect for others, and that allows for the accommodation of differences. It is a culture that depends on personal responsibility and accountability, a culture built on individual freedom.
Our culture requires we be governed by our peers, with a government, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, of, by and for the people. Our culture does not shy from dissent but reflects an undefinable something that draws us together in time of strife when commonalities rise above differences. It is a culture that is, however, always at risk of being lost; so it cannot be abandoned to self-serving, ephemeral policies like DEI, identity politics, or promoting a lifestyle that permits men to compete against women in sports or encourages gender alteration among prepubescent children and teenagers.
In 1919, Henry Cabot Lodge wrote President Woodrow Wilson words that echo today: “I can never be anything else but an American, and I must think of the United States first, and when I think of the United States first…I am thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States fails, the best hopes of mankind fail with it.” Does anyone believe that if China were to become the global hegemon the world would be better off? We cherish this unique culture that is ours. It is not transient. It is embedded in our unique origins. It is our culture that draws to these shores the industrious and aspirant, because they know that it offers an environment in which they will be free to thrive.
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