I recently wrote about two sets of friends from England, and their obsession with American popular culture.
Their interests ran deeper, too. They were keen to talk about health care in this country. From the British point of view, our system seems fairly barbaric. Our friends have been treated for, among other things, prostate cancer, infertility, and cerebral palsy. And all without the worry that, should they lose a job, their care might be interrupted, or worse, simply cut off.
I think it’s good to have an outsider’s perspective on one’s own country, especially a proud and powerful one like ours, which tends to consider itself somehow separate from the rest of the world, despite all the chatter about “globalization.”
Lately, I’ve been reading the commentary of another outsider, a Frenchman, a great admirer and occasional critic of this country who has noted the following:
Americans stuff an amazing quantity of food down their gullets.
American husbands lack romantic imagination; their wives, on the other hand, excel at managing households. In fact, the superiority of American women is the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of the nation.
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
I think these observations are quite good, if a bit familiar.
Of course, the reason for their familiarity is that they were written in the 1830s by a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville. You may have been force-fed Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in high school.
A new collection of Tocqueville’s private letters, translated by Frederick Brown, will be published the Yale University Press next year, but you can get a sneak preview of them at www.hudsonreview.com.
They’re lovely letters—penetrating, witty, wry, affectionate, full of longing for news from home. Tocqueville had journeyed to America on an official mission: to study our prisons. This, he did with a real passion. I was amazed to read about his visit to New York’s Sing Sing prison, which was apparently a state-of-the-art facility back in 1830. The prisoners were whipped a lot less than at other facilities. They were even paying back their debt to society by working day and night at slave wages. The prison was privately run and turning a tidy profit!
The prisons in Pennsylvania, on the other hand, followed along more enlightened lines, especially the brand-new Eastern State Penitentiary outside of Philadelphia, where all prisoners enjoyed solitary confinement and rarely had to suffer a Sunday without the comfort of mind-emptying hard work.
As I read about Tocqueville’s time in Philadelphia, my curiosity was piqued. Had he, by any chance, cast his aristocratic eye on our own Perry County?
The answer is maybe, but probably not. He did journey from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh over three miserable days in late November, 1830, but I couldn’t manage to establish his precise route. Even if he had traversed Perry County, which was just in its infancy, or rather its pre-teen phase, he probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it very much. The roads were abominable; the weather was frigid; the carriage was slowed by blinding snow; and there wasn’t a whole lot to see, anyway, other than forests and the occasional farmer’s field.
Baltimore, on the other hand, was a lot more fun for him. There were horse races, pretty girls, and plenty of galas. So many, in fact, that Tocqueville wrote his family back in France requesting two dozen pairs of yellow kid gloves, since, with all the partying, he was going through them at an awful clip.
It’s one thing to read Democracy in America, the synthesis of Tocqueville’s American adventure, with its spookily accurate political predictions:
There are at the present time two great nations in the world—the Russians and the Americans. All other nations seem to have nearly reached their national limits, and have only to maintain their power; these alone are proceeding along a path to which no limit can be perceived.
Remember, this was written in the 1830s, not the 1930s!
But it’s another to read Tocqueville’s letters and journal entries from the adventure itself, when he was more concerned with conveying the immediacy of his experiences. There’s a lovely letter to his father, written on the summertime banks of the Hudson River, the author’s vantage being the branches of a sycamore tree, where he has retreated for relief from the heat. “You see how well I mesh with the landscape,” he writes.
His encounters with Native Americans filled him with sadness and a foreboding. He saw all too clearly that relocation would lead to further relocation, and even annihilation.
About slavery, he wrote with the passion of Enlightenment humanism, and simultaneously with the blind racism of a white supremacist.
He was complicated and brilliant. I highly recommend him. He returned home to Europe to spread the news of our extraordinary, boorish, tireless, egalitarian, complacent, meritocratic, arrogant, and youthful country.
And now he’s run off with this column, too.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 12 November 2009
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
