The Extraordinary American

Up the hill from the Old Mill, which occupies the place of the King’s Mill that once readied lumber for the town of York, Ontario, is a house brimming with faith and wonder.

In the grand wooden room looking down on the valley from the second floor of that house, my parents’ home, is a mantlepiece crowded with knightly figurines, many collected abroad and others gifted.

These armored miniatures, some bearing the order colors of the knight and lady of the house, stand watch over the assorted treasures on the northern wall: G.K. Chesterton’s own artworks, first editions, personal letters, and manuscripts. (The great writer’s puppets, including those he cut into knightly shapes, cast shadows unguarded elsewhere on the property.)

The historical value of this collection, which my father built over what seemed like many years, may have been lost on me as a boy, yet I always appreciated its contents.

The melting pot must not melt.

How could I not? In these tomes are the stories read to my siblings and me before bedtime. Here are the essays digested at the dinner table, attesting to the eternal victory secured on Calvary and the nature of the battles fought since. Here are the poems read aloud—misty-eyed in the case of “Lepanto”—that invigorated kin and company alike even as darkness descended outside that wooden room.

Like the home that houses it, this much-appreciated collection is full of faith and wonder, along with insights that have only sharpened with age.

One among the many insightful books slotted on the north face recently proved crucial when, on America’s 250th birthday, I tackled a question about her distinction and people.

America Is Not an Idea

The usual suspects like to call America a creedal nation with little or no qualification—to emphasize the generalities of the Declaration, deemphasize the particulars of the declarants, and to pretend that the adventitious roots that have dug in since 1776 could be equal to the colonial taproot.

That’s about as hard to accept as the direct corollary: that the creedal foreigner with an airplane ticket could be more American than the native-born apostate with colonial blood.

If America is simply reducible to doctrinal propositions, then it’s less a country and more an abstract economic zone. These supposedly borderless propositions have, however, only been successfully accepted once, and nowhere else, despite repeated attempts—as the surviving visitor to Liberia might attest.

No, this particular egalitarian creed will not grow on rocky soil or among thorns.

There’s something uniquely fertile not just about the place but about the people who first made what came to be the American creed viable. This presumably has something to do with their moral framework, common law inheritance, and ethnic and religious composition.

With some qualifications, it is nevertheless right to identify America with a creed as Chesterton did following his 20th-century pilgrimage to the land of the Declaration.

In his introduction to Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation, Chesterton wrote that even as late as the Victorian novelist’s first trip to the U.S. in 1842, England “still felt America as a colony,” a “part of our civilisation, a limb of our life.”

But when Chesterton himself first visited the United States in the early months of 1921, the famed English journalist didn’t find himself among kinsmen. Instead, he encountered natives—or, perhaps more accurately, zealots—in a place “far more foreign than France or even than Ireland” with that “element of strangeness which marks the frontier of any fairyland, or gives to the traveller himself the almost eerie title of the stranger.”

The frontiersmen’s strangeness to Chesterton is evidenced by the Briton’s struggle in What I Saw in America to render a sensational simplification, a truthful stereotype of the American, the kind he penned elsewhere for so many other peoples in more than one medium.

Chesterton “burnt the midnight oil” to produce numerous puppets and drawings for his toy theater, which he emphasized was “as philosophical as the drama of Athens.” Today, many of these puppets hang over the book-heavy shelves leading to my father’s study.

Among the personalities Chesterton dreamt up for his “Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured” is a wild knight with an aquiline zimier; a Londoner with monocle trained upon a broadsheet; a pauper dressed in his ragged best of a forgotten year; and a googly-eyed sultan scampering away from some unseen terror with a courtier clinging on to his cape.

Behind each of these toy theater cartoons is a confidence and a familiarity that make them not only accessible but also believable.

More cartoonish than all of these and far less accessible is Chesterton’s “Extraordinary American”—that “lean brown man, having rather the look of a shabby tropical traveller, with a grey moustache and lively and alert eye,” who confronted the Englishman in Oklahoma and whose natural defiance of tidy European classification the Englishman reckoned was typical of Americans at large.

While adept at capturing types in words and colors, Chesterton had trouble decoding this particular “picture puzzle.” Was the Oklahoman an outlaw or a sheriff? he wondered. Or was he, instead, an astronomer, a detective, a wandering lunatic?

Chesterton concluded that if he could properly understand the “Extraordinary American,” he should understand America, yet that understanding lay beyond his reach.

“Only in the presence of that citizen of Oklahoma do I feel I am confronted with the fullness and depth of the mystery of America. Because I understand nothing, I recognise the thing that we call a nation; and I salute the flag,” Chesterton wrote.

It would apparently be easier to make the dragon puppet “dragonish” and the sultan “sultanic” than to cut a proper shape for the Oklahoman.

Imaginary Homelands

Despite having some Americans for kin, traveling their country perhaps more extensively than my own, and working daily with their countrymen, I can appreciate Chesterton’s sense of otherness in encounters with the place and people of the Stars and Stripes.

Whereas America is a nation with a creedal character, my home and native land of Canada is a nation largely with a relational character.

That unlikely federation to America’s north boasts a national birth certificate along with a great many achievements, innovations, gallantries, personalities, and eccentricities.

Nevertheless, because Canada doesn’t have a codified and observed national creed, any meaningful consideration of that country’s ethos has historically required an interrogation of the nation’s ever-changing relationship not only with nature at large but also with the British, the French, the Irish, the Indians, the Church, and—chief among various others—the Americans.

In our mad reckonings with the increasingly unassimilated vision in the mirror, Canadians have, for at least a saeculum, defined ourselves in the negative—as not American.

This negative ontology, a bad practice in light of all the positive Americanisms that might be bandied about, never mind the potential for a confounding southern identity crisis, accounts for the largely unsuccessful, multigenerational protectionist campaign that left us with radio content quotas, the National Film Board, the tumorous Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and endless blather about an imagined “cultural mosaic.”

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.”

Given the relational nature of Canadianism and the dominance of our southern relation, I’ve on occasion contemplated what sets the American apart—what might have made him strange a century ago to that Englishman whose works weigh heavily on the north wall and what might make the American outwardly strange today.

There is, of course, the stereotypical otherness played up in film and literature, which comes down to generalizations about temperament, about Americans’ restlessness, unabashed curiosity, unparalleled enthusiasm about things both great and small, extraversion, national pride, and practical efficiency—all traits that Chesterton observed during his first time Stateside.

But in a waiting room full of international travelers, these traits alone would not give the American away since they are not unique, especially after decades of the caricature’s promotion and emulation abroad. I have met, for instance, a restless Korean, a curious Canadian, an enthusiastic Croat, an outgoing Briton, and so on.

The numbers tell us that, more likely than not, the American in the waiting room would be white and a Christian; however, pigment and religiosity, too, won’t give the American away, for the white Christian in the room could just as well be the Croat.

Rather, the American will stand out in action and conversation by the nature of the crucible that formed him, the creed that dictated that formation, and the men who established that creed. In short, he’ll stand out for the very reasons I suspect the Oklahoman appeared to our interloper as a puzzle.

The Making of an American

According to Chesterton, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just.”

Chesterton apparently drew this conclusion after being asked at an American consulate sometime before voyaging to the United States whether he was an anarchist or an atheist.

This official “inquisition” struck him as incomprehensible, as alien. England, after all, wouldn’t ask such questions. Then it dawned on him: England did not have an inquisition because it did not have a creed, and it did not have a creed, in part, because it had a “national type”—that is, both a common ethnicity and an inheritance.

“England is English,” he wrote, a place where it is “natural to be national, because there is nothing else to be.”

Despite the relative homogeneity of the founders—the vast majority of the Declaration’s signers were America-born, all were of European descent, and all but one were Protestants—there was from the outset nevertheless an ethnic admixture and, in more ways than one, possibly something else to be.

Initially, to be national here was not reflexive but a conscious choice made by a specific group of men convinced of the veracity of a specific set of propositions and all committed to one another with lives, fortunes, and honor staked as collateral.

“They are exiles or they are citizens; there is no moment when they are cosmopolitans.”

They created a nation and gave its people a creed.

An important distinction must be made: the nation is not the creed. It does, however, reflect the character of its people, who are predominantly creedal—even today—because from generation to generation, the beneficiaries of the founders’ choice have ensured fidelity to the creed.

At one time, this may have entailed condemning anarchism and, by inference, atheism, as Chesterton suggested; at another, ferreting out communists and totalitarians by other stripes, busting castes and cartels as they’ve emerged, and steering clear of pagan materialism and, as much as possible, eugenics.

Failure to guard against heresy and apostasy would not necessarily mean the end of America, though it would almost certainly mean a deformation of its creedal character or its replacement with something alien, the fallout of which cannot be known until suffered.

President Calvin Coolidge noted, when celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration, just a few years after the Englishman’s visit, that “we can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.”

He emphasized that “if we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it.”

It’s not sufficient, in other words, to keep creating Americans in the biblical fashion. They must also be raised in the faith.

And those from afar who are permitted to pursue the inheritance of the native-born must join them in the crucible, the so-called melting pot forged by the founders and operated since by genuine articles.

By a million types of socialization, including steepage in American myth and custom, and through engagements with and service to established Americans, the melted man might not only join the ranks of the minted citizenry but become identifiably American in character such that even before he acts, it may be possible to tell from the expression he returns in that international waiting room that he has faced the crucible both shaped by the first generation and heated by Americans since, and come out transformed.

He now thinks as the founders thought, honors their choice, and keeps their commitment.

This trial by fire is pass-or-fail and, as Chesterton observed in New York, there are no successful hybrids.

“Those who are Americanised are American, and very patriotically American,” he wrote. “Those who are not thus nationalised are not in the least internationalised. They simply continue to be themselves; the Irish are Irish; the Jews are Jewish; and all sorts of other tribes carry on the traditions of remote European valleys almost untouched.”

Chesterton said for certain that “they are exiles or they are citizens; there is no moment when they are cosmopolitans.”

The American Test

President Theodore Roosevelt was among the creedal Americans who applied intense heat to the melting pot and apparently wanted nothing to do with cosmopolitans and those seeking to maintain roots and allegiances in multiple lands.

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” he told the Knights of Columbus in Carnegie Hall five years before the order gifted Chesterton a swordstick at Yale.

Roosevelt reassured the crowd that he was not speaking of “naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad,” but rather those with an alternate or secondary allegiance.

“Our allegiance must be purely to the United States,” said the Rough Rider. “We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.”

One aim of the melting pot, it seems, is to burn away hyphens and transatlantic root systems.

While the assimilatory practices of the United States have long appeared highly effective, their success is hardly guaranteed. There is at least one vulnerability the usual suspects may overlook.

“The melting pot metaphor,” Chesterton observed, “implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting pot must not melt.”

Chesterton, who believed that the melting pot’s “original shape was traced on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy,” argued that “it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless.”

The pot that has tended to uniformly pour out creedal Americans could conceivably melt or become shapeless if overloaded with elements impervious to, or at least resistant to, the heat. It could also fail if, as a function of alterations to the national character or body, the heat is lowered.

Chesterton said that he’d often been told that Americans “were harsh, hustling, rather rude and perhaps vulgar; but they were very practical, and the future belonged to them.” What he actually found firsthand was that they were “sympathetic, imaginative, and full of fine enthusiasms,” but that their purchase on the future was uncertain.

After seeing in America forests of wooden houses of a kind inconceivable or at least forgotten in his homeland—houses seemingly “too temporary even to be merely temporal”—the great writer asked himself, “Will all this be here at all in two hundred years?”

It appears so. But I wonder: a century hence, will Americans retain their creedal character? Do they even maintain it today?

One test of whether the melting pot has retained its shape and done its job of maintaining the creedal character of the nationals and the nation next door is whether they stand like a people assured that their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are God-given and unalienable, that their government derives its power and legitimacy from the governed, and that they have a right to lay low tyrants.

The simpler test is whether the American still provokes in the traveler a sense of strangeness—of his being strange or being among strangers.

Like my fellow interloper, whose eyes track me in the house atop the hill, it’s clear from my travels in America and dealings with the Americans that the pot is safe and the creed secure.