I often rail about the lack of interest in history, which seems one of the defining characteristics of most modern humans.
But is it just modern humans in general, or particularly an American thing? I suspect it’s both.
I started thinking about this this morning because I recently returned to reading a book I started to read last year, but didn’t finish. I’m now getting close to finishing How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, by James Kugel.
Anyway, toward the end Kugel’s writing about some puzzling things about the book of Isaiah, and wondering why it was written/edited that way, and then jumps back to raise the same points with regard to the Pentateuch. That takes him to talking about how so much of the Torah started as short, etiological (his favorite word) stories told orally from generation to generation, long before they were put together in early Hebrew.
And I paused to imagine American families doing that. I couldn’t.
Oh, there are exceptions. Alex Haley said Roots came from stories his family told about Kunta Kinte and subsequent generations. But it’s generally hard to find examples among descendants of people who came here willingly, on purpose.
I think there’s something in the makeup of a person who decides to take a hazardous journey across the ocean in a frail wooden ship, leaving all he or his ancestors ever knew, that causes him to want to forget all that went before. I don’t get it, but I know that’s a thing.
Such people passed that on in their DNA. The ancient Israelites passed on stories about ancestors, and even memories of the switch from foraging to agriculture 10,000 years earlier (hence the Adam and Eve story). Americans — I mean deliberate, voluntary Americans — seemed to pass on forgetfulness.
I’ve traced every line in my family — save one, that of my mother’s father’s mother’s father, who created a dead end when he died during the siege of Petersburg — back to the old country. But I’ve never found a single story clearly answering my biggest question about them coming here: Why?
Why did they pull up stakes and come here? Oh, I know all the standard answers from the elementary school — freedom, especially of religion. And if you were a Pilgrim, that’s a good answer. I suspect most people came for an economic and social opportunity — a chance to get out of the box in which their old, established societies placed them. They came for land and upward mobility, or so I gather. Of course, some did have an anarchic streak that had to do with not wanting to be told what to do, but I suspect that was a side benefit, and wasn’t quite the refined sense of liberty that Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison left us.
I do have a hint from one immigrant ancestor — John Barton Wathen (the R was added by my branch a century later) came over as an indentured servant in 1670. That’s seems a clear indication of A motive, if not necessarily the motive. It seems to have worked out for him — after his servitude, he acquired and passed on a good bit of land.
But I’d still like to have a chat with him. I’m glad that I’m an American. But I still want to know why I’m an American.
And you know what? As much as I know about John Wathen, I still have no idea what his life back in England (or perhaps Wales) was like.
Which makes me like most Americans…
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