There’s no doubt that we’re passing through a historical moment in this nation’s existence, and it may all be traced in the evolving meaning of a single word.
For far too long—since our entanglement in Vietnam, perhaps, or a few years earlier with the assassination of John F. Kennedy—the connotations of the adjective American have been negative ones for some people here and many abroad. In the last eight years, with George W. Bush as our president (despite brief positive feelings toward us immediately after September 11th), our standing in the world has sunk lower and the words associated with us—like overreaching, arrogance, and hubris—have become worse than ever.
Of course, this hasn’t always been the case. It was striking, in recently reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) for the first time, to come across the adjective American over and over, always appearing in a positive light. The word almost serves as a talisman to Kerouac’s alter ego narrator, Sal Paradise, who takes it as shorthand to describe the authenticity that he encounters, and the optimism that he feels, as he crosses and re-crosses the land.
At the same time, in fashion, it has been interesting to watch the steady, rising obsession, in recent years, with so-called American Heritage brands: Woolrich, Filson, Red Wing, Quoddy, et al.—first in Japan, where a great appreciation for classic American workwear exists (glorified through exhaustive photos and essays in magazines like Free & Easy), and then here in the United States.
Or see what American means in the mid-century films of French auteur Jacques Tati. In Jour de Fête (1949) the word stands for a streamlined, speedy way of doing things. In the Paris of Playtime (1967), International Modernism runs rampant, and the city’s traditional culture has been pushed to the edges, its monuments only occasionally appearing reflected in glass doors, as loud, brash Americans run rampant through the metropolis. But in spite of Tati’s critical take on Modernism—and, at times, on the American technocracy responsible for exporting it to the rest of the world—he also sees our wide-eyed interest and a desire to preserve the past in the way we view his own culture. In Playtime it is the loud-mouthed American who ultimately creates a sort of ad hoc, idealized bistro inside an over-the-top nightclub so modern and shoddily made that it’s literally falling apart around him.
The fascination in these examples seems rooted in a time after World War II, when the U.S.’s image in the world was shaped, to a degree, by the myth of a can-do attitude, a pioneering spirit, and a certain amount of openness toward the world around us. Perhaps this is why Free & Easy publishes pictures of Kerouac and his friend Neal Cassady sporting rugged button-downs and reverse-weave sweatshirts—in their faces, in their stances, is a look of openness about the future. It’s a spirit that permeates On the Road. Maybe this openness, this optimism, is what the editors of Free & Easy, and all the people who elevate this particular kind of American myth, wanted back. Maybe it’s what we all wanted back. And, in a sense, it’s what we now have in President Barack Obama.
When the remaining Tuskegee Airmen, sitting in their places of honor, watch our nation’s first African-American president sworn in today on the Capitol steps, they bear witness to a process that has been unfolding since before they were born—a process (the loosening of old restrictions, the shifting away from dusty conventions that have long held the country back) that may at last instill hope and optimism in them, and in us all. It’s a process that may once again, or truly at last, render the adjective American a positive one.
