I Like Being American : Treasured Traditions, Symbols, and Stories

by Leach, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780385507431
• ISBN10: 0385507437
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-01
• Publisher: Doubleday

Summary

A stirring celebration of a nation rich in diversity and united by an indestructible belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A feast of heartwarming true stories, thought-provoking essays, and eye-opening observations,I Like Being Americancaptures the love, loyalty, and gratitude that inspires and sustains Americans in good times and in bad. It is about what is beautiful, true, and lasting in our country, and it is sure to lift your spirit, and encourage all of us to live up to our deepest ideals. The contributors range from such well-known figures as novelist Anna Quindlen, who celebrates our unity in diversity, to Dinesh D'Souza who learned that in America he could write the story of his own life, to immigrants from every corner of the earth who express profound gratitude for their new homeland. Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American senator, and Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state, share their pride in how far America has come in its brief history. The values Americans treasure come to life in the first-person stories of "ordinary people" such as Dan O'Neill, who founded Mercy Corps to help share America's abundance with those less fortunate throughout the world. A guest list of celebrities as diverse as Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Marianne Williamson, Paul Simon, Bill O'Reilly, and Yogi Berra reveals a nation built on foundations of freedom, equality, and compassion. The spiritual foundations of the nation come to life in historic documents and inspiring speechesincluding the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s letter from a Birmingham jail. A book of great spirit and generosity, just like the land it portrays,I Like Being Americanshowcases in words and pictures why 300 million people of every age, religion, ethnicity, and race are proud to say with one voice: "I like being American!"

Author Biography

<p>Michael Leach</b> is the publisher of Orbis Books. A past president and publisher of the Crossroad/Continuum Publishing Group, he has edited and published more than a thousand books, including numerous award-winners. His own books include <i>I Like Being Married</i> and the bestseller <i>I Like Being Catholic</i>, coedited with Therese J. Borchard. He lives in Connecticut.</p>

Table of Contents

Introduction: I Like Being American	1	(2)
Prelude: The American Idea	3	(2)
The American Family	5	(16)
A Quilt of a Country
Anna Quindlen
Everything I Know About Being an American I Learned in My Family
Donna Crissey
Plus selected bits
Rudy Giuliani
Bill O'Reilly
Interlude	20	(1)
Alex Haley
The American Experience	21	(18)
Haven for Humanity
Carol Moseley-Braun
No Walls
Setareh Sabety
Plus selected bits
Madeleine Albright
Condoleezza Rice
Interlude	37	(2)
Nikki Giovanni
The New American Pioneers	39	(18)
The Typical American Family
Richard Reeves
Hispanidad: A Rainbow of Feelings, a Paradise of Sounds, a Parade of Flavors
David Aquije
From Vietnam War Widow to American Activist
Jackie Bong-Wright
Why I'm Glad This Is a Nation of Immigrants
Crystal Uvalle
Plus selected bits
Hakeem Olajuwon
Dinesh D'Souza
Interlude: What Do These Famous People Have in Common?	54	(3)
The American Spirit	57	(16)
The Spirit of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence
Emmet Fox
The American Spirit in Action
Dick Colt
Plus selected bits by
Paul Simon
Joyce Brothers
Interlude: ``The American Woman''	72	(1)
Alexis de Tocqueville
Eleanor Roosevelt
Ginger Rogers
Helen Keller
Erica Jong
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
American Soul	73	(15)
An American Muslim Looks Back with Love
Asma Gull Hasan
An American Jew Appreciates the Present
Shmuley Boteach
An American Christian Looks Forward with Hope
Michael Leach
Plus selected bits
from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Koran
Interlude	87	(1)
Thomas Wolfe
Franz Kafka
John Updike
G. K. Chesterton
George Papashvily
Dore Schary
Mary McCarthy
American Symbols	88	(16)
The Flag on the Moon
Harrison H. Schmitt
Mending the Liberty Bell
Leonard Fein
Little Shrines at Firehouses, and Other Symbol Experiences
Kathy Coffey
Touch Me---A Soliloquy
Hank Miller
Plus selected bits
Emma Lazarus
Jacques Maritain
Interlude	103	(1)
Yogi Berra
Ernie Banks
Willie Mays
Peter Ueberroth
A. Bartlett Giamatti
Satchel Paige
The American Hero	104	(18)
Five American Role Models
Michael Leach
My American Mom
Sasha Stone
The Night Before Christmas
Major Bruce Lovely
The American G.I.
Colin Powell
Plus selected bits
Bob Dylan
Arthur Ashe
Interlude	120	(2)
Andrew M. Greeley
Tony Blair
American Best	122	(13)
American Best---Variety, Optimism, Bounty, Talent: An Accounting
Roger Rosenblatt
Fifty Things Americans Like Best About Being American
Michael Leach
Ten Great American Values---or Aunt Mary and Uncle Louie Are Alive and Well and Living Next Door
Michael Leach
Plus selected bits
Eric Hoffer
Benjamin Harrison
Interlude: Chef Jeff Perez, with a Great American Meal	131	(4)
The American Dream	135	(14)
The Birth of a Dream
Dan Rather
Honoring the Dream
Lee Iacocca
Plus selected bits
Serena Williams
Ralph Nader
Interlude	147	(2)
Daniel J. Boorstin
Arthur Quinton
American Culture	149	(23)
The Ten Best Books About Being American You'll Ever Read
Evander Lomke
The Ten Best Movies About Being American You'll Ever See
Michael Leach
The Top Ten Songs That Celebrate America
Joseph Durepos
Fourteen Great American Composers
David Goodnough
Fourteen Great American Artists
Roberta Savage
Plus selected bits
Walt Whitman
Terrence Mann
Interlude	171	(1)
Marianne Williamson
The American Challenge	172	(11)
The Compassionate Touch
Dan O'Neill
The Soul of America
Jacob Needleman
Plus selected bits
Chief Seattle
John F. Kennedy
Epilogue: ``The more American America can be, the better it will be...''	183	(2)
Acknowledgments	185	(2)
Credits	187	(4)
About the Editor	191

Excerpts

Chapter One

The American Family

E pluribus unum--out of many, one.
--Motto on the Great Seal of the United States

There are birds of many colors--red, blue, green, yellow--yet it is all one bird. There are horses of many colors--brown, black, yellow, white--yet it is all one horse. So cattle, so all living things--animals, flowers, trees. So men: in this land where once were only Indians are now men of every color--white, black, yellow, red--yet all one people. That this should come to pass was in the heart of the Great Mystery. It is right thus. And everywhere there shall be peace.
--Hiamovi (High Chief) Chief of Cheyennes and Dakotas

The Indian Book

Americans are not a single ethnic group.

Americans are not of one race or one religion.

Americans emerge from all your nations.

We are defined as Americans by our beliefs--not by our ethnic origins, our race, or our religion. Our beliefs in religious freedom, political freedom, and economic freedom--that's what makes an American. Our belief in democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human life--that's how you become an American. It is these very principles--and the opportunities these principles give to so many to create a better life for themselves and their families--that make America, and New York, "a shining city on a hill."

There is no nation, and no city, in the history of the world that has seen more immigrants, in less time, than America. People continue to come here in large numbers to seek freedom, opportunity, decency, and civility.

Each of your nations--I am certain--has contributed citizens to the United States and to New York. I believe I can take every one of you someplace in New York City, where you can find someone from your country, someone from your village or town, that speaks your language and practices your religion. In each of your lands there are many who are Americans in spirit, by virtue of their commitment to our shared principles.
--Mayor Rudy Giuliani
United Nations General Assembly
October 1, 2001

America is not like a blanket--one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt--many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.
--Jesse Jackson, American human rights activist

A Quilt of a Country By Anna Quindlen

America is an improbable idea, a mongrel nation built of ever-changing disparate parts, it is held together by a notion, the notion that all men are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone. "Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image," the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote. That's because it was built of bits and pieces that seem discordant, like the crazy quilts that have been one of its great folk-art forms, velvet and calico and checks and brocades. Out of many, one. That is the ideal.

The reality is often quite different, a great national striving consisting frequently of failure. Many of the oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry. Slavery and sweatshops, the burning of crosses and the ostracism of the other. Children learn in social-studies class and in the news of the lynching of blacks, the denial of rights to women, the murder of gay men. It is difficult to know how to convince them that this amounts to "crown thy good with brotherhood," that amid all the failures is something spectacularly successful. Perhaps they understand it at this moment [in the aftermath of 9/11], when enormous tragedy, as it so often does, demands a time of reflection on enormous blessings.

This is a nation founded on a conundrum, what Mario Cuomo has characterized as "community added to individualism." These two are our defining ideals; they are also in constant conflict. Historians today bemoan the ascendancy of a kind of prideful apartheid in America, saying that the clinging to ethnicity, in background and custom, has undermined the concept of unity. These historians must have forgotten the past, or have gilded it. The New York of my children is no more Balkanized, probably less so, than the Philadelphia of my father, in which Jewish boys would walk several blocks out of their way to avoid the Irish divide of Chester Avenue. (I was the product of a mixed marriage, across barely bridgeable lines: an Italian girl, an Irish boy. How quaint it seems now, how incendiary then.) The Brooklyn of Francie Nolan's famous tree, the Newark of which Portnoy complained, even the uninflected WASP suburbs of Cheever's characters: they are ghettoes, pure and simple. Do the Cambodians and the Mexicans in California coexist less easily today than did the Irish and Italians of Massachusetts a century ago? You know the answer.

What is the point of this splintered whole? What is the point of a nation in which Arab cabbies chauffeur Jewish passengers through the streets of New York--and in which Jewish cabbies chauffeur Arab passengers, too, and yet speak in theory of hatred, one for the other? What is the point of a nation in which one part seems to be always on the verge of fisticuffs with another, blacks and whites, gays and straights, left and right, Pole and Chinese and Puerto Rican and Slovenian? Other countries with such divisions have in fact divided into new nations with new names, but not this one, impossibly interwoven even in its hostilities.

Once these disparate parts were held together by a common enemy, by the fault lines of world wars and the electrified fence of communism. With the end of the cold war there was the creeping concern that without a focus for hatred and distrust, a sense of national identity would evaporate, that the left side of the hyphen--African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American--would overwhelm the right. And slow-growing domestic traumas like economic unrest and increasing crime seemed more likely to emphasize division than community. Today the citizens of the United States have come together once more because of armed conflict and enemy attack. Terrorism has led to devastation--and unity.

Yet even in 1994, the overwhelming majority of those surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center agreed with this statement: "The U.S. is a unique country that stands for something special in the world." One of the things that it stands for is this vexing notion that a great nation can consist entirely of refugees from other nations, that people of different, even warring religions and cultures can live, if not side by side, then on either side of the country's Chester Avenues. Faced with this diversity there is little point in trying to isolate anything remotely resembling a national character, but there are two strains of behavior that, however tenuously, abet the concept of unity.

There is the Calvinist undercurrent in the American psyche that loves the difficult, the demanding, that sees mastering the impossible, whether it be prairie or subway, as a test of character, and so glories in the struggle of this fractured coalescing. And there is a grudging fairness among the citizens of the United States that eventually leads most to admit that, no matter what the English-only advocates try to suggest, the new immigrants are not so different from our own parents or grandparents. Leonel Castillo, former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and himself the grandson of Mexican immigrants, once told the writer Studs Terkel proudly, "The old neighborhood Ma-Pa stores are still around. They are not Italian or Jewish or Eastern European any more. Ma and Pa are now Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, Jordanian, Latin American. They live in the store. They work seven days a week. Their kids are doing well in school. They're making it. Sound familiar?"

Tolerance is the word used most often when this kind of coexistence succeeds, but tolerance is a vanilla-pudding word, standing for little more than the allowance of letting others live unremarked and unmolested. Pride seems excessive, given the American willingness to endlessly complain about them, them being whoever is new, different, unknown, or currently under suspicion. But patriotism is partly taking pride in this unlikely ability to throw all of us together in a country that across its length and breadth is as different as a dozen countries, and still be able to call it by one name. When photographs of the faces of all those who died in the World Trade Center destruction are assembled in one place, it will be possible to trace in the skin color, the shape of the eyes and the noses, the texture of the hair, a map of the world. These are the representatives of a mongrel nation that somehow, at times like this, has one spirit. Like many improbable ideas, when it actually works, it's a wonder.
--Anna Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, is the author of the bestselling A Short Guide to a Happy Life and three acclaimed novels, Object Lessons, One True Thing, and Black and Blue.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. Mine was Polish American. It wasn't until I went to high school that I met and became friends with Irish, German, Italian, Lithuanian, and other Americans with roots in foreign lands.

I was ordained a Catholic priest in 1966 and have spent the rest of my life serving in an African American community. It's on the other side of town of my original neighborhood and yet so very close. I could not have been made to feel more welcomed anywhere on earth.

My vision of what is good and beautiful and true has simply broadened. I grew up in one community with a particular style and expression, and have moved into another with a different style and expression. I'm referring to verbal expression, food, music, ways of celebrating, spirituality, humor, and more. Each one is unique to that culture, and I have been privileged to live in and experience both.

I have learned, of course, that neither one--nor any single expression--can encompass all that is good and true and beautiful about America.

America is at once apple pie and pierogi, soul food and pasta, Tex-Mex and Cantonese. What is so wonderful about our country is precisely that: no one group has an exclusive hold on "the American idea." Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, or none of the above, are all American. Our nation was founded on this idea and I'm grateful for it. It's why I like being American, wherever I'm privileged to live and serve.
--Rev. Thomas Kaminski
Chicago, Illinois

I came to America from Middlesbrough, England, in 1973. My next intelligent choice was to marry Brigid, an Irish American girl from New York. In time we would adopt four children, two from Korea, one from Colombia, and one from Paraguay. "Only in America" is not a cliche in the Gollogly family.

I didn't become a citizen right away though. I lived in New York and enjoyed the fruits of American life but still considered myself a Brit. After our first two children, Lila and Mura, came, I took them to be naturalized at the County Courthouse in downtown Manhattan.

More than two hundred people from all over the world filled the huge courtroom, all of them eager to invest themselves in the American idea. I rubbed shoulders with people from Nigeria, Brazil, China, Yemen, India, Haiti, and Russia. Donald Trump was even there, accompanying his wife Ivana who was born in Czechoslovakia. Brigid was home with the flu, so I had my hands full with our two new children, one and three years old. People who had come from all over the world gladly lent me a hand.

The judge came in to administer the oath, but first he spoke from his heart about the country he loved. I will never forget it.

He shared what America had meant to his grandmother who had fled pogroms in the Ukraine. She kept her naturalization certificate under her bed and would often take it out and gaze at it in gratitude. The judge stressed the profound value of a country where freedom of speech and freedom of religion were as natural as the seasons. And he talked about how we all had to work and live together, and of the privilege of paying our fair share of taxes for the things we all need in common: roads, firemen, police, ambulances, traffic lights, schools, airports, and so much more. The country could work only if everyone who lived here worked together and shared together.

Right then and there I resolved to become an American.

The judge held up ideals I could not ignore and which beat in the deepest part of my heart. "Rule Britannia," "The Queen," and all that? I loved my native England, but here in America, in the midst of diversity, I saw true democracy at work. Here was a vision that I wanted to embrace with all my heart.

I had to wait another two years for my turn to come, but when it did I could not have taken the oath more fervently, or believed in it more sincerely.

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God. In acknowledgment whereof I have hereunto affixed my signature.

From that day on I have been grateful to be a member of the American family.
--Gene Gollogly
New York, New York

America has been my home for sixty-three years. Gratitude fills my heart every time I gaze at the Statue of Liberty and think of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that she has welcomed. I am filled with gratitude as I walk the halls of Congress and realize that we have a democratic form of government, that we are free of political oppression. I give thanks for the Redwoods of California, the mountains of Montana, our "old man" Mississippi, the prairies of Nebraska, the lakes of Minnesota, the rough coasts of Maine, and, being from Green Bay, the Packers. Joy fills my heart as we, nationwide, remember our military personnel on Memorial Day, sit at a table at Thanksgiving in November, illumine a July night in celebration of independence. My soul finds nourishment in reading Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, our Constitution, the Bill of Rights. I give thanks for our educational institutions: one-room schoolhouses, our prestigious universities, our pragmatic technical schools, our libraries and museums. I am grateful that we, as Americans, can say "one nation under God" and "liberty and justice for all."
--Bishop Robert Morneau
Green Bay, Wisconsin

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Excerpted from I Like Being American: Treasured Traditions, Symbols, and Stories by Michael Leach
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.