Martha Weinman Lear
They still tell in our family how the 14‑year‑old,
my father, came off the boat with a rope around his waist to hold up his
pants. When he bent to kiss the ground the rope loosened and his pants fell
down. "America!" he cried. My God, how he believed. He carried his faith into
the country like baggage and hung onto it, with that fierce urgent immigrant's
grip, through the sweatshops, through the Crash, through the wars, the political
scandals, the Coughlins, the Ku Klux Klanners, the lynchings,
whatever. They were all temporary aberrations from the eternal goodness of
America, which was second only to the goodness of God.
American cops were honest (though intimidating; he
never overcame that Old Country tremor; once, when he was stopped for speeding,
he went white and I thought he would faint), American politicians were omniscient
and incorruptible American millionaires were benevolent, The American Dream
was real and it was upon him. It was not jingoism, never anything like that,
and it was surely no belief in capitalism, of which he knew nothing. It was
simply a celebration of that safety that shone like sun upon his home, his
children, his religion, his pennies in the bank.
Once he took us from Boston to see the Statue of Liberty.
It was important, he said, for the children to understand what America meant.
We stood at the top of that colossus in the bay and he gestured outward with
the pride of a host. "This is the melting
pot of the world," he said.
"What does it melt?" I asked.
"People," he said.
He could never understand other immigrants' complaints
about the hardness of life. "You should thank God to work here," he said.
"There could never be a Hitler here. "
And to his children, whenever we whined about anything
we couldn't have, or refused to finish the food set before us: "Shame. Think
of the poor children in Europe." We were fattened on visions of the poor children
in Europe.
World War II was a holy war. F.D.R. was a saint. (When he invited us in for a fireside
chat, no one was allowed to speak. When he died, we cried. I don't know why,
except that our elders cried. What better reason?) Truman was a very good person. Ike was Homeric, beyond politics. The Checkers speech was suspect, and it was true that the
man was not likable, but out of this possible breach of faith my father salvaged
a peculiarly American ethic. "A man deserves another chance," he said. "You
can see he's sorry." Joe McCarthy was bad, but American goodness triumphed.
"Have you no sense of decency, sir?" Joseph
Welch intoned, and my father applauded wildly and thumped the table.
"Decency!" he said. He was so proud that Joseph Welch came from Boston.
Our earliest perceptions of what it meant to be American
were filtered through his own. We moved with him in a magnetic field of verities:
God blesses
America. A chicken in every pot. The land of plenty. The land of
opportunity. Streets paved with gold (he lived poor and died poor but assumed,
cheerfully, that he simply had not found the right streets. "Money doesn't
buy happiness," he said). The cradle of liberty. Our boys in blue.
Our cause is just. The land of the free and the home
of the brave. Brothers under the skin. All men are created equal. Anyone
can grow up to be President.
My father voted Democratic
by rote, and by some cultural imperative that he only dimly understood; I
never knew a Republican until I got to college. But he loved the sound of
"two‑party system," it tinkled like a soft clear bell in his ear, and so in
fervent lectures to his friends around our kitchen table, over the coffee,
after the pinochle, he defended the right of Republicans to exist.
"Freedom means that you can pick from different things," he said. "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend with
my life ... How does the rest of it go? You know, that saying by George
Washington."
"Nathan
Hale, Daddy," I said (and so believed for many years).
He beamed triumphantly around the table. "There! You
see what it means to get an American education? Where else could she get an
education like that."
Thus his faith informed us, and we never had reason
to doubt. It was everywhere corroborated. Each morning in school we prayed
as mechanically as we brushed our teeth, invoking God's blessing upon this
land. We stood, facing the flag, put our hands to our hearts and chirped:
"... one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. "
One girl brought a note from home requesting that she
be excused from reciting the Pledge of
Allegiance. This was wartime. She was suspended for a week, and when
she returned ‑ on condition that she recite the Pledge ‑ we ostracized her.
"Traitor!" we shrieked in the school cafeteria. I cannot imagine what we
thought it meant. A teacher reprimanded us. "It's not her fault that her
parents are traitors," she said.
At assemblies we sang "America the Beautiful," rendering it, as we had been taught, up‑tempo and with a great operatic rolling of the R's: "... And cr‑r‑ rown thy good with br‑r‑rother‑r‑rhood/Fr‑r‑rom sea to shining sea!" And then, after school, we would go out into the streets of Roxbury, where the black kids were forever beating up on the Jewish kids and the Irish kids on the black kids and the police on them all. We heard no dissonance. We sensed no irony ...
The author goes on to relate how, during the war, she and other girls in
her school were taught how to become good wives and mothers.
The first of the engagements was announced after the war. She came to school
bearing on her ring finger a glinting chip that was almost lost in the baby
fat of her knuckle, and we all stared as though it were the Hope
diamond. He was the boy next door. They had a blueprint for life: She
would drop out after this junior year and work until she had saved enough
for a trousseau. He would finish high school. Then they would marry ‑ she
had planned, already, every detail of her wedding gown; she described the
bits of lace and the placement of seed pearls and we all closed our eyes
envisioning ‑ and settle into an apartment in Roxbury and save for a home
in Brookline. They would have four children. He would go into the insurance
business, and his goal was to earn $ 10,000 a year, which would buy one hell
of a house. We all blinked at the force of his ambition.
My own ambition was to study journalism. My guidance
counselor advised against it. "Be an English teacher," he said. "Journalism
is not for women. It makes them tough."
We were graduated in a fine
postwar euphoria. It said beneath my picture in the yearbook: "Her voice is
ever soft and low, an excellent thing in a woman." I was pleased.
I gave the Class Speech and spoke, soft and low, of
the sacrifices that had been made for democracy and of our mission, now, to
go forth into the world and assure that they would not have been made in vain:
to be good Americans, to marry good Americans, to raise good Americans. My
parents cried a little. The graduation ceremony ended with "God Bless America,"
and it echoed so that, as we filed out into the sun, we could hear nothing
but America singing.
The cataclysmic assaults upon faith and myth, innocence,
invincibility all came after my father's death. I cannot imagine what he would
think today, but I suspect that he would still hear America singing. It was
a sound so sweet that he could never have borne to relinquish it.