American Society: From “The Promised Land” to “Coming Apart”

                                                    John Hallwas

            One of the finest studies of American society in recent years is now being reviewed across the country. “Coming Apart” (2011), by Charles Murray, deals with the increasing cultural decline---and hence, social problems---among our poorest people during the past half century.

            As “New York Times” reviewer Ross Douthat recently put it, Murray portrays “the steady breakdown of what he calls America’s ‘founding virtues’---thrift and industriousness, [marital] fidelity and parental responsibility, piety and civic engagement---within America’s working class, and the personal and communal wreckage that has ensued.”

            As a result, too, there is a significant difference in “core behaviors and values” between upper class and lower class Americans. Murray even claims that there was a greater consensus among the social classes half a century ago that there is today.

            I’m not sure he’s right on that, but his view that America is struggling against communal breakdown, which is a multi-faceted problem, is right on target. That change, in fact, has been a primary impetus for my “On Community” column, because the solution, in my view, lies within individual communities and has much to do with devotion to place, multi-layered social interaction, and common awareness of both national and local heritage. All of those matters are declining in our time, and communities that address them will fare much better on many fronts.

            As someone who has been interested in this matter for many years, I can’t help noting that Murray’s study has appeared on the centennial of another book that addresses the problem in a more personal and compelling way. Mary Antin’s “The Promised Land,” focused on an immigrant’s experience, was a bestseller in 1912-1913, and it is my favorite American autobiography.

            Antin, who came to America with her Jewish family at age 12, was a remarkably gifted person. She was soon admitted to a prestigious Boston school for girls, and her first book appeared in 1899, when she was just 18. The later huge success of “The Promised Land” led to lectures by her across the country, in which she asserted that “the unique spiritual mission of America” demanded a positive, welcoming approach to immigrants.

            More important, “The Promised Land” is a superb literary achievement, reflecting more thoughtfully than any other book I have read both the potential for spiritual self-growth in America and the tendency toward cultural breakdown in the modern world.

            The first half of Antin’s book is a portrait of her family’s experience, and their culture, in a Jewish community called Polotzk, in pre-communist Russia. For various reasons, including poverty, Jewish tradition, anti-Semitic restrictions there, and persecution by Christians, society in Polotzk was intensely communal.

            She depicts a world of oppression and suffering, faced by people who had a strong sense of interdependence. Their struggle was collective---and deeply meaningful. There was little chance for social breakdown, but not much opportunity for individual self-realization either.

            In contrast, the second half of the book chronicles an American experience that utterly transforms young Mary. Through an excellent grammar school, then Columbia University and Barnard College, plus open association with others and access to libraries, she is able to realize her talents and develop her inner life in ways that were impossible back in Russia---and would have been inappropriate for a Jewish woman.  In psychological terms, her unique personal identity emerges as she adopts a new American social identity.

            Antin does that partly by escaping “from the folds of my clinging past,” as she puts it---by denying the value of many cultural and religious tenets held by Russian Jews, including her parents. However, looking back, she realizes that her slum-dwelling immigrant family, also impacted by America, suffered various kinds of “disintegration of home life,” which she notes was typical among turn-of-the-century poor people in Boston. Anticipating Murray’s “Coming Apart,” she also says that there was “no common life,” no meaningful community, in their impoverished corner of America.

            Antin’s book raises the central issue that Americans need to confront: how to maintain an increasingly self-liberating society without also fostering alienation from others and social irresponsibility. It’s a crucial problem for families, communities, schools, and governments.

            Reading “The Promised Land” and looking inward, at the social and spiritual dimensions of our own American experience, would be a good way to start.