American identity

Introduction

In J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's “What Is an American” and in James Baldwin's “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” one of the most profound themes that try to define America is the role of American citizen's effort to distinguish themselves from European citizens.

In de Crèvecoeur's essay his writing style tries to advertise American society by describing the life of an individual American, and comparing it to the European lifestyle. In the first part of his essay, de Crèvecoeur describes American identity: “Here he beholds fair cities, substantial villages, extensive fields, and immense country filled with decent houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges, where an hundred years ago all was wild, woody and uncultivated! What a train of pleasing ideas this fair spectacle must suggest; it is a prospect which must inspire a good citizen with the most heartfelt pleasure”.

Discussion

Should Crevecoeur have been able to come from past America as if just visiting the present, he would have been surprised with many of the changes, but smug about the values and traditions kept, and his own accurate predictions. The last two centuries have changed rapidly in technology, fashion, attitudes, and geography. Many laws that were once the norm back then hardly even exist today; new ones have taken their places. Religion has undergone many definitions and changes, and is not as heavily enforced as before. The original thirteen colonies are no longer agrarian societi4es, but instead, big busy bustling cities. However, despite all of the changes, there are some things that remain the same. Americans have kept their identity as work-o-holics, a country full of diversity, and one with relatively high toleration towards other ethnic groups or religions(Richards, pp.56-70).

Crevecoeur would be most speechless about the disappearance of individual farms that made colonial America. In his "Letters From an American Farmer," he shows his high esteem and respect for the farmer, who was the prime example of stability and self-independence. It was that farmers who survived settlement in the late 1700's and while keeping a dependent population from starving during harsh winters. He describes most Americans as "tillers of the earth... a people of cultivators" (Crevecoeur 301). Farmers had a far more important status in North American than in Europe, because of their high responsibilities towards their own family and the community. Also, the main cash crops that gave birth to the ...