It was a time when the nationwide character was being cast not among the many institution circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia however out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged expertise of westward growth, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893, that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its disinterest in excessive tradition and well mannered manners. The West was settled by a rising tide of hucksterism — the spirit of the circus grasp P.T. Barnum greater than that of the aristocratic novelist Henry James.
It was a golden age of braggadocio, of Paul Bunyan-style tall tales. It was additionally an age when to be American was to be wreathed in glory. Many Individuals believed that God had assigned a sacred errand to his new chosen folks, to finish historical past and to convey a brand new heaven right down to earth. (Sort of like the best way God saved Trump in that Pennsylvania subject in order that he might full the sacred mission of deporting extra immigrants.)
Herman Melville captured, with out endorsing, the nationalist fervor in his novel “White Jacket”: “We Individuals are the peculiar, chosen folks — the Israel of our time. God has predestinated, mankind expects, nice issues from our race; and nice issues we really feel in our souls.” Walt Whitman joined the refrain: “Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and finish their lesson, wearied over there past the seas? / We take up the duty everlasting.” There’s no confidence like adolescent confidence, for an individual or a rustic.
I can see why this picture of a wild, uncooked, aspiring America appeals to Trump. It’s typically stated that Trump appeals to these left behind, the losers of the data age. And it is a nationalism full of aspiration, daring, hope and future-mindedness. (It helps if, like Trump, you whitewash a number of minor particulars about Nineteenth-century America out of your portrait — like, you recognize, slavery and Reconstruction.)
Possibly the century’s key enchantment for Trump is that in these days America was firmly anti-establishment. Throughout the Atlantic have been the outdated states — Europe. Periodically, Europeans like Fanny Trollope (herself a novelist and the mom of a rather more famous one) would go to America and switch up their noses on the vulgar money-loving folks they discovered right here. The English author Morris Birkbeck summarized his view of the American spirit this fashion: “Acquire! Acquire! Acquire!” Individuals have been proud to defy the snobs with their refined manners, class-ridden societies and inherited luxuries.
