Moving Decisions...
...and resolutions to stay nearby
This is another installment on the role of home in American life. Hope you like it. — Jim
There are two fixed realities of our lives that cannot be changed. The first, and the focus of the discussion at hand, is where we’re born. (The other is the times through which we live.) One of the first real decisions we make as human beings, one that in important sense marks our emergence into a full-fledged selfhood, is how we react to our lot: acceptance or rejection. In fact, of course, the choice is rarely that stark or complete; acceptance and rejection are more like two ends of a spectrum between which we position ourselves. Any stance we do take is often more a state of mind than objective reality; our ability to leave or stay in a place may be constrained by any number of material circumstances. Moreover, a state of mind may be harder to reject than one might think—even if you can pick up and go, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll leave a place in your mind or your heart after you’re gone. Conversely, many are the rebel stuck in a place whose imagined real life is elsewhere.
However complicated or even contradictory it may be, the distinction between those who are happy with their lot and those who want to leave it behind marks an important divide in our national life. In fact, both sets of people have American Dreams. But those of the restless are the ones that tend to dominate our collective consciousness. It’s not hard to see why: at some fundamental level, the Dream is about overcoming, transcending, or otherwise altering the circumstances of your birth, and there are few better ways to do that than a change of venue. The quest for a new home goes to the very heart of the origins of America; we are, after all, a nation of immigrants. For most of U.S. history, Americans have been among the most mobile people on the face of the earth, convinced—rightly and not—that a better future lay beyond the horizon. This restlessness was captured, not approvingly, by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic 1840 study Democracy in America:
In the United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops; he embraces a profession and gives it up; he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure, he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness. Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which forever escapes him.
We all know that mass migrations across oceans have been a defining element of the American experience, but so have internal ones. Black history alone affords multiple examples: the slave migration from the Atlantic coast to the cotton country of the Southern interior; the migration of the so-called Exodusters from the South to Kansas after the Civil War; the well-known Great Migration from the Southern countryside to Northern cities in the first half of the twentieth century (and the migration back toward that end of that century); and so on.[2] In most of these cases there was often a hope—even an expectation—that a new home would lead to a better life, albeit a tenuous one in the case of slaves, whose dreams, of course, naturally turned to escape, requiring mobility of the most literal and fundamental kind.
But homebodies have dreams, too. For some slaves, not moving—not being sold down the river, not to be rent from their families—was the deepest longing. We typically think of the American Dream in terms of mobility, because in some sense that’s its essence. But it can also be imagined in terms of settling down, of release from endless striving, like the weary employee who daydreams about a retirement—very often in terms of a home designated for one’s golden years. But settling down in one place can also be a means of getting down to work—starting a business, raising a family, gaining the necessary space to embark on a journey within.
In our time, the homebody/roamer divide manifests itself in terms of a much older the cultural divide that has taken on new relevance, even urgency: that between cosmopolitans and provincials. In recent years in particular, these two identities have increasingly taken on political overtones, with provincials as Republicans and cosmopolitans as Democrats. There are some good reasons for this, and they’re reasons that transcend an American context—there’s a strong class character to cosmopolitanism, which rests on a leisured elite’s appetites for new experiences, one that often leads such people to embrace minority experience, whether as a matter of novelty or a sense of moral purpose. Provincials are often comprised of a majoritarian middle that’s sometimes hostile toward the bottom and subject to scorn from the top. But cosmopolitans and provincials may be best understood not in terms of class or ideology, but rather in terms of temperaments—as dispositions toward the notion of place, an instinctive craving for either familiarity or novelty roughly congruent with a neurological spectrum between introversion and extroversion.
Like most people, I’ve got both cosmopolitan and provincial tendencies, and they’ve played out in terms of the circumstances and choices of my life. At heart, though, I’m a provincial, and this is an identity that’s become ever more clear to me as I’ve aged. In a way, it’s a strange loyalty to profess, given that my own experience of upward mobility has involved class mobility that required geographic mobility to be realized. And while I would hardly consider myself a world traveler, I have journeyed to the far corners of the earth in my capacity as a student and scholar, and pride myself, within limits, as to my knowledge of the world at large. But such experiences have made clear to me the depth of my attachment to my home—by which I mean my country, as well as the terrain surrounding the house I inhabit. I’ve come to believe that the key to reconciling the divergence between my feelings and experiences is the character of the places I’ve lived for most of the last half-century. Which is to say that I belong, for better or worse, to that approximate half of the U.S. population that is suburban.
Next: the place of the suburbs in American life.