The Power of the Pen

They say the pen is mightier than the sword, and for Americans this holds true. The American Revolution had a fairly low body count for the scope of the war, especially when compared to the French Revolution. I think this is because of printing. The Declaration of Independence was a huge stepping stone, literally declaring to Britain and the world that America, and the 13 colonies in particular, was now its own nation. The Declaration might have been a pivotal point, but it was the unique print culture of the "New World" that enabled such a work to be published.

In Europe printing was a strictly guarded procedure that involved getting permission from the government. Free speech did not exist like it does today. In America things were different. Prior to the 1850s the colonies were not united and each governed themselves to some extent, but Benjamin Franklin and other printers began to produce copiously and they made political statements that would have been illegal in Europe, like the cartoon above. This cartoon was then reproduced in all the colonies papers, and began the print culture that helped unite the colonies, ultimately resulting in Revolution.

The American Revolution is the ultimate underdog story, and as such Americans can't stop retelling it. We're proud of what our forefathers did: of the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere, and beating those redcoats. In today's internet based society, print culture has changed once again. Now anyone can post anything they want on the internet (like my blog,) and instead of uniting 13 colonies it unites the world.

Defining American

        I've always thought that being American meant being free, and having certain "inalienable rights,” but from reading Jean de Crevecoeur, Langston Hughes, Emma Lazarus, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, I came to realize that this wasn't always the case.

Crevecoeur wrote at the beginning of America, and yet America was already something the world hadn't seen before. Crevecoeur touches on the “melting pot” idea, but he leaves out a significant group of people who were not permitted to intermingle like those of the European descent, the Native Americans and the African Slaves brought over. In Aldrich's writing he speaks of keeping certain people out of America, those who might spoil it. Emma Lazarus' poem is of course the famous inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty and it, at least at the time it was inscribed was a lie.

Langston Hughes speaks of those Crevecoeur "forgot," and those Aldrich wanted to keep out. Hughes wrote about the disinherited and those who didn't get the same freedoms as those of European descent. I have always admired Langston Hughes' poetry, but reading it in conjunction with Crevecoeur and the others made me realize how skewed our perception of America really is. As a white person I can find my origins in the people Crevecoeur talks about, but as a woman I feel that I can find some common ground with Hughes as well.   

I am proud to be an American, today, but I am ashamed of this country's past. As a country built on a constitution that promises equality, the past certainly lacked that. This country's patriarchs brought people from their homeland and forced them into a life of servitude; slavery is the scourge of America's past, and it is one thing that sticks out to me as hypocritical.