Unit VII: What, Then, Is This American? ca. 1865 - 1900

Question/Problem 12: Describe America at the close of the 19th century.

I am an American. The things I shall say about myself may seem at first to contradict one another, but in the end they add up. I am almost always recognized at once, wherever I go about the world. Some say it is my clothes that give me away. Some say it is my way of talking. I think it is more than that....

The life I lived shaped me into a new kind of human being. I will not say a better kind, only a different kind....

I remember great men and great deeds. I remember great sayings.

But I remember, also, sayings that were never written down and deeds known only to a few: the pioneer greeting his wife as he came in from his new cornfield, in the dappled shade of ringed and dying trees; the strong surge of discussion in remote crossro ads stores; the young man in Georgia or Ohio kissing his mother good-by as he goes to enlist; a Mississippi Negro, a Texas cowboy... all manner of men and women planning, working, saving, seeing that the children had better schooling than the parents; re formers crying out against brutality and corruption; dreamers battling against the full tide of materialism....

I am an American. I am of one race and of all races. I am heir to a great estate. I am free and bound to the wheel of a great responsibility....

After the years, the centuries, I begin to know what it means to be an American.

From Kenneth Seeman Giniger, ed., America, America, America (New York: Franklin Watts, 1957), pp. 198-201.