Defined by their own glory, prosperity and happiness, all nations on Earth claim a “golden age.” What is our Golden Age in America? Many of us may believe ours today is America’s Golden Age. Indeed, speaking materially, we have virtually anything we want, available day and night, in greatest abundance and variety the world has ever seen — and at our fingertips. Speaking politically, many recall pre-MAGA liberal America where many political experiments were tried and they want to reclaim America’s golden age when Democrats take power again. By contrast, some may believe today’s America under Trump deserves that accolade.
But I want to visit America’s truly heroic age, an era in which America’s heroes were resolute, their ideals clear and their deeds simple. There truly was a “golden” age in American history in its 19th century frontier nation, in which its citizens were virtuous, and their vision of America more universal than it has become.
Indeed, what was the quintessential idea of “America” in its Golden Age as conceived of by its founders and now forgotten by its descendants?
Sociologist C. Wright Mills, in his book “White Collar,” describes the Jeffersonian vision of frontier America in the 19th-century: “Here (writes Mills) the ideas of the political economist Adam Smith coincided with those of the political moralist Thomas Jefferson; together they form(ed) the ideology of the naturally harmonious world of the small entrepreneur.”
Mills again describes what happens when free and equal individuals interact with one another in an open society: “Since few men owned more property than they could work, differences between men were due in large part to personal strength and ingenuity. The type of man presupposed and strengthened by this society was willingly economic, possessing the ‘reasonable self-interest’ needed to build and operate the market economy. He was an ‘absolute individual,’ linked into a system with no authoritarian center, but held together by countless, free, shrewd transactions.”
There, in the true epic of the American saga, the common lives were, for the first time in human history, free from tyranny and were equal to one another, in a nation where God, humanity and society were combined to create a new “shining city on a hill.” Nothing like that ever existed before or since. The Golden Age of America was history’s only time when the common men were both free from political-economic authority and equal to all persons around them.
They left their homelands in search of liberty and equality. In frontier America they found both. But life in the new land was often harsh and short. When they died, they were buried where they died. Yet, here, they were free, with no king or lord or master over them. They were hungry and driven largely by self-interest, as were all others who came. Unlike in the Old World, every man in the New World had a chance, as every other man, in their declaration and also in the lives they lived, and in their deaths.
In this frontier Golden Age, their opinion was equal to that of anyone, and the open land and guns ensured that all were equal and free, as the Declaration of Independence had famously declared. Of all those who lived and died in the Golden Age of America, no one was more quintessentially “American” than Davy Crockett who defined America in memorable simplicity: “American Republic. I like the sound of the word. It means people can live free. Talk free. Go or come. Buy or sell. Be drunk or sober. However they choose.”
Such uncomplicated faith in simple liberty was possible because the nation’s unlimited bounties were available to all, which created a social and economic equality the world had never seen before. As the new nation held the world spellbound with its unique democracy, even Karl Marx called America “an exception” to history’s ubiquitous class conflict.
Great Americans lived along common Americans in this great era: George Washington in his simple honesty, Thomas Jefferson in his unwavering egalitarianism, Abraham Lincoln in his great humility, Henry David Thoreau in his uncomplicated morality and humanity, John Brown in his quest for an end to slavery and inhumanity, and countless simple folks in frontier piety and simpler democratic ideals.
They all believed in an ideal called “America.” In this plain but just society everyone gave their honest labor and everyone kept the fruit of their labor unmolested. Power, the one evil that had plagued mankind throughout history, vanished in America because it was shared by all men who were free and equal in their individual pursuit of happiness in frontier America far away from feudal Europe – and America’s own slavery.
During the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia (1787), the word “slavery” was never mentioned as if it didn’t exist. It was just too painful to mention such an evil word when the delegates gathered there to create the world’s first perfect republic that represented humanity’s dream of an ideal democracy.
Today, as we celebrate our 250-year fortunes in America where all men (and women and all others) are free and equal, there is one word — like “slavery” 250 years ago — we want to avoid uttering or even thinking about because it is just too painful a reminder in our national celebration. And the word is “Trump,” which, if loudly uttered, would instantly ruin any celebratory jubilation.
Like the unspoken “S” word at the Convention 250 years ago, now, in our hushed silence today 250 years later, we buy another day of fake-peace with Trump only because we are complicit with his plans for America’s new slavery.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.