At a recent conference of historians, one of the few participants with a literary background confessed that he was surprised to hear such frequent and confident reference to “facts.” His reaction reflects the fact that contemporary literary theorists have become as wary of speaking of facts, (without inverted commas) as avant-garde theologians are of adverting to “God.” Indeed to critical theorists, most historians seem theoretical dolts; unlike Molière's famous character, they don't even realize they are talking (bad) theory all the time. Moreover to a novelist such as Gore Vidal, historians seem pettifoggers and without an imaginative bone in their body. Whatever else they are confident of, novelists automatically assume that they can do justice to the past with more verve and authenticity than historians.

As any parent or pet-owner knows, play seems to be a natural part of life. Dogs and cats wrestle, chase their tails, and scamper in races; monkeys, fish, and birds dance; children make toys out of any nearby prop. Play is older than man and seems to be one of the inevitable characteristics that evolution has built into all beings above the level of the most basic species. Both quiet play and active play – leisure and recreation – have a therapeutic effect that make creatures seek them. Play is ubiquitous psychologists say, because fun is essential in order to do the serious things of life – work, survive, reproduce, and live in social groups. Why then does it jar our sensibilities to think of Puritans playing and having fun? Why is it necessary to remind people – to persuade them against their instinctive reaction – that the religious settlers of colonial New England sought relaxation and pleasure in their lives? Many societies past and present have reputations for restrictive views of the pursuit of pleasure, but few peoples conjure up as strong an image of asceticism as the Puritans do.

If we only considered how near and intimate is the subject of the study of the self, we might suppose that of all studies it would be the most easy. And since it carries us back to the object of our most lively affections, we might think it would be most agreeable, and that we should proceed to it by natural impulse. Yet it is precisely the contrary.

Lionel Trilling is generally regarded as one of the most important American critics self-consciously indebted to Matthew Arnold's idea of critical humanism. But his legacy draws little interest now that humanism has presumably been “unmasked” in academic circles to reveal the various political agendas beneath its program of disinterested idealism. For many critics on the Left, he is remembered, in Cornel West's phrase, as “the godfather of neo-conservatism,” and perhaps a precursor of such recent advocates of the humanities as Allan Bloom and former Secretary of Education William Bennett. Much of this is doubtless due to Trilling's opposition to the general tenor of the 1960s counter-culture, some of whose participants are now today's academic cultural critics. But if Trilling is to be remembered as a kind of mandarin apologist for “high culture,” he should be remembered as a very troubled and ambivalent one.

If you went looking for traces of the Sauk village where Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak (or Black Sparrow Hawk) was born and which, in his refusal to give it up, became the ultimate cause of the Black Hawk War in 1832 – the last Indian war east of the Mississippi – you would not find much: a few smart allusions to the great Sauk warrior on storefront signs and other such promotion gestures over on Rock Island, Iowa, but no archeological evidence at the juncture of the Rock and Mississippi rivers to suggest that the village ever existed. And yet, according to Cecil Eby, by 1790 Saukenuk was “the most imposing town in the Northwest, Indian or white, with more than 100 wickeups (many extending 60 feet in length) and from April to October inhabited by some 3,000 Sauk.” There are, however, scattered verbal signs that might draw the archeologist or historian back and forth over other tableaux of potential Sauk geography, like Sac City in Sac County, Iowa, and Black Hawk County due West of Dubuque. Then there is Prairie du Sac and Sauk City on the Wisconsin River, Wisconsin, two historically vibrant sites which novelist August Derleth turned to good use in his saga of Wisconsin. But when it comes to dealing with a defeated people who also happen to belong to the red race, the names themselves often become signs of cultural obscurantism, if not commemorative oblivion. In list form the available nomenclature amuses: Sacs, Saukies (which the Indians themselves used), Sockeys, Socks, Sacques, Saucs, Sakis. This embarrassing take-your-pick liberality clearly enough sets forth a problem of transliteration; it also evokes the more complex issue of cultural translation tout court: us/them, inside/outside, center/periphery, hegemonic culture/minority culture, structure/chaos.

King Vidor's 1928 film “The Crowd” examines the life of an “average” New Yorker, John Sims, who grows up dreaming of boundless opportunities for success yet remains stuck as a low-level clerk in a large corporation. Bored with office work, John invents advertising slogans and eventually wins $500 in a contest. He rushes home with an armful of toys and clothes for his family and jumps ecstatically about the room with his wife. From the window he displays a newly purchased scooter to his children across the street, then watches as his little girl runs to receive her gift and is struck by a huge truck careening down the block. John rushes out to find her surrounded by a large and anonymous crowd. In his grief he lifts the injured child high above them, an unconscious sacrifice to the seemingly mindless speed and swirling masses that rob modern urban people of their innocence and hope for individual fulfillment.

Rising from the streets of New York with his songs like Caruso or Sinatra, but in words. “Sweet Milanese hills” brood in his Renaissance soul, evening is coming on the hills. Amazing and beautiful Gregory Corso, the one and only Gregory the Herald.

When, on his way back to Manhattan from Kennedy Airport where he has picked up his girlfriend Maria, Sherman McCoy, the protagonist of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, takes a wrong exit, he gets lost and ends up in the Bronx. This is Sherman's first meeting with the Bronx, and it turns out to be nothing less than a catastrophe. A wealthy Wall Street stockbroker with a very WASP background, Sherman McCoy has lived his life under conditions as remote from those of any child growing up in the Bronx as can possibly be. The distance between McCoy's Manhattan – that of his business address, Wall Street, as well as his private one, Fifth Avenue – and the Bronx may not be great in geographical terms; in economic and psychological terms, however, it is enormous. In the Bronx, McCoy encounters “the other” America, the poor, non-white, and violent America from which his sheltered background has successfully shielded him until he is well into his thirties. He, or rather his girlfriend Maria, runs down and mortally wounds a young black man – an accident for which later Sherman gets all the blame and is put to trial. Puzzled and frightened, Sherman does not quite know how to relate to the Bronx and to the accident, and it is Maria who finally has to enlighten and explain to him what it is all about:

Sherman, let me tell you something. There's two kinds a jungles. Wall Street is a jungle. You've heard that, haven't you? You know how to handle yourself in that jungle…. And then there's the other jungle. That's the one we got lost in the other night, in the Bronx…. You don't live in that jungle, Sherman, and you never have. You know what's in that jungle? People who are all the time crossing back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side…. You don't know what that's like. You had a good upbringing. Laws weren't any kind of a threat to you. They were your laws, Sherman, people like you and your family's…. And let me tell you something else. Right there on the line everyody's an animal – the police, the judges, the criminals, everybody (p. 275).

American history has come a long way in the past quarter century. It was, after all, 1965 when Samuel Eliot Morison published his enormously successful and widely praised Oxford History of the American People – an 1,100-page work that relegated the women's suffrage amendment of the Constitution to half a sentence in a chapter entitled “Bootlegging and Other Sports,” and intimated that most blacks were pleased and contented as slaves. And this was an avant-garde position for Morison, commonly regarded as the preeminent American historian of his time: in earlier versions of the same text he had referred to blacks collectively as “Sambo,” as “childlike, improvident, humorous, prevaricating, and superstitious” creatures; when confined to slavery, he had stated flatly, blacks were “adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy.”

He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labor and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.

This paper examines the contestation over otherness – in the form of ethnicity and national identity – that arose in the U.S. during World War I, culminating in the Red Scare of the 1920s. In the narrative of “Americanization,” immigration policies were joined with a militant nationalism, aiming to eliminate “enemies within” and from without, through a process of deportation, the criminalization of dissent and military interventionism. The demonization of immigrant-otherness became a means of strengthening solidarity among Anglo-Saxons, at a time when their cohesiveness was being challenged internally. As such, the history of America's internal control over its immigrant self is the familiar one of the limits of liberalism.