Telling American Stories

Americans’ respect for discipline is deeply connected with ideas about honor and self-restraint, and also with respect for practice, hard work, and the excellence we believe those traits to engender.

When Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play major league baseball, he faced an entire season’s worth of the most terrible racism and ignorant hatred imaginable, from people in the stands, from his opponents, and even from his own teammates. Yet Robinson never once fought back, never lost control of himself, because he realized that to do so would be to lose sight of his ultimate goal: seeing the majors completely integrated. At the same time, if Jackie Robinson had been merely an average third baseman, or a so-so hitter, the trail he was blazing would have been immeasurably more difficult. Just as much as his discipline, his greatness helped him win over the public and achieve his goals—if there’s one thing America likes more than a hardworking underdog, it’s a hardworking underdog who wins.

Telling stories that focus on the discipline shown by hard-working immigrant mothers and father can help engender respect for their struggles. While there is a real danger of reinforcing stereotypes about “deserving” and “undeserving” members of the society we care about, highlighting the core American values animating our stories can be of immense value in convincing our fellow Americans of the justness of our cause.

The value Americans place on hard work is central to our identity and deeply ingrained in our collective conscious. The connection with fairness (“work hard, get ahead,” or “an honest day’s wages”) is a major part of many economic justice messages. These concepts are embodied in the life story of a woman such as Dolores Huerta, who has spent her entire life fighting for decent working conditions for migrant farm-workers and at the age of seventy five still puts in a full work week at her foundation. It’s important to remember that it is not only fairness that we strive for when we organize to win better wages or working conditions—hard work itself is valued in this country because it speaks to the moral uprightness of those who do it. Understanding how work imparts dignity to the worker and reminding people of that fact can be extremely helpful in forging the personal connections through our communications efforts that will help to change minds and win allies.

Americans value toughness, particularly when it’s mixed with a measure of stoicism, grace under pressure, and good humor. Cool, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, but people know it when they see it. In America, the birthplace of cool, it most often takes the form of a knowing toughness, laced with sarcasm and dry wit—always easy and graceful, without a care in the world. While our understanding of precisely who is cool changes with the times, from Humphrey Bogart in the 1940s to James Dean and Audrey Hepburn in the 1950s, Bruce Lee in the 1970s and Eddie Murphy in the 1980s to Andre 3000 and Big Boi today, cool itself is eternal. If you have someone on your side who has it, by all means—use it! Likewise, if your opponents are attempting to don the mantle of cool, and you know they’re anything but, call them on it. There’s nothing worse than trying to look cool when you’re not.

The freedom to worship or not, “according to the dictates of our own conscience,” in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, is a cornerstone of our American democracy. Still, there can be no denying the powerful role that faith has played in our history, from the references to the Creator in the Declaration of Independence to the soaring imagery of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. Acknowledging how traditional religious values related to social justice, inclusion, and care for those less fortunate than ourselves connect the values that animate the work of our own organizations can be a powerful way to connect with people whose religious beliefs are based in the same tradition. Those values reveal the hope for a better world that is embodied by that work, providing a corollary to the value Americans place on optimism.Read more>>

Americans have a deep respect for individuals whose actions are motivated by concern for others, and even more so when their actions involve great risk to themselves. Such individuals embody the kind of moral courage that we aspire to for ourselves.

The story of Harriet Tubman and her work on the Underground Railroad, leading escaped slaves to freedom in the North, is a good example. Time and again, she risked her own freedom to secure that of others. When asked how it was she could place herself at such risk so many times, she replied, “ I can’t die but once.”

Highlighting the sacrifices made by immigrant parents for the sake of their children, for example, or the commitment shown by a community fighting a polluting corporation, can help to connect the causes progressives are fighting for with broadly held values.

Optimism is the cardinal American value. How could it not be in a country that was founded on Enlightenment ideas about human dignity, the right of self-government and the perfectibility of humanity? Without optimism, a revolutionary war that pitted a group of poorly armed provincials against the most feared army in the world could never have been started. Optimism is intimately connected with the value of courage—not physical courage, though that is also highly valued in America— the kind of moral courage that makes a person believe they have the duty to fight for the better world they believe is possible. Read more>>

The first question to ask yourself when you start to think about how to tell your own American stories is: “Does it have American values in it?” The list of values that follows is admittedly subjective and nowhere near exhaustive, but it is based on a lifelong interest in American history, literature and popular culture. It makes connections between the listed values to show what they mean to Americans, both separately and as a system of values. Ideas like courage or hope are, of course, prized by cultures around the world—to speak of them as American values is to try to explain how they play out in our culture, and how they make up part of a coherent whole.

What Makes an American?
America, more than most countries, defines itself and the members of its society by reference to a set of shared values. In many ways, they define what it means to be American. While many other nations define their members on the basis of birthplace and blood relations, Americanness is based on a social contract involving an understanding and acceptance of its unique set of democratic values. As sociologist Carl Friedrich once said, “To be a Frenchman is a fact, while to be an American is an ideal.” By embracing that ideal, organizations fighting for justice and equality, whether they are working for immigration reform or against felony disenfranchisement, can stake their claim to the American story in a way that will make it difficult for their opponents to attack.

Reaffirming our commitment to our shared values can be a powerful tool to promote inclusion of all the individuals and communities that make up the American nation. This isn’t to say that using values-laden language will somehow magically erase the barriers between us and win acceptance of marginalized communities, but rather that it will be extremely difficult to win that acceptance without reference to the values that underlie the social contract that binds us together as a nation.

A bit of housekeeping, to explain what you’re looking at, and what you can expect from this site. Telling American Stories started out as a workshop, and over the past year or so I’ve been developing a narrative that tracks the workshop pretty closely. The posts you see below are the beginning of that narrative. Over the course of the next couple weeks, I’ll be posting the rest in this space, and as I do, creating permanent pages for each section, which will be gathered at right under the “Narrative” header. When the whole thing has been published that way, I’ll post a .pdf of the whole thing, and this space will be given over to a blog about the subject. Thanks for visiting, and leave a comment if you have a moment. I’d love to know what you think of the site.

As you might expect in a country that thinks as highly of itself as the United States, a great number of people have attempted to define what is unique about America. The following ideas are only examples of the many ways this question has been answered, but they contain some common elements and surprising connections that illustrate broader themes about what we mean when we talk about the American story.

Four Stories.
In his book, Tales of a New America, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich identifies four stories he believes constantly recur in our country’s history.
One is the story of the Triumphant Individual. This is the Horatio Alger story, where a young person with only a nickel in his or her pocket and a good idea eventually hits the big time, achieving great wealth and fame thanks to his or her own hard work and the open nature of our society. It’s also the story of Bill Gates, the college dropout who became the richest man in America, and of Lance Armstrong, beating cancer, winning races and inspiring millions.

A second story revolves around the Benevolent Community. This story invokes images of barn-raisings and Main Street in a New England town, but also of big city neighborhoods like Little Italy or Chinatown where immigrant communities gather and prosperity and security are achieved by everyone looking out for everyone else. It is also a story often invoked in the wake of tragedy such as Hurricane Katrina or the Virginia Tech shootings in order to remind ourselves of the kind of communities we aspire to create and to offer solace.

A third story is that of the Mob at the Gates, in which our country and our very way of life are threatened by outsiders. This story has often been used in our history to scapegoat and marginalize groups of people, or to make political appeals based on fear and division. Unfortunately, that makes it no less a part of the American story, and understanding how this narrative is constructed can help us combat it. In the 19th century, it was successive waves of new immigrants from places like Ireland and Poland that threatened to overwhelm our culture; in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the “Red Menace.” Today, it is “the terrorists,” of course, but it is also undocumented workers from Mexico that threaten to change the nature of our society.

A fourth story, according to Reich, is that of the Rot at the Top, in which secretive elites in business or politics conspire in smoke-filled rooms to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us and cut deals to poison our environment and betray our principles. Put simply, this story is about the idea that power corrupts and our need to be ever-vigilant against the powerful; it also helps to account for our endless fascination with celebrity and scandal. It is both the story of Enron and of Jack Abramoff.

Interestingly, while two of these stories are closely associated with conservative politics (the Triumphant Individual and the Mob at the Gates) and two with progressive causes (the Benevolent Community and the Rot at the Top), these stories are not exclusively conservative or progressive. We might associate the Triumphant Individual most closely with conservative ideals, but almost all of us can point to someone in their own experience who succeeded through their own hard work and determination. Likewise, while the Rot at the Top story is familiar to anyone working on economic justice or environmental issues, conservatives often tell the same story about government waste and pork-barrel spending. In short, despite the superficial associations with one ideological perspective, each of these stories can be easily understood by people from across the political spectrum. That makes them powerful tools for progressive communicators hoping to expand support for their issues.
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There’s no denying that the idea of telling an American story, of invoking values, is something that progressives have had real trouble with and sometimes even rejected outright. What good is telling a story when we’re fighting to defeat a ballot measure or win community benefits on a new development project? Why talk about values when it seems they only ever get mentioned when someone’s telling us that we don’t have them? Whose American story are we talking about? Why tell American stories anyway?

For three simple reasons: the power of narrative; the nature of our democracy; and because the Progressive Story is the American Story. Read more>>