The welcoming reception that so many European soccer fans have received as they have crossed the nation in pursuit of World Cup games has struck many as a happy surprise of the summer of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
“The World Cup is at our shores, and all these people are doing us a great service,” comedian Bill Maher posted. “They are reminding Americans that this place is kind of awesome.”
“They are seeing an America they never imagined,” the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan noted with something like awe. “They expected a dark and brooding nation; they discovered a sun-filled magnificence. It’s so big, so spacious, has such wondrous shops, the best food and absolutely wonderful people.”
“We forget too easily,” the British-born American Andrew Sullivan wrote, “the loving, generous, beautiful culture that is still America at its core. If it takes a soccer tournament rather than a choreographed 250th anniversary celebration to remind us of that, so be it. We’re worth celebrating no less.”
Sullivan took special care to hail “the multicultural miracle we have already achieved in this quarter of a millennium.” It’s a refreshing contrast with the notion, widely prevalent in the pre-Trump years of this century, that America had suddenly, for the first time, moved from being a stiflingly, insensitively monocultural society to a multiracial, multicultural one.
When you go riffling back in American history, you encounter this notion time and again. In the years of peak Ellis Island migration from eastern and southern Europe, 1892 to 1914, you heard constantly that America was suddenly becoming — for some, dangerously becoming — multicultural.
In the decade from 1846 to 1857, when immigration as a percentage of the preexisting population was at a similar peak, the sudden inrush of German and Irish Catholic immigrants inspired similar ruminations. The fact that many newcomers, rather than fan out into farms and the frontier, clustered in high-density neighborhoods in central cities seemed especially threatening.
But cultural diversity was part of the American experience, going back to colonial days and through the Revolution and the first tenuous years of independence, which produced the Constitution.
America’s revolutionary patriots had grown up during a period when recent history was centered on foreign and civil wars centered on differences in religion. England’s Glorious Revolution, the ouster of a Catholic king by a Protestant foreigner, was as distant in time from revolutionaries active in the 1770s and 1780s as World War II is as distant in time from us today.
The English Civil War, which resulted in the execution of the king, was contemporaneous with the demographically devastating Thirty Years’ War in Europe was 120 to 130 years in the past — not much farther distant than World War I and the totalitarian fascism and communism of the 20th century that followed.
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Against such a background, the varied religious origins of the different colonies must have been disquieting. The New England colonies had been founded by Calvinist rebels against the Church of England, and Virginia and the Carolinas by faithful Anglicans. Maryland had been established by Catholic and Pennsylvania by Quaker proprietors, and New York by Dutch Reformed Protestants.
Certainly, the newly appointed Gen. George Washington learned quickly that prickly New England troops could not be led in the same manner as his more deferential fellow Virginians. And British leaders fastened on strategies based on the colonies’ differences.
By March 1776, British generals decided to abandon a Massachusetts bristling with hostile Yankees and base their operations in a New York whose multiethnic population had a large minority or perhaps majority of loyalists. Washington, in turn, for most of the years from 1777 to 1780, established winter camps and led spring and summer forays centered on New York City, which separated the Revolutionary strongholds of New England and Virginia.
In 1780, the British struck to the south, occupying Charleston and sending aggressive troops to the Upcountry Carolinas. This was some of the toughest fighting of the war, as symbolized by a 14-year-old boy who demanded the rights of a prisoner-of-war and got slashed with a sword across the face for it, named Andrew Jackson.
The British may have seen South Carolina as another hugely profitable sugar colony, like Jamaica or Barbados. Their strategy was foiled only by the troops of Gen. Nathaniel Greene, who got the British Gen. Cornwallis scurrying off to the Virginia peninsula of Yorktown.
Washington, in turn, was only persuaded to step away from his concentration on New York by repeated assurances that a French fleet would sail from the Caribbean to the Chesapeake to cut off Cornwallis. This finally happened in October 1781, five years and three months after the Declaration of Independence.
The independent American states set up a federal republic, more akin to the Dutch federal republic than to a Britain in the process of uniting the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland to rule by a king-in-Parliament based in London, and on the especially sensitive subject of religion. Americans chose a course less British than Dutch.
Article VI of the Constitution, approved by the convention in September 1787 and ratified by the ninth state and rendered effective in June 1788, provided that, unlike in Britain, “no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Tryst under the United States.”
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And in the First Amendment to the Constitution, approved by the First Congress in September 1789 and ratified by the states in December 1791, even before guaranteeing “the freedom of speech, or of the press,” provided that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” States could keep their established religions — Connecticut did until 1818, Massachusetts until 1833 — or have none at all.
In the nearly 250 years since, Americans have grappled with the difficulties of maintaining their “multicultural miracle” even as the population has increased from 4 million to 349 million. But that there have been difficulties should not blind us to the founders’ achievement in declaring independence and establishing a frame of government appropriate to an always, and always-changing, multicultural society.