Asked what he thought the single most important event in history was in his day, Otto von Bismarck said without hesitation: “the fact that North Americans speak English.” By that statement, the Iron Chancellor not only acknowledged the future dominance of English language over German but presciently predicted the powerful and leadership role America would play later in world affairs.
At the time, in the mid to late nineteenth century, America was still an experiment in progress, coming of age, sort of, after a fratricidal civil war. Thankfully, the war did not break up America. Against all odds, Abraham Lincoln was able to hold the union together as one and, in the process, laid a solid foundation on which generations of Americans have built an empire far surpassing any ancient or modern equivalent, thus lending credence to Nietzsche’s aphorism that what can’t kill you can only make you stronger.
To fully understand Lincoln’s legacy of one nation indivisible, it is important to consider what might have been if the southern states (Confederacy) had succeeded in seceding? What might have become of the superpower we know today as America?
What is pretty much clear however is that America holds the unique distinction of being one of the few countries in the world with a multitude of races and cultures living within and sharing the same geographical space. To some observers, that racial and cultural mix, a “melting pot,” is what has given America “its vitality and success.”
Think of Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Robert J. Oppenheimer, scientists that delivered the Atomic bomb to a country that gave them freedom from the minatory Nazis. What about writers and filmmakers such as Norman Mailer, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer and the four Warner Brothers, all of them Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe?
What of sportsmen and women such as Mohammed Ali, Carl Lewis, Joe Louis, Joe Frazier, Joyner Griffith, the William sisters? Think of Frank Sinatra – Ole Blue Eyes – and the legions of entertainers made good simply because of the limitless opportunities provided by the land of opportunities?
And then there are the inventors and scientists and industrialists who worked hard to make life better and more comfortable for Americans in particular and the world in general. There are a number of less famous but equally accomplished immigrants who contributed to the development of America in their own significant ways.
A pertinent question to ask now is why did many of these immigrants choose to go to America and not Russia or China, for instance? Why is the magnetic pull of America so irresistible to people from nearly all corners of the world? Apart from being a land of opportunities, Strobe Talbott, onetime Time correspondent, gave a persuasive reason: “The American political and economic system encouraged freedom of markets and freedom of the individual. It rewarded talent instead of class and pedigree.”
By the time World War 1 started in 1914, a period in history that heralded America’s looming world influence and power, Bismarck had died. Even so, his prediction was right on the beam. World War 11 more than confirmed America’s indisputable position as a world power and leader – economically, politically and militarily.
Has America’s leadership position changed in the world today? Not by any means for this writer whose love and admiration for, to borrow an American phrase, God’s own country, began way back in the seventies as a teenager in secondary school. College was an all-male public school founded in 1952 somewhere in a town in the northern part of Bendel state now conveniently split into Edo and Delta states in Nigeria.
The principal of St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School in Igarra, Dr. Samuel A. Okolo, was a British-trained mathematician whose mantra went like “you can live in London in Nigeria,” meaning that without ever having to travel to the U.K, students under his charge can acquire some of the best qualities and ethics of their counterparts in British public schools.
Although he did not know it at the time, some of us were secretly infatuated with the goings-on in another country, a country that England tried and failed to colonize. What was the nature of this infatuation? Books – pulp-fiction novels by James Hardly Chase (an Englishman who wrote copiously about New York and Miami as if he had Yankee gene in his DNA.)
We equally avidly followed some of his contemporaries such as Harold Robbins, Nick Carter and other writers of serious entertainment like Robert Ludlum, Sidney Sheldon, etc. That early infatuation with America was just what it was because, to begin with, none of those authors were required reading in our literature classes.
I honestly cannot remember today how I got my first Chase novel. But after I saw those leggy blondes on the cover (a sales gimmick, no doubt, by the publishers) I was interested. And once I browsed what was between the covers, the cross-continent pursuit of spies and moles by Mark Garland and Malik his Russian counterpart, Poke Toholo, Ticky Edris, Vito Ferrari and then the man with his ears to the ground, Al Barney, I was hooked. Like most teenagers then in schools across Nigeria who were fortunate to come across those pulp-fictions, it was impossible to ignore them.
Reading Chase novels did not come in any chronological order of publication. We read them as we got them, passed from hand to hand like proscribed publications in censorious regimes – although they were not.
Some of my peers and classmates had an aversion for science subjects. So, while others poked at specimens in Petri dishes, squinted at colourless or tinted gases in labs and listened to soporific mathematics lectures by teachers who were invariably Indians or Ceylonese, we were cloistered in our hostels hiking with hippies on the highways in American cities and towns, marveling at how criminal characters outwitted one another to get the girl, cash or rare gem.
Though television wasn’t quite a common domestic electronic appliance, we got to know some of the films nonetheless, soaps and series of American-made movies and the charismatic actors playing the lead roles: John Wayne, Marlon Brando, Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris and later Sylvester Stallone – all of them portraying macho characters that somewhat defined for us, in our impressionistic teenage years, what America was like or should be like.
In the intervening years between then and now, my impression of America has remained steadfast, a nation of people with hardscrabble upbringing who, through sheer hard work and ingenuity, have amassed the excesses that some other nations now envy or deride. But one of the co-founders of Time, Henry Luce long ago panned such dismissive attitudes by foreigners. “Make money, be proud of it,” Luce declared proudly to his compatriots in 1937. “Make more money, be prouder of it.”
It is hard to dismiss the significance of financial liquidity of the United States in terms of world affairs or even diplomacy. Only a country rich enough could bail out a thrashed Europe after World War 11 thanks to the Marshall Plan. Only a country with the fiscal might can dispatch young Americans as members of the Peace Corps pioneered by the Kennedy Administration. It took the American leadership under Bill Clinton to say enough was enough in the Balkan debacle of the mid-nineties.
Like most nations, America has had its ups and downs, notably diplomatic fiascos and military misadventures. The Bay of Pigs invasion was one and the war in Vietnam another. In the first, in April 1961, the Kennedy Administration inadvertently made a hero out of Fidel Castro – what with the several failed assassination attempts on El Jefe – who then went on to declare, rather tauntingly, that “it is not my fault that the CIA has been unable to kill me.”
The second was no less a military disaster following America’s intention to curtail and contain communism in Vietnam. There was the disastrous military foray and interference in some Latin American and African countries, Chile, Nicaragua, Zaire, etc.
And then, there is America’s own internal disconnect: race relations between whites and blacks on the one hand and other minorities on the other. It must be said that, even today, there are evidences of mutual suspicion and resentment among the races, but it is not as bad as it was 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. Of course, the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in 2008 is a significant pointer to the improvement in race relations.
So, what about my personal contact with the U.S after Chase, Ludlum and Sheldon post-secondary school?
After university, I came to Lagos and got a job as a reporter with a now defunct newspaper, The Post Express. It was in February 1997, a time that coincided with the Black American History Month. Covering this event was my very first assignment as a newspaperman and venue was the United States Information Service at 2, Broad Street, Lagos, a squat, white-painted storey building behind a matching colour of high fence.
Apart from hosting such important cultural events, USIS also lent books to registered members. I was not but, somehow, I read one of Mark Twain’s short stories – “The Man That Corrupted Hardleyburg.” I was bowled over by Twain’s rather irreverent and humorous style.
The story itself would delight any Twainiac: A stranger arrives in a community where residents pride themselves on their honesty. The man departs but leaves a document and a bag of money behind thanking a particular unnamed indigene for his kind assistance during the sojourner’s brief stay. In the end, the strange man entraps the senior citizens for laying claim to services not rendered. Moral Lesson: Never chest-thump about your virtues until temptation comes.
Book by book, film after film and sometimes from documentaries, one’s knowledge of America grew, deepening the fascination.
All through the years of upheaval – homegrown terrorism by Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber and then 9/ 11 – America has remained steadfast and weathered the storm.
And then, sometime last year, I met an American not far from where I live, Oregun, in Lagos.
We will call this American Jay P, for short. He is a thoroughgoing American in every sense, at 6 feet plus standing head and shoulders above most people I have ever seen him with. “My father was a very tall man with huge hands,” Jay P once told me, going back in time more than five decades he spent in half a dozen states he grew up in, from Arkansas to Texas and Louisiana and Tennessee.
Jay P is as gregarious as any American from the south can be. There is a certain bonhomie about him that makes you remember him. He has been in Nigeria since the late eighties and is even married to a Nigerian woman from the Niger Delta. But he is American all the same and a self-confessed Republican. In the last presidential election, he voted for Trump whom he admires tremendously. He is sure to vote for him again in 2020.
To him, Trump faces the formidable liberal establishment that has called the shots for far too long. Trump, he insists, is a game changer and for that, he is bound to become unpopular. At just about anytime and anywhere, Jay P is willing to make a case for Trump to whoever cares to listen. It was on one of those occasions that I met and spoke with Jay P. I have not stopped listening to him on views American, particularly Trump and what he is trying to do for America.
Today, it is impossible to juxtapose any country with America in terms of reach and influence, although some Americans themselves bemoan the declining influence and power of Uncle Sam. However much an ascetic mullah may rail against the amoral Yankees, he might very well reach for a Coke to calm his rage at the end of the day. Part of the sartorial choice of his son or daughter in a university in Tehran could just be denims – either a jacket or trousers.
Look around Europe and point to any one country that has as much influence and might as America. Is it Germany? True, the country Bismarck himself unified more than 150 years ago is a formidable economic and military power today. But most Americans know too well that their country gave Germany a lifeline through the Marshall Plan, thus making post-Hitler Germany rise, like the mythical sphinx, out of the ashes of defeat in 1945. Same thing goes for much of Europe whether it is the United Kingdom, France or Italy.
Take a close look at Eastern Europe. True again. There was once a mighty and frightening Soviet Union, frightening as the bears that roamed its taigas and steppes. While the beasts still wander around the ice floes and forests, the Soviet Union is no more, blown to smithereens – now independent satellite states – by the inevitable wind of change that swept through much of Eastern Europe in the late eighties and early nineties.
Trump era
It is a remarkable turn of history that someone who never contested for elective office as a politician is now at the head of political leadership in America today. Unlike chief executives before him, Trump never angled to become a congressman, not even mayoral office. Nor was he governor of any state prior to his becoming president. Professionally, he is a businessman, one of the top 10 real estate businessmen in America.
Almost two years into his presidency, Trump, like the country he presides over, has attracted both admiration and scorn from supporters and detractors in equal measure. In a special report published by Newsweek magazine of July 11, 1983 in a piece titled “How the World Sees America,” the editors declared that America “is a standard for the world’s successes and a scapegoat for the world’s failures.”
The same rule can be applied to America’s 45th president. Some political heavyweights on the left have still not gotten over his victory over much favoured Hillary Clinton in the last presidential election in 2016. Allies in Europe are aflutter because of Trump’s disinclination to do business as usual. For Trump, “it is America first.”
More important, Trump is following to the letter what former American presidents once proposed to be the main focus of Americans. The first was Lincoln who insisted in a speech in Springfield, Ohio, in 1837, that “Passion has helped us, but can do so no more.” The panacea for rising crime and violence in American life would be “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason…Reason – cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason – must furnish all the materials for future support and defence.”
The second was by Calvin Coolidge, president during the Great War. “The chief business of the American people is business,” he wrote.
Has Trump brought his business acumen to bear on the economic lives of his fellow Americans? I am not an American and so cannot provide a definitive answer. But in two years, Americans themselves, those eligible to vote wherever they are, will answer with a resounding yes or no by voting him in a second time or shooing him out of the White House.