It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged experience of westward expansion, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893, that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its disinterest in high culture and polite manners. The West was settled by a rising tide of hucksterism — the spirit of the circus master P.T. Barnum more than that of the aristocratic novelist Henry James.
It was a golden age of braggadocio, of Paul Bunyan-style tall tales. It was also an age when to be American was to be wreathed in glory. Many Americans believed that God had assigned a sacred errand to his new chosen people, to complete history and to bring a new heaven down to earth. (Kind of like the way God saved Trump in that Pennsylvania field so that he could complete the sacred mission of deporting more immigrants.)
Herman Melville captured, without endorsing, the nationalist fervor in his novel “White Jacket”: “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.” Walt Whitman joined the chorus: “Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? / We take up the task eternal.” There’s no confidence like adolescent confidence, for a person or a country.
I can see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump. It is sometimes said that Trump appeals to those left behind, the losers of the information age. And this is a nationalism filled with aspiration, daring, hope and future-mindedness. (It helps if, like Trump, you whitewash a few minor details about 19th-century America from your portrait — like, you know, slavery and Reconstruction.)
Maybe the century’s key appeal for Trump is that in those days America was firmly anti-establishment. Across the Atlantic were the old states — Europe. Periodically, Europeans like Fanny Trollope (herself a novelist and the mother of a rather more famous one) would visit America and turn up their noses at the vulgar money-loving people they found here. The English writer Morris Birkbeck summarized his view of the American spirit this way: “Gain! Gain! Gain!” Americans were proud to defy the snobs with their refined manners, class-ridden societies and inherited luxuries.
