I hold that among the variety of forces (puritanism, outlaw and many more) that birthed the American experiment, there was a deep seed of genuine liberation present. Not freedom, liberation. Historians can't capture the essential distinction between such things, so one must, for sanity and the sake of Truth over truth, turn to literature, or at minimum, the artist.
In his marvelous series of critical essays Studies in Classic American Literature DH Lawerence provides the foil for mistaken understandings of America's relationship to freedom. Before Hemingway or Fitzgerald and certainly prior to the modern drawl of Delillo and Updike, Lawrence investigates the actual quality of the American Dream through its early literature. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Cooper. Below are some telling paragraphs from the opening essay The Spirit of Place. In these paragraphs, not hard to mine out, lies, it seems to me, secrets of deception, the wrong paths taken, and a hint about what new may be peaking up just out of view today.
"We like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as childeren's books. Just childishness, on our part. The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so long as we insist on reading the books as children's tales, we miss all that...
...It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown langauge. We just don't listen. There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has babbled about childern's stories.
Why? -- Out of fear. The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. And it is like trying to use muscles that have perhaps never been used, or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly.
The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own selves...
...Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters...
...Truly art is a sort of subterfuge. But thank God for it, we can see through the subterfuge if we choose. Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth...
Let us look at the American artist first. How did he ever get to America to start with? Why isn't he a European still, like his father before him?
Now listen to me, don't listen to him. He'll tell you the lie you expect. Which is partly your fault for expecting it.
He didn't come in search of freedom of worship. England had more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had...
...Freedom how? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen...
...Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free. The freest are perhaps least free.
Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose...
...Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes."
