He refused to be a Leftist prophet
The American birthright entails both the freedom and often times the necessity of making yourself up from scratch. Many of America’s most famous heroes were self-made men, from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. The same is true for the protagonists of America’s best-loved tales, from Huckleberry Finn to Jay Gatsby. Where Europeans defined themselves, both individually and collectively, through bloodlines and attachment to the soil, Americans defined themselves through a shared freedom from the past and an accompanying licence to roam.
Where Americans were born and who their parents are has always been much less important than how they greeted the present moment, with one eye fixed on the road ahead and the other on the stars. Walt Whitman’s great “Song of Myself”, written in 1855 and unfolding over 52 stanzas, including accounts of sea battles and slavery, mentions not a single word about the speaker’s parents, or even what their names were.
