The Gifts of Travel - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 8

Figure 1.1. Alexis de Tocqueville
This observation, of course, overstates the case. It sums up American culture as we
wish it to be, not as it has always been. Thomas Jefferson claimed that in writing The De-
claration of Independence, he had merely given voice to sentiments already in the air. But
the Declaration's assertion that “all men are created equal” came from a slave-owner. And
the assertion of “unalienable rights” smoothes over a long colonial history of Indian mas-
sacres, censored speech, witch hunts and hangings, as well as a long, long struggle to make
our society color-blind. Even so, the Declaration serves as the American Creed, goading us
to “achieve a more perfect union.” As English poet Robert Browning says, “A man's reach
should exceed his grasp / Or what's a heaven for.” [15]
The American experience also has its impediments and its critics. Americans take
pride in what is often called “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States is
qualitatively different from other nations. For the most part, Americans have been free of
the social and political constraints that blighted the life and spirit of other societies. This
has created an attitude of separation based on individualism, egalitarianism, and liberty.
In 1630 the Puritan John Winthrop, who helped to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
spoke of America as a beacon, a “city on a hill” bringing light to the rest of the world. In his
“Letters from an American Farmer” (1782), French-American writer Hector de Crèvecœur
spoke of the spirit of equality that sets Americans apart from all others. Thomas Jefferson
called America “the world's best hope.”
But, as the eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote, “O wad some
Pow'r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us” [16] (Oh would some power give