The Fabric of America (44 page)

The border crossing between the United States and Mexico at San Ysidro

Yet for many Americans, anxiety about terrorists comes second to fears about illegal immigration. The estimated eleven million illegal Hispanic immigrants pose a more insidious danger because, it is claimed, they threaten to subvert the very identity of the United States. Images of lines of illegal migrants heading through the scrub, led in some cases by organized criminals also shipping in drugs, produce a deep unease even among those who recognize the human instinct that drives ordinary people to risk everything in the hope of a better life. There is a sense of chaos breaking in, and the overrunning of the frontier represents the undermining of order within the United States itself.

Contributors to Internet discussion groups often quote the words of Mexican author
Elena Poniatowski
—“Mexico is recovering the territories yielded to the United States by means of migratory tactics”—and they draw the violent conclusion that illegal crossing of the frontier amounts to “a declaration of war.” Echoing their sentiments, Harvard's Professor Samuel Huntington found in the level of Mexican migration “a unique, disturbing, and a looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to the future of our country.” The great swath of the Southwest, sometimes known as MexAmerica, home to five hundred radio stations and more than a hundred newspapers whose first language is Spanish, would seem to provide powerful supporting evidence.

Nevertheless, the history of Mexican-American immigration has very much followed the pattern set by other nationalities entering the United States. While almost twenty-eight million Americans speak Spanish at home, the majority are first-generation immigrants. Follow-up studies in Los Angeles indicate that almost three quarters of second-generation immigrants prefer to speak English at home, rising to 97 percent among third generation. That is a classic transition that was experienced and mourned by German speakers in the 1880s, by Italian and Polish speakers in the early twentieth century, and by Yiddish speakers in the 1950s. The difference today, according to
Professor Rubén Rumbaut
of the University of California, is that exposure to the Internet and other types of English-language technology is bringing about the change to English faster than before. Among more than fifty-two hundred second-generation immigrant children studied in the Miami and San Diego school systems in 2005, 99 percent spoke fluent English, and less than one third remained fluent in their parents' tongue by the age of seventeen.

“The fate of all these languages is to succumb to rapid assimilation,” Rumbaut commented. “Demography will take care of the problem itself—it is not really a policy issue.”

In the past, fears of cultural change have sprung from the assumption that the United States was formed by a single set of unchanging values, an assumption implicit in Huntington's question “Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture?” Set in this static context, the identity and culture of the United States inevitably appear fragile and vulnerable to any sort of change. Yet
throughout history, the reverse has been true. The core values of American society have evolved through a dynamic, often confrontational, process, directly affected by those already inside the frontier who naturally wish to preserve what is there, and those who want to cross the frontier and will inevitably alter the existing state of things.

Huntington's alarmist note bears an uncanny resemblance to the fears expressed by his Harvard predecessors in the 1880s when they threw their academic weight behind the Immigration Restriction League. At the end of the nineteenth century the United States faced a choice, according to the league, between being “peopled by British, German and Scandinavian stock, historically free, energetic, progressive, or by Slav, Latin and Asiatic races, historically down-trodden, atavistic and stagnant.” Since there was no precedent for such large-scale immigration of non-English speakers with an alien culture, the nineteenth-century doomsayers had some reason for apprehension. Indeed, the 1890 census indicated that the proportion of Americans unable to speak English was about three times as great as it is today. Late-nineteenth-century American values were undoubtedly changed by their arrival, but they remain unmistakably American.

Seen against the long perspective of the frontier's history, the process of Americanization becomes clear. Ever since Andrew Ellicott drew the first national boundary enclosing the fractious inhabitants of Natchez, immigrants have become American by a process of reciprocity—a constitutional guarantee of individual rights that could be secured only in exchange for participation in government. For all the tensions that the process entails, it has worked to awesome effect for more than two centuries.

That long history suggests that a modern Frederick Jackson Turner might take the 2000 census as a starting point for a new frontier theory. Reviewing the main patterns thrown up by the census, the former director of the Census Bureau, Kenneth Prewitt, concluded, “The U.S. has become home to people from, literally, every civilization and of every nationality, and speaking almost every language. Not in recorded history has there been a nation so demographically complex. So it falls to us, the American citizens of the 21st century, to fashion from this diversity history's first ‘world nation.'”

The frontier of the United States has never been the outer defense of Fortress America. Its purpose has always been to mark the extent of a system of government, law, and individual rights unlike any other in the world.

The tensions will always exist between immigrants and existing citizens, between new demands for equality and the protection of old habits. But the unparalleled commitment to democracy and individual liberty, and the values of inclusion, for which so much blood was spilled, have proved capable of creating Americans from every nationality under the sun.

Before the snows of 1819 came, Andrew Ellicott left the forty-fifth parallel where he had been running the frontier with Canada and returned to the familiar discipline of West Point signaled by drums and marching cadets in smart gray uniforms, braided vests, and tall shakos. His health remained sound—he boasted to Sally that on the Canadian border he had maintained the arduous schedule of late-night observations and daylight calculations without fatigue, but his young assistants “could perform the laborious duty of sleeping eighteen hours out of 24 if not interrupted.” With Thayer, Mansfield, and with increasing frequency his son-in-law Douglass, he drew up the regulations that molded the academy's future—no admissions except on ability decided by exam, promotions strictly on merit, two months' camp in the summer, no winter vacation, and at Douglass's insistence the self-regulating honor code that guided cadets' personal lives. In West Point as on the frontier, the rule of law had taken the place of wayward savagery.

In the summer of 1820 as Ellicott returned on the steamboat from New York to West Point, he was felled by a massive stroke. A doctor on board looked after him and he was still alive when the boat reached West Point, where his wife, Sally, took him up the hill to their house. “Everything that skill & tenderness could devise was afforded but without the wished for effect,” his son-in-law wrote on August 28. “He died this morning (Monday) 1/2 past 12 o'clock & will be interred tomorrow afternoon. I am surrounded by affliction which added to my own is beyond expression.”

Ellicott was buried near the northeast corner of the bluff overlooking the Hudson River, a place of savage beauty. A military funeral was read over his
coffin, and a cadet honor guard fired a volley of shots as it was lowered into the grave. He would have liked the wildness of his resting place and the precision of the ceremony, but the raised gray slab that marks his grave is not his true memorial. That is to be found in the very fabric of the United States. The lines he drew in the wilderness did not simply define its states and its frontiers, they carried values of government and order and public service that molded his country's identity.

Andrew Ellicott's grave at West Point

In two dimensions the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. In three dimensions it is a curve. The basic problem this presents can be seen by comparing a conventional map with a globe. On the map, it may seem that the shortest distance from London to New York, for example, is a straight line running southwest across the Atlantic, but in three-dimensional reality, as transatlantic travelers quickly notice, the shortest route actually takes a northerly course passing close to Greenland. Hence the sight of glaciers from an aircraft window and, in an earlier age, the tragic fate of the
Titanic
. This route, known as a Great Circle, is a circumference of the earth. Extended beyond New York, it passes through the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific to New Zealand on the far side of the globe and returns through Asia to London.

It was this paradox that Mason and Dixon used to check that their line really did run east-west along a parallel. Instead of following a compass bearing of 90° due west from their starting point, Charles Mason calculated that they should follow a Great Circle directed at 89°55'51” west of north. This would bend away to the north from the parallel but recross it after about twelve miles. The separation at its widest point ought to be no more than twenty feet. At every mile an offset, or perpendicular line from the Great Circle, would be measured out to the parallel, and at the point of intersection elaborate checks using a zenith sector, or vertically aligned telescope, were undertaken to establish longitude and latitude.

The quality of the science was reflected in the instrument they used. First
constructed in the 1720s, zenith sectors abruptly changed the parameters of accuracy in stargazing. The largest examples were up to twenty-five feet long and suspended vertically so that the viewer had to lie on the ground staring upward, but their magnifying power and concentrated view of stars when they were directly overhead and most clear of refraction almost immediately brought about two discoveries: that the earth wobbles on its axis, and that in the time a star's light takes to reach earth, a star will have shifted its position slightly. Minute though these distortions were, once they had been eliminated, observation of the stars could achieve new levels of precision. One immediate payoff was the discovery in 1736 by the French astronomer Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis, using a zenith sector in Lapland, that the earth was not round but, as Isaac Newton had predicted, flattened at the poles likes a squashed orange. That Mason and Dixon were equipped with a six-foot-long zenith sector specially built for them by John Bird of London, with such added improvements as a micrometer screw that allowed adjustments to the nearest half second of arc, indicated their status. It was, as Thomas Penn remarked with some pride, “a very well executed and most curious Instrument,” which had cost him three times as much as the inferior one provided by Lord Baltimore.