‘America, America’

News that Stanford University has put “American” on its list of terms banned as part of its initiative on the “elimination of harmful language” sends us to The New York Sun’s “Reporter’s Handbook and Manual of Style.” Under the entry for “America,” the Manual says that America is “what the Sun calls the United States, except in quoted material.” It offers: “Mr. Biden is president of America. America is part of North America.”For further clarification, Sun style is to say “He traveled to America from Canada. She traveled to America from South America.” The legislature is “The Congress of America.” It’s at odds with Stanford, which says: “This term” — American — “often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas (which is actually made up of 42 countries).”We’re not the first to observe that Stanford’s new speech code transcends parody with its fealty to all the left-wing pieties. “Circle the wagons,” say, is marked for elimination because it “paints Indigenous Peoples as the aggressors.” Even “crazy” is off-limits — it’s “ableist,” of course, as it “trivializes the experiences of people” with mental illness. So let’s just say banning “American” as an affiliation is really something.The reason the Sun prefers using America to describe the United States is that “America” was the word arriving immigrants used as they sailed past the Statue of Liberty. Standing at the rail, hat in hand, one spouse would hug the other, turn again to the Statue, and exclaim not “the United States” but the emotional name of their new home — “America! America!” The speech code writers at Stanford would have jumped overboard.As far back as 1992, the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger was warning against what he called “The Disuniting of America,” fearing that the new multicultural dogma was “replacing assimilation by fragmentation, integration by separatism.” It “belittles unum and glorifies pluribus,” he observed. He endorsed FDR’s view that “Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race and ancestry.”Even a liberal like President Obama would run afoul of Stanford’s new speech code. In his breakthrough speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, he hailed the “ingredient in the American saga: a belief that we’re all connected as one people.” He explained it “allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.” Echoing Schlesinger, he cited the motto “E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.”The Sun conceives of America as President Reagan did: a “shining ‘city upon a hill.’” In his farewell address Reagan reminded that the phrase came from the Puritan and early Bay State governor John Winthrop, “who wrote it to describe the America he imagined.” What Winthrop “imagined was important,” the Gipper said, for he had “journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat,” in search of “a home that would be free.” In Reagan’s telling, America was “a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans” and “teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.” It was “still a beacon,” he said, “still a magnet for all who must have freedom.” Among the freedoms vouchsafed by America’s Constitution stands free expression — a right that is hard to square with speech codes like the one being put forward today by leftist universities like Stanford.

‘America, America’

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