The American dream

The real story of America is not about power, money or the march of armies. It is about a dream of liberty and justice and independence -- a dream that still comes true every day.

By Greil Marcus

Read more: The Sopranos, Thomas Jefferson, Greil Marcus, American History, Opinion

July 4, 2006 | (Delivered as a commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley, May 19, 2006.)

I'm going to start out today by going back just over a month ago. It's Sunday night, April 16 -- the sixth episode of the sixth season of "The Sopranos" is on. Vito Spatafore -- the most reliable and loyal captain in the New Jersey crime family run by Tony Soprano -- is on the run. The story is out -- Vito has a wife, two kids, the requisite mistress, but he's been seen in a gay bar, dressed like the biker in the Village People. The other mobsters want him dead; he's dishonored them all.

Heading north, Vito's been on the road for hours. His cellphone rings; he throws it out the window. He has no idea where he is. His car breaks down. He makes it into the next town, finds an inn, puts his gun under his pillow.

The next day he wakes up in a little New Hampshire village, where gay people walk the streets without fear. In a diner, looks pass between Vito and the counterman. A male couple comes in, sits down, and begins speaking a language Vito has never before heard in the light of day, only in the dark. He's confused: What does it mean to be in a place where, for the first time in your life, you might feel at home in your own skin? Could that even be right?

He goes into an antique shop. He picks up a vase, and the gay owner compliments him on his taste: "That's the most expensive item in the store." But then Vito sees something else, probably the cheapest thing in the store: an old New Hampshire license plate. "Live Free or Die," reads the slogan across the top.

The phrase burns into Vito's mind. You can see his face change. The words were written in 1809 by Gen. John Stark, a New Hampshire hero of the Revolutionary War, on the occasion of the 32nd reunion of veterans of the 1777 Battle of Bennington, Vt.; too ill to attend, Gen. Stark sent a toast. "Live free or die," another man read for him: "Death is not the worst of evils." The words echoed across the nation, down through the decades; in 1945, with the end of the Second World War, New Hampshire took the first four words and put them all over the state.

Vito stares. "Live Free or Die" -- it's as if the metal can talk. It's just a license plate; for him it might as well be the Declaration of Independence, ringing its bell. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness," Jefferson wrote -- and suddenly, as it has for so many for so long, through that license plate the Declaration is speaking to Vito as if it were addressed to him. "Live free or die" -- what if all this, the shock in his face says, was meant for him as much as anyone?

It's one of those signal moments when the whole weight of the national story, its promises and its betrayals, hits home -- leaving the citizen at once part of a community and completely alone. It doesn't matter that, well, yes, of course, on the fourth of July, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was presented, everyone understood that all men meant men, not women; whites, not blacks; Christians, not Jews or Hindi or heathen; decent people, not Sodomites. The idea that "all men are created equal" was not a "self-evident truth," Sen. John Pettit said on the floor of the Senate in 1853: it was "a self-evident lie." It was in the midst of the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act; Pettit was arguing for voiding the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and opening the territories to slavery. It was a debate: "The great declaration cost our forefathers too dear," Sen. Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio replied to Pettit, "to be so lightly thrown away by their children."

Abraham Lincoln read these debates from his oblivion in Springfield, Ill.; he was a 44-year-old lawyer who had served one term in Congress before being turned out of office. Pettit's words and the words against him brought Lincoln back to the world. Soon he was speaking as if the Declaration of Independence contained all the words the nation ever needed to hear -- and in a certain sense, it didn't matter that Lincoln did not believe that, once men and women left the hand of their creator, they were equal on earth. "Pettit called the Declaration of Independence a lie," Lincoln said in Peoria in 1854, answering a speech by Stephen Douglas. "If it had been said in old Independence Hall 78 years ago, the doorkeeper would have thrown him into the street." That might have been a fairy tale; the Declaration of Independence itself might be a fairy tale, but not one that can be given an ending, happy or not. The charge in the Declaration was boundless; no limits placed upon it hold.

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" -- it's what the rest of the world understands by America when America isn't forcing the rest of the world to understand America as something else. "We are caught in a world of limits where there's no such thing as the self-made man," said a graduate student in France last week; Claire de la Vigne was speaking to a New York Times reporter about the French university system, where doors are made to be closed, not opened. "We are never taught the idea of the American dream, where everything is possible," she said. It's what Americans understand by America, when the facts of everyday American life somehow recede, and an idea of America takes their place.

Here's a passage from "Enthusiasm," a yet-to-be-published novel written by a friend of mine, Charlie Haas. A man -- a scientist, a businessman -- is trying to recover from brain damage. His father is trying to reintroduce him to time, place, names, faces.

Dad and Barney sat at the desk with the datebook open in front of them. "Okay," Dad said, "what's something you might have to do this afternoon?"

"Yes," Barney said. "So we get liberty. And we wear wigs in the room."

This doesn't even have the weight of a fairy tale, or of a dream you can just barely remember -- and yet it's inescapable, and unbreakable.

Next page: "Hey, baby, it's the fourth of July"