The Fabric of America (43 page)

Inevitably, therefore, the battle split into two, emphasizing either the influence of ownership or the guarantees of government. Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, stressed that the campaign should evolve from the bottom up, from black education and black-owned businesses—“a dairy farm or industrial skills,” as he put it in 1895—and only then to political power. But by 1900 W. E. B. Du Bois estimated that black Americans owned one million acres of land and property worth $12 million, and that without votes they still had no security against Jim Crow legislation. To safeguard property rights, however, black Americans like those before them had to have an influence in government. Consequently more lives were lost and more blood shed in the battle to register voters than in any other phase of the campaign to win equal rights.

No statistic underlines more starkly how fiercely the exclusive freedom of whites was defended than the 4,733 lynchings that occurred between 1882 and 1959. Not all victims were black—a resurgent Ku Klux Klan targeted Jews, Catholics, and Communists after the First World War—but the great majority were, and the nature of a lynching made it the ultimate demonstration of social power against those who offended its norms by not knowing their place. The number of killings dropped rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s, from more than seventy a year to about ten, but that they continued, together with the prevailing fear they induced, pointed up the critical importance of political power.

More than two hundred antilynching bills were introduced during the first half of the twentieth century, but all failed, a record for which the U.S. Senate formally apologized in 2005. Many were killed off during the New Deal, a period when the interventionist power of the federal government reached a peak not seen in peacetime since Reconstruction. President Franklin D. Roosevelt never concealed that he could not support laws against lynching because he needed the solid block of southern Democratic votes in the Senate and House to support his New Deal legislation. “If I come out for the antilynching bill now,” he told a delegate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1934, “[the South] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk.”

What virtually ended lynching and made the goal of equal rights a practical possibility was the Second World War. Pitted against Japanese veneration of the emperor and Nazi doctrines of the Teutonic
Übermensch
, the idea of universal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness became a goal worth fighting for. Yet the most far-reaching effect of the war was simply one of dispersal. At home, factories operating at full capacity to meet wartime production targets created unprecedented opportunities for African-American workers outside the south, luring more than one million to cities such as Chicago in the north and Los Angeles in the west. They departed the south in such numbers that the population of North Carolina became predominantly white for the first time since the eighteenth century.

The vast wartime migration to the north and west introduced the city-based children of the 1900s immigrants to the formerly hidden world of black America. Jewish-Americans in New York and Italian-Americans in Chicago provided the earliest white audiences for jazz. City dwellers such as them were the first to be aware of the colonizing influence of African-Americans, some finding it a threat to the values and material gains for which they had striven, others welcoming it as a match with their own urban, progressive outlook. For each side on the racial divide, the encounter provided a first glimpse of the other as citizens rather than as the children of slaves and owners.

The transforming effect on national values was illustrated by the almost universal outburst of revulsion against the brutal lynchings of two black couples in Georgia in July 1946. That same year, the Civil Rights branch of the Justice Department succeeded for the first time in having a member of a lynch mob brought to trial and found guilty. Two years later, President Harry Truman banned segregation in both the army and the federal government, a decision forced on the administration by the requirements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights prohibiting racial discrimination, but approved of by voters.

The tipping point came when Thurgood Marshall persuaded the Supreme Court in 1954 to reach beyond state lines and rule that the public provision of “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites according to the
Plessy
ruling was unconstitutional. Although the decision in
Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka
only concerned public education, the principle applied to the provision of every kind of service, including hospitals, transport, and housing.

Among the pictures of the desegregation era, one stands out—the 1957 image of troopers from the 101st Airborne Division, sent by their Second World War commander, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with their Second World War rifles on their shoulders, escorting nine black students into Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. The moment represented the boundary between old and new. It harked back to Reconstruction, the last time that the federal government attempted to impose Lincoln's inclusive Constitution on the south by force, but it also pointed forward to the post–Civil Rights future, when it would be normal to expect all Americans, of every race, creed, and gender, to enjoy equal rights.

The critical piece of legislation turned out to be the 1965 Voting Rights Act striking down the legal niceties of “grandfather” clauses, literacy tests, and tax payments that prevented African-Americans from voting. The results were startling; in Mississippi alone the ratio of African-Americans registered to vote jumped from barely 6 percent to more than 66 percent, and nationwide the number of black voters almost tripled to nine million. It was not the end of discrimination, but the crucial watershed in the journey undertaken by everyone else who had crossed the frontier. Once African-Americans could make their voting power felt, they could ensure that the constitutional guarantees of personal and economic freedom were not subverted by some new version of Jim Crow legislation.

What made the black American demand for their share of liberty different from that of other immigrants was that throughout Anglo-American history their inferior status had been inseparable from the exclusive freedom enjoyed by other Americans. So long as they, who had arrived almost with the first colonists, were denied equality, the privileged nature of the freedom enjoyed by all others would not have changed.

The Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s that guaranteed equality of rights to African-Americans signaled a turning point of immeasurable significance. It enacted the measures needed to bring about Lincoln's inclusive freedom, and its consequences have permeated every section of U.S. society ever since. Native Americans, not even recognized as citizens until 1924, asserted their rights in the 1975 Self-Determination Act to educate their children in their own way free of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Women, who had secured the vote in 1920 to safeguard their interests, now used the legislation to extend their rights as individuals. They were followed by other
sections, defined by gender, ability, or interests, who felt themselves discriminated against.

What it has produced is a paradox. The liberty that should be an inalienable human right has only become available to everyone within the United States as a result of an intricate mixture of constitutional, political, and legal forces driven for generations by an equally rich cocktail of courage, optimism, and a stubborn belief in human dignity. The evolution of American freedom runs through the country's history and represents its crowning achievement. But it could not exist beyond the borders of the United States.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT, U.S. Constitution, 1868

A yellow line in the highway between Tijuana and San Diego marks the point at which the United States ends and Mexico begins. After nearly an hour trapped in the middle of seven lanes of traffic inching toward the immigration and customs channels at the San Ysidro crossing, it feels as though the transition from one country to the other should be more momentous. So much has been invested in maintaining the difference—border patrols, security cameras, fences, identity checks, computer systems, and enough uniforms to clothe a small army—and then … just a lick of paint.

When William Emory and José Salazar first marked it out, this stretch of the line would have run through dry scrubland identical on either side. Now it cuts across the metropolitan area of San Diego–Tijuana, home to around four million inhabitants, most of whom live in the same combination of concrete high-rises and rancho-style villas, choose between the same fast-food chains offering burgers or frijoles, and work for the same borderland economy offering transport, warehousing, and financial services. The division of this part of North America into Mexico and the United States seems artificial compared to its obvious unity. It begs the question whether the old importance attached to frontiers, as inviolable limits of sovereignty, is now becoming misplaced.

A century ago, when the imperial frenzy was at its height and new boundaries were being drawn wherever an industrialized power could impose itself, Britain's George Curzon, a former viceroy of India, could declare, “Frontiers are indeed the razor's edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace, of life or death to nations.” Just seven years later, the razor slipped when the German army crossed Belgium's frontier and the world's empires tumbled into the carnage of the First World War. In 1939 Adolf Hitler's decision to march the Wehrmacht across the Polish frontier triggered Britain's declaration of war against Nazi Germany and the start of the Second World War. Two years later, the violation of the U.S. frontier at Pearl Harbor catapulted her into war with Japan and Germany. And all through the Cold War, the moment when missiles crossed into national airspace would have unleashed the program of Mutually Assured Destruction. But when the Berlin Wall came down, literally the most concrete representation of the divisive boundary in the world, the influence of economic, technological, and political forces all contrived to undermine the significance of national frontiers.

In his widely quoted, much misunderstood 1989 essay “The End of History?”
Francis Fukuyama
provided a philosophical background for the way he thought the world might develop. With the end of the Cold War, the old clash of ideologies that had marked history—the battles between empires and monarchies, between communism, fascism, and democracy—would end and be replaced in the long term by acceptance that the world was developing toward a single model. “The state that emerges at the end of history,” he wrote, “is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man's universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed.”

Just a year later, the economist
Kenichi Ohmae
claimed in
The Borderless World
that the global economy “made traditional national borders almost disappear, and pushed bureaucrats, politicians, and the military toward the status of declining industries.” Since then the effects of globalization have become commonplace, so that it is hardly surprising to find that an electric toothbrush sold around the world by Philips, a Dutch company, is actually assembled in Snoqualmie, Washington, from components made in China, Japan, Malaysia, France, Germany, and Sweden.

Driven by the logic of separating manufacture from assembly, global
trade grew in the five years up to 2005 by nearly one third to $9.12 trillion. Fifteen years after Ohmae's original thesis,
Thomas L. Friedman
argued in
The World Is Flat
that the growth of Chinese and Indian corporations into world companies had created additional forces to weaken the concept of national sovereignty. International supply chains—to companies such as Philips and Wal-Mart, and from providers such as the Indian computer giant Infosys or the Chinese auto-parts maker Wanxiang—now dominated international relations. “No two countries that are part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war,” Friedman predicted, “as long as they're each still part of that supply chain.”

In Europe, for centuries the cockpit of warring nation-states, growing economic integration has led to greater political harmony, with effects that are immediately visible. Since 2001, the Schengen Agreement among most of the nations in the European Union has made it possible to drive from Cádiz in the south of Spain to Norway's North Cape crossing seven international frontiers but without encountering a single border control. And at San Ysidro almost fifty thousand people a day commute to jobs, schools, and entertainment that happen to be on the other side of a border that barely registers in their daily routine.

It has become a commonplace to say that “everything changed” on September 11, 2001, but nowhere was it more true than in people's feelings about the frontier. Quite suddenly a line that had been virtually ignored and deemed beyond assault was shown to be terrifyingly fragile. “Protecting borders was not a national security issue before 9/11,” the national commission report on Al Qaeda's attack stated succinctly. In the years since, border protection has become the single most important security issue in the war on terror.

At home it underpinned the introduction of a blizzard of measures to strengthen security, including putting the Department of Homeland Security in charge of border crossings. Abroad, as President George W. Bush repeatedly made clear, the need to protect the frontier justified a wide range of actions far beyond the actual boundary of the United States, including the war on terror and the Iraq campaign. “We cannot find security by abandoning our commitments and retreating within our borders,” he argued in
his State of the Union address in January 2006. “If we were to leave these vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone. They would simply move the battlefield to our own shores.” Yet the sense of vulnerability persists, and the conservative commentator Glynn Custred, for example, still maintains that “the longest undefended border in the world now looks like a 4,000-mile-long portal for terrorists.”