A Quilt of a Country

“That’s because it was built of bits and pieces that seem discordant, like the crazy quilts that have been one of its great folk-art forms, velvet and calico and checks and brocades. Out of many, one. That is the ideal.”

This passage introduces the titular quilt metaphor. Just like the colorful and clashing fabrics that make up this national art form, the United States comprises diverse groups with varying degrees of peaceful coexistence. Its strength is in its diversity—at least, “that is the ideal.”

“The reality is often quite different, a great national striving consisting frequently of failure. Many of the oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry. Slavery and sweatshops, the burning of crosses and the ostracism of the other. Children learn in social-studies class and in the news of the lynching of blacks, the denial of rights to women, the murders of gay men. It is difficult to know how to convince them that this amounts to ‘crown thy good with brotherhood,’ that amid all the failures is something spectacularly successful.”

Quindlen notes that historically the United States has not lived up to the ideal of equality. Some have viewed diversity and multiculturalism not as a strength, but as sources of fear and unease, even resorting to violence in their attempts to make the nation more homogenous. The author invokes lyrics from the patriotic song “America the Beautiful” to defend the ideal, despite America’s failures in consistently enacting it.

“This is a nation founded on a conundrum, what Mario Cuomo has characterized as ‘community added to individualism.’ These two are our defining ideals; they are also in constant conflict. Historians today bemoan the ascendancy of a kind of prideful apartheid in America, saying that the clinging to ethnicity, in background and custom, has undermined the concept of unity. These historians must have forgotten the past, or have gilded it.”

Mario Cuomo was the former governor of New York, historically one of the most multicultural states in America. The allusion introduces yet another contradiction that characterizes the nation. The idea(l) of individualism—the belief that society should be made up of individuals independently pursuing their satisfactions and self-fulfillment—is deeply embedded in American culture. The sense of community is “added” to this, almost as an afterthought, and these two ideals are in constant conflict because they create conflicting interests.

“The New York of my children is no more Balkanized, probably less so, than the Philadelphia of my father, in which Jewish boys would walk several blocks out of their way to avoid the Irish divide of Chester Avenue.”

The “Irish divide of Chester Avenue” references the unofficial border of the Irish and non-Irish neighborhood in Philadelphia during the time period when Quindlen’s father was a child. The implication is that there have always been ethnic/religious divisions in America; however, these divisions have tended to dissolve over time. The implication is that today’s hostilities will also one day be forgotten.

“Do the Cambodians and the Mexicans in California coexist less easily today than did the Irish and Italians of Massachusetts a century ago? You know the answer.”

The implication here is that the social divisions of today, however insurmountable they may seem, will be bridged in the future, just as those between Irish and Italian Americans have been. In addition, Cambodian and Mexican Americans will cease to be seen as “non-Americans”, much like the Irish and Italians—once viewed as “others”—have.

“What is the point of a nation in which one part seems to be always on the verge of fisticuffs with another, blacks and whites, gays and straights, left and right, Pole and Chinese and Puerto Rican and Slovenian? Other countries with such divisions have in fact divided into new nations with new names, but not this one, impossibly interwoven even in its hostilities.”

The essay reaches a rhetorical climax here, as Quindlen poses a question to which there is no explicit answer. One possible answer is American Exceptionalism—i.e., that “the point” of the United States is its uniqueness. Specifically, Quindlen suggests, the US is exceptional in the multiculturalism embedded in its national ethos. Diversity is so “interwoven” (even geographically) that it would be impossible for the US to fragment into different countries along ethnic lines.

“Once these disparate parts were held together by a common enemy, by the fault lines of world wars and the electrified fence of communism. With the end of the cold war there was the creeping concern that without a focus for hatred and distrust, a sense of national identity would evaporate, that the left side of the hyphen—African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American—would overwhelm the right. And slow-growing domestic traumas like economic unrest and increasing crime seemed more likely to emphasize division than community.”

Quindlen suggests that having foreign adversaries against whom people can direct their hostilities has helped to prevent internal divisions within the United States. However, she implies that this speaks partly to the absence of effective domestic economic and social policy, which tends to exacerbate the ethnic tensions that have sometimes simmered over.

“Today the citizens of the United States have come together once more because of armed conflict and enemy attack. Terrorism has led to devastation—and unity.”

Quindlen finds the silver lining of the situation and encourages unity by using paradox, which she visually suggests with the dash that both separates and links “devastation” and “unity.” She posits that the United States once again finds itself before a common enemy against which people can put their differences aside and come together.

“Yet even in 1994, the overwhelming majority of those surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center agreed with this statement: ‘The US is a unique country that stands for something special in the world.’ One of the things that it stands for is this vexing notion that a great nation can consist entirely of refugees from other nations, that people of different, even warring religions and cultures can live, if not side by side, then on either side of the country’s Chester Avenues.”

This is an appeal to logic, citing scientific evidence from a survey. Quindlen employs this device partly to rebut the claim that America would implode and fall prey to internal divisions without a common external enemy. Without more context, it’s unclear what those surveyed find “special” about the US, so the implication that the survey shows a firm belief in diversity is debatable. On the other hand, Quindlen may be staking a claim about what America should stand for rather than what it in fact does.

“Faced with this diversity there is little point in trying to isolate anything remotely resembling a national character, but there are two strains of behavior that, however tenuously, abet the concept of unity. There is that Calvinist undercurrent in the American psyche that loves the difficult, the demanding, that sees mastering the impossible, whether it be prairie or subway, as a test of character, and so glories in the struggle of this fractured coalescing. And there is a grudging fairness among the citizens of the United States that eventually leads most to admit that, no matter what the English-only advocates try to suggest, the new immigrants are not so different from our own parents or grandparents.”

This quote attempts to explain what universally held beliefs, if any, characterize American society. Some of the first white settlers in the US were Calvinists, i.e., reformist Protestants, and Quindlen sees their influence in the form of a strong work ethic and the embracing of challenges. The second claim is that Americans know that they are all descended from immigrants, and so they see a part of themselves reflected in new immigrants and believe in equal opportunities for all.

“Leonel Castillo, former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and himself the grandson of Mexican immigrants, once told the writer Studs Terkel proudly, ‘The old neighborhood Ma-Pa stores are still around. They are not Italian or Jewish or Eastern European anymore. Ma and Pa are now Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, Jordanian, Latin American. They live in the store. They work seven days a week. Their kids are doing well in school. They’re making it. Sound familiar?’”

The author draws a parallel between European immigrants once considered questionably American and newcomers of non-European descent. She highlights that they are all hard-working people and uses a quotation that addresses the reader directly, asking them to draw the parallel.

“Tolerance is the word used most often when this kind of coexistence succeeds, but tolerance is a vanilla-pudding word, standing for little more than the allowance of letting others live unremarked and unmolested.”

Quindlen takes issue with the concept of “tolerance,” which is lauded as a way of ensuring peaceful coexistence. She feels that merely tolerating others does not go far enough to achieve a harmonious society.

“Pride seems excessive, given the American willingness to endlessly complain about them, them being whoever is new, different, unknown or currently under suspicion. But patriotism is partly taking pride in this unlikely ability to throw all of us together in a country that across its length and breadth is as different as a dozen countries, and still be able to call it by one name.”

Quindlen defines Patriotism and National Identity not as uniformity or unthinking adherence to a set of norms or values, but as pride in America’s diverse makeup and respect for its differences. She is saying that Americans should take pride in America standing for the freedom to be different. Her mention of “those currently under suspicion” alludes to hostility toward Muslim Americans in the aftermath of 9/11.