Two accounts of what it means to be an American

One of the characteristic idiosyncrasies of Americans is that they are always fretting about their identity. They are a people constantly asking themselves, what does it mean to be a “real American”?

There are certain literary figures we can instantly associate with the issue of American identity—for example, Thomas Paine, who claimed that Americans were about to begin the world anew. Alexis de Tocqueville famously asserted that Americans were an exceptional people. And we remember Theodore Roosevelt, who often spoke and wrote about what he called “true Americanism.” And in our own times, we may think of politicians like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and even Barack Obama, all of whom have made American identity a trademark of their rhetoric.

Let us consider and compare two figures in particular who addressed the question of American identity: J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1735–1813) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). Both Crevecoeur and Du Bois were prolific writers, but the works we will take up are Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk.