Out of a living silence

“More than any other group in America, Yankees conceive of government as being run by and for themselves. Everyone is supposed to participate, and there is no greater outrage than to manipulate the political process for private gain. Yankee idealism never died.”¹

The most prototypically American of the nations was one of the last to be founded. From its inception in the 1680s, the Midlands was a tolerant, multicultural, multilingual civilization populated by families of modest means—many of them religious—who desired mostly that their government and leaders leave them in peace. Over the past three centuries, Midland culture has pushed westward from its hearth in and around Philadelphia, jumped over the Appalachians, and spread across a vast swath of the American heartland, but it has retained these essential qualities.²

When I was still a small child, far too young to understand the significance of what I was hearing, my father told me that he, and therefore I, was descended from three passengers on The Mayflower and one passenger from another shipload of Pilgrims called The Anne. My paternal grandfather was a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, who were therefore my 9th great grandparents, and my paternal grandmother was a descendant of William Bradford and Alice Carpenter, my 10th great grandparents.

When I was an adolescent and young adult, I did not see much significance in having ancestors who had landed in North America on November 21, 1620. After all, as many as 2048 people were my 9th great grandparents, and 4096 my 10th great grandparents,³ so why focus attention on those four people? Mathematically speaking, no more than 0.048828125% of my genetic makeup comes from John and Priscilla, and only 0.0244140625% from William and Alice. From a biological perspective, I figured that I have inherited almost nothing from any one ancestor from the 17th century. Despite all that, I must confess that when I stood in Pieterskerk in Leiden, Zuid-Holland and remembered that William Bradford had worshiped in that very church four hundred years earlier, I was surprised by a feeling of connection to and gratitude for Bradford unlike any I had ever felt before. I realized I would not have been standing in that church had he not be standing there four centuries earlier. It brought tears to my eyes and rendered me speechless.

Feelings like those that arose in Pieterskerk (and in several other places in Leiden where the English Puritan refugees had lived and worked) are fleeting. Once they wore off, I was once again for the most part indifferent to my personal ancestry. Indifference, however, like every other mental attitude, is liable to disappear when conditions change. A condition that changed in my case came about through reading American Nations,the first book in Colin Woodard’s trilogy about American history and how characteristics in the American society of today were shaped by cultural tendencies found in the various peoples who have made North America their home.

When my father retired, he devoted much time and energy during the following decades to doing genealogical research, and not long before he died, he gave me all the notes he had made and photographs he had collected. When I read American Nations, I studied those genealogical notes with renewed interest. It turns out that the majority of the ancestors of my paternal grandfather lived their entire lives New England and were Congregationalists or Universalists. I know from reading books written about my great grandfather and great-great grandfather that their core values and outlook on life was remarkably similar to the cultural values that Woodard describes as characteristic of Yankeedom. I began to realize that although I have never lived in New England, many of my own core values—and also many of my regrettable snobbish prejudices (against, for example, Appalachians, Deep Southerners, evangelical Christians, and Nashville musicians)—are not much different from my Yankee ancestors.

My father’s genealogical research revealed to me that alongside the ancestors from what Woodard calls Yankeedom, many of my paternal grandmother’s ancestors, and nearly all of my maternal grandmother’s ancestors, were Germans who settled in Ohio, Indiana, and eastern Kansas, all part of what Woodard calls the Midlands. On reading what Woodard says of that “nation” within North America, I recognize that no small part of my temperament (a “live and let live” attitude, and a celebration of multiculturalism and multilingualism) reflects Midland cultural stereotypes.

I am probably not alone in having assumed when I was young that most people in North America had the same values I grew up having. I knew that most of my father’s ancestors were New Englanders (Yankees) and that most of my mother’s ancestors were Midwesterners (Midlanders) who had settled in Kansas. I was aware that my own mentality was shaped by both of my parents and their extended families, but when I was a child I assumed that everyone in North America, and indeed everyone in the world, thought and felt about things pretty much as they did, and therefore pretty much as I did. It gradually became apparent that that assumption was unwarranted, and that a significant percentage of the people on this continent, perhaps the majority, have convictions that are diametrically opposed to my own, and that they feel as uncomfortable having me in their homeland as I am having them in mine.

Reflecting on how Woodard’s book has influenced my current thinking, I see that the indifference I used to have about my ancestry was due to an overemphasis on biology and genetics and an underemphasis on the lasting influence of that nebulosity we call culture. I have come to see, for example, that although I may have become a Buddhist by choice in my adult life, my Buddhism has an unmistakable Yankee/Midlander flavor to it and is undoubtedly much more a Boston Unitarian Buddhism than it is a South Asian Brahmanical Buddhism, or an East Asian Confucian-Daoist Buddhism. Even when I sit in meditation, I suspect that there are traces of Bradford’s Puritanism and the low-church anabaptist Protestantism of those Midlander ancestors manifesting themselves in what I fancy is a wordless and thoughtless silence.

1. Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. (New York: Viking, 2011) ↩
2. Woodard, American Nations. ↩
3. Given the possibility of being descended from a distant great grandparent by more than one line, the actual numbers would likely be smaller. ↩