Response to “After Innocence”

While Jedediah Purdy’s article “After Innocence” (The American Prospect Online, Sept. 18, 2001) raises a number of important questions about how the American people and our government will respond to the attacks of Sept. 11, the assertion that “the age of American innocence” somehow ended that day ignores the rest of our nation’s history.

Purdy rightly cites the War of 1812 as the last time a foreign power invaded the American mainland. But a brief and admittedly incomplete survey of American tragedies calls into question the notion of a prior “age of American innocence”:

In 1789, the U.S. Constitution, that guarantor of liberty that so many of us fear will be scarred by overzealous reaction, actually enshrined the slavery of African Americans. Seven decades later, during the Civil War that formally ended that most evil of human institutions, 184,594 Americans were killed in combat, another 373,458 Americans died from disease, privation and accidents resulting from the war, and more than 412,000 Americans were wounded -- all on American soil.

In 1865, the President of the United States was assassinated.

In 1881, the President of the United States was assassinated.

In 1901, the President of the United States was assassinated.

In 1942, in a display of precisely the “American form of barbarism” Purdy laments, the United States government herded 120,000 innocent men, women and children – including 80,000 U.S. citizens -- into detainment camps because of their Japanese heritage.

Between 1961 and 1972, nearly 60,000 Americans died in a war that divided the American people and that, while popular for a time, was almost as likely to see its veterans spit on as lauded by their own countrymen. During that same time, American soldiers opened fire on student peace activists at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four and wounding nine. Also during that time, President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.

In the 1950s and '60s, civil defense and nuclear fallout drills were part of the curriculum for America's schoolchildren. The shadow of nuclear holocaust didn't lift until the late 1980s.

In 1995, an American terrorist murdered 169 of his brother and sister Americans at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in what was, until Sept. 11, the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil.

Purdy is by no means the only commentator to indulge in this kind of trite characterization of our national grief. He is perhaps more conspicuous than others, given his past expositions on America’s preference for irony and cynicism, which apparently contradict this new assertion. In fairness, for the twenty-something generation -- a generation that has, as Purdy suggests, grown up in an era of relative peace, prosperity and privilege -- some loss of innocence, and certainly some loss of confidence in their own safety, might feel very real.

Maybe innocence is cyclical and half a century from now it will gain new steam so that Americans of that time will decry some future tragedy as the nation's loss of innocence. Or maybe, in our grief and shock and anger, we fear that the only way to protect ourselves will be to fundamentally change who we are as a nation, and the best way we know to express that fear is as a loss of innocence. We weren't as secure as we thought we were, but we can fix that. For sure, we have suffered a brutal blow; but with as much pain as we grieve the incomprehensible loss of life, I can't look at all that our nation has been through and honestly grieve a loss of innocence, the end of American optimism, or a fundamental change in our national character. If anything, I see signs that we really are who we think we are, and that makes me -- a twenty-something of that ironic, sarcastic, Seinfeld-watching generation -- unabashedly and without a trace of cynicism, proud to be called American.