B E A R I N G S

Lost and Found

by Dick Crepeau

America has, over the decades and centuries, lost its innocence again and again, which of course means it has reclaimed its innocence repeatedly.

Still, one of the sentiments often expressed since the events of Sept. 11 is the notion that America’s innocence — both its sense of safety and its position of comfort — has been toppled. America, it has been said, will never be the same.

The shock and disbelief at the sight of planes crashing into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, causing two towers to collapse in a bed of ash and the death of more than 6,000 people, has been nearly too much to process. No doubt it will be weeks, or even months, before the full reality becomes part of our being. Less clear, however, is whether America’s innocence has finally, and completely, dissolved.

This loss of innocence has been a familiar theme in American literature dating back at least to the 19th century with the appearance of the “American Adam” — characters pure and innocent, living close to nature and not corrupted by the appurtenances of civilization, detached from Europe and without limitations.

American literature in the late 19th and early 20th century (including the likes of naturalist writers such as Frank Norris and Jack London) is seen as reflecting The End of American Innocence, to borrow the title of Henry May’s history of 1912 to 1917. World War I, ‘the war to end all wars,” was said to produce profound disillusionment in its wake, and this became a theme of the Roaring Twenties in literature and politics. The same disillusionment permeated popular culture in 1919, when, thanks to the Black Sox Scandal, the “faith of 50 million” was under attack by gamblers and ball players.

Certainly the stock market crash and the Depression produced a sense that fundamental beliefs of the political and economic culture were no longer operative. Hard work and clean living no longer guaranteed one a job and the basic necessities of life. American businesses no longer seemed able to bring America to the land of prosperity and produce the end of poverty. The vision of two chickens in every pot retreated in the rear view mirror.

Following World War II, another round of lost innocence passed through America. The coming of the Cold War and the appearance of spies in their midst troubled many Americans. In the”60s, the country mourned the deaths of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It witnessed the rise of the counterculture and dealt with the fallout from the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. All seemed part of a series of disillusioning events that hit bottom with the revelations of Watergate.

Somehow through it all Americans have managed to regain their innocence, only to lose it again in their next bout with reality. Will it be any different this time?

We may, in fact, have passed some critical point in our history. It has been a kind of standard interpretation that the only Americans who understand tragedy are Southerners, since they are the only ones who have suffered defeat. It has been said that Americans have no scar tissue from tragedy. This is how innocence has been maintained.

Now it would seem that most Americans have suffered some sense of defeat and have experienced tragedy directly and on a communal scale. A New York fireman heading back to the rubble, who had been stopped by one of those pesky TV people, looked laconically at the camera and said to no one in particular as he walked away, “The world is an evil place.” Clearly, there will be some scar tissue to deal with in the wake of these events.

Perhaps innocence will be lost in some permanent and fundamental sense. If it has been, Americans will come out of this a different and less simply optimistic people, more wary of the world around them and, perhaps, somewhat wiser in the realities of that world. They will no longer feel that they can — and must — control everything in their universe, and will understand that it is the nature of tragedy that some things are beyond the control of individuals or nations.

This would be a loss, but it could also be a gain of great significance, leaving us more mature as a culture — better able to understand the tragedies that haunt the lives of millions of people around the globe and better equipped to function within that world.

Enter the Pop Forum
Will America regain its "innocence"?

Richard C. Crepeau is a professor of history at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He is the author of Baseball: America’s Diamond Mind (click here to purchase).

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"It was a day in Washington that people compared to the day President Kennedy was assassinated, or when Pearl Harbor was bombed. America has lost its innocence many times, but this was a day to discover all over again that the country still had something left to lose," David Montgomery writes in the Washington Post on Sept. 11.