Joe DiMaggio came out of the fog of San Francisco’s North Beach, the eighth of nine kids born to a Sicilian fisherman who couldn’t read English and couldn’t understand why his boy wouldn’t take the boat out. The father wanted nets and the smell of the wharf. The son wanted center field. That quarrel, between an immigrant’s caution and his kid’s ambition, played out in a hundred thousand homes across this country, mine included, and it is the whole American story in miniature. The fisherman’s son ended up standing in Yankee Stadium with fifty thousand people chanting his name, and the old man finally understood why the boy wouldn’t fish.
That was the deal America offered, and as we hit the country’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, the question I keep asking is whether we still believe that we’re in the business of honoring it.
Striving Brought Us Together
Hemingway, who championed self-mastery, gave the old fisherman in his novella exactly one consolation out there alone in the Gulf Stream, the thought of the great DiMaggio, who did everything perfectly even with the bone spur in his heel. Hemingway had it right.
Real grace is discipline so deep it stops looking like discipline; it looks natural. But let’s be honest with ourselves, we’ve lost our taste for it in recent years. We reward the loud grievance now. We reward the guy who tells you at length how hard he’s trying. We forgot that dignity used to mean the opposite, doing the hard thing without narrating it.
Now look at who else was rising in those same crowded decades, every one of them in a unique style, every one of them carrying an old country’s accent into the new one. Hank Greenberg, the Jew from the Bronx, hitting home runs while across the ocean his people were being marched toward the ovens. Joe Louis, a sharecropper’s grandson, dropped Schmeling to the canvas and carried a whole race in a nation that had not yet decided to honor it. The Pole in the steel mill, the Irish cop walking a beat, the Italian girl learning shorthand at night.
None of them were promised anything. All of them were convinced the door was open if you pushed hard enough. Here’s the thing that gets me. They didn’t push together. They pushed alone, each in their own language, toward their own version of the prize, and the sum of all that separate striving became a country.
They didn’t pretend the differences away, and they didn’t make a religion out of them either. The differences were the raw material. The striving was the shared faith.
And the striving didn’t stay on the ballfield or in the ring. It went into the factory, the laboratory, the classroom, the back of the garage, and beyond. The same immigrant nerve and faith put a fisherman’s son in center field and put a Scotsman’s telephone and a Serb’s alternating current and a Russian Jew’s television into the bloodstream of the country.
A Nation with Nerve
I’ve spent my whole career around capital, and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. Money follows nerve, and nerve goes where it’s welcome.
America was the one place on earth that didn’t ask where your grandfather was buried before it let you build. Carnegie came over in steerage and poured the steel that became our skylines. Kids whose families had been chased out of half of Europe started the picture studios, the scrap yards that became fortunes, and eventually the software companies that created a whole new world of ones and zeros.
Risk wasn’t shameful and failure wasn’t final here. I’ve failed publicly, spectacularly, on the front page, and this country still let me get back up. That’s not a small thing; it is a core tenet of the American promise. The country did not decide who was allowed to win and it let everybody try. That disposition compounded into the richest, most inventive society the world has ever seen.
There was an innocence in that age, and we shouldn’t be too sophisticated to say so. Not the innocence of ignorance. It was the innocence of belief, a working faith that effort got answered, that the rules, however imperfect, applied to everyone, that a man was measured by his actions above all else.
That generation didn’t flatter the country and didn’t despise it. They got up in the morning and went to work.
Loving an Imperfect Nation
Here’s the division eating at us now, two hundred and fifty years in. We’ve split into one camp that flatters America past all reason and another that despises it past all fairness. Both camps have walked away from the harder middle ground that DiMaggio’s generation lived on, which was loving the country precisely because you could see its faults and were trying, in your own lane, however small, to fix them.
You can hold both of those at once. My father held both every day of his working life. Somebody convinced us we have to choose, and somebody was wrong.
DiMaggio married the most luminous woman in America and couldn’t hold her, and that belongs in the story too, because the country he embodied was always better at producing excellence than protecting tenderness. When Paul Simon asked where Joe DiMaggio had gone, he wasn’t asking about a ballplayer; he was asking about a vanished idea of public conduct, the idea that a famous man owed the public his dignity and owed himself his silence, and that both debts could be paid at the same time.
“Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away,” the song answered, and the leaving felt bigger than one man’s retirement.
We’re not mourning a simpler time, because the time wasn’t simple. So, what’s the lesson, with the candles lit on the long birthday cake?
Not that the past was better. It jailed and excluded and lynched, and plenty of people striving in their lanes weren’t allowed into the same race, and we’re not wrong to have learned that catalogue. The lesson is narrower and more useful, and it should concentrate the mind of everyone reading this.
What We Owe the Next 250
A country doesn’t stay rich and inventive because of its resources. It stays rich and inventive because it keeps the door open to the person with nothing but nerve and an idea, and because it keeps believing that person might build something great. That’s a trade I’d make every single time, and for two hundred and fifty years it’s been the best trade in human history.
On certain summer evenings, when the light runs long across an outfield, it’s worth remembering that there was once a man who faced the hardest thing in the world with grace, and a country that produced him and thousands like him, each rising in his own right. For one brief, improbable moment in the middle of the century, the arrangement very nearly worked.
At two hundred and fifty, the job is not to mourn it. The job is to keep the door open for the next generation, to honor the risk-taker and the newcomer, and build it again. My grandfather’s generation did it with nets, cranes, and shovels. Ours gets to do it with technology beyond that generation’s wildest dreams. No more excuses. Let’s build it together.
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