Lofty Promises: An Election Eve Tribute to the American Essay

By Joey Franklin

In the twenty-plus years that I have been eligible to vote, I’ve moved more than twelve times, which means I’ve rarely cast a ballot in the same place more than twice. Elementary school cafeterias in Oregon, the city offices in Athens, Ohio, and a Catholic church in Lubbock, Texas. I’ve caucused inside an 80-year-old middle school, cast an absentee ballot from Japan, and voted by mail during a pandemic (don’t tell the president).

A part of me loves election season—the way a community opens itself up every year to make room for this grand civic experiment, the communal queuing up to cast our votes, the elderly matrons of democracy who run the polling stations, and the polling stations themselves as little bastions of non-partisan volunteerism. It can feel utterly patriotic, and every year the part of me that grew up a Boy Scout reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and lionizing the founding fathers fills with hope in the lofty promises of America.

But every year, there is another part of me that feels nauseated by the entire process—the incessant partisan spin on cable news, the angry churn of social media, the pandering to party extremes, and all that wasted money ($14 Billion this cycle, and still counting), not to mention the struggle to live up to our own highest ideals.

And this year, more so than in years past (except maybe 2016), it has been hard to focus on those ideals (and in turn on how to reach them) because the rhetoric has been so vitriolic, superficial, and base. Take the first presidential debate of 2020 as a case in point—with Donald Trump talking over his opponent and the moderator incessantly, repeating dozens of falsehoods, and calling his opponent “stupid,” and Joe Biden referring to Trump as a “clown,” a “liar” and, channeling the sentiment of so many viewers, telling the President to ‘shut up.”

The fact that NBC’s Lester Holt referred to this debate as “a low point in American political discourse,” is perhaps more prescient than he may have intended. While the rhetorical history of American politics is rife with Trump’s brand of ego-driven intimidation, racist dog-whistles, and self-serving partisan narratives, the rhetorical history of American progress is marked by a brand of rhetoric much more befitting those national ideals we have such a hard time living up to. Voices of reason wielding the double-edged sword of literary precision and intimate personal experience have played essential roles in every pivotal moment in the story of our country.

Not to exaggerate the role of the personal essay in American progress—for no amount of thoughtful rhetoric means anything unless we act—but it has so often been the “I” of the essay giving testament to the individual iterations of the American experience that has helped to shift national opinion and strengthen what Lincoln called “The mystic chords of memory,” that bind us together as a country. It has so often been the essay that has pointed us toward “the better angels of our nature.” 

Scholar Brian Norman calls this genre the “American Protest Essay.” A genre in which “writers bring the experiences of those lacking full social status into the public arena.” The genre is an expression of the personal essay’s promise manifested on a national scale—to show, as Rebecca Solnit writes, “how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly dissimilar things share a secret kinship, how intuitive and scholarly knowledge can cook down together, how discovery can be a deep pleasure.”

In fear and humility, and knowing the inadequacy of what follows, I offer a brief, incomplete list of essayists and essayistic thinkers who’ve reminded Americans of the intrinsic relationship between “the personal and the public,” and encouraged us to discover the “secret kinships” of our shared national identity.

Revolutionary essayists such as Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton who helped form our first notion of what it meant to be American. Abolitionist writers such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs whose narratives asserted the humanity of four million slaves. Advocates for women’s suffrage such as Susan B. Anthony; indigenous writers such as Zitkála-Šá whose vivid journalism helped expose mistreatment of native peoples; the fireside chats of Franklin D. Roosevelt that helped give America the courage to enter World War II; the voices of John Muir and later Rachel Carson on behalf of the environment; writers of the civil rights movement—James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and so many others whose essays on being black in America continue to shape the way we envision race; Larry Kramer’s AIDS and LGBTQ advocacy, Gloria Anzaldúa’s voice for Chicanx culture, Barbara Ehrenreich’s voice for the poor, and on and on to the many stellar civic-minded writers of today: Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rebecca Skloot, J.D. Vance, Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit, and Saeed Jones, to name just a few.

In 1961 James Baldwin wrote, “The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.” Against the backdrop of so much failed humanity in our current political rhetoric, it is good to remember the role of eloquent protest—on the streets, in the halls of government, and in the words we read. When we essay America, we resist easy narratives. We affirm the public value of individual experience. We acknowledge the potential for empathy in our neighbors. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, we assert a common civic identity that rises above partisanship towards something else—an expansive vision of our national potential that begins to feel like the slow fulfillment of a very old American promise.

___
Joey Franklin’s new book Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays is on sale now at University of Nebraska Press. Use discount code 6AF20 to get 40% off.
___

Joey Franklin’s newest book is Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays. He is also the author of My Wife Wants You to Know I Am Happily Married (Nebraska 2015). His articles and essays have appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine, Writer’s Chronicle, Hunger Mountain, Gettysburg Review, the Norton Reader, and elsewhere. With Patrick Madden, he co-edits the literary magazine Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction (accepting submissions now), and he teaches at Brigham Young University where he coordinates the MFA program in creative writing. His current projects include a memoir about the saints and scoundrels in his family tree, and a professionalization guide for creative writers. He can be found online at joeyfranklin.com.