EXCERPT FROM THE PREFACE OF ‘THE AMERICAN’

Today we strive to improve ourselves by focusing less on our strengths than on what needs fixing. Yet as we confront the cruelties and injustices that Daniel Boorstin left out, his words still resonate. Boorstin brought our forebears vividly into the present. He described how our sparsely settled, uncharted continent demanded distinctive qualities of enterprise and ways of working together that made America a unique place, a cobweb of communities spun from possibility and hope. Reading him, people felt they were seeing America’s past for the first time.

With all that writing, Boorstin refused to write about himself. In searching out the America that shaped Daniel Boorstin I confront the story he never told, a true story about fathers and sons, about Jews and race and the price of being American. And I find what he found that gave him hope.

Daniel Boorstin was in search of his father Sam, the man who raised him but he said he never knew. Sam Boorstin was a close friend of Leo Frank, who was lynched in Georgia in 1915 in America’s most notorious antisemitic incident. A few years later he was the trusted counselor to the publisher of the Tulsa Tribune, supporter of the KKK, whose “Lynch Him” editorial sparked the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, perhaps our worst racist incident since Reconstruction. Sam helped him cover his tracks. Sam Boorstin had to make his own peace with the vagaries of American injustice.

Daniel never wrote about the Leo Frank case or the Tulsa Massacre. On the rare occasions that Daniel spoke of Sam to me as I was growing up, his mouth contorted with a bitter taste. But I lived with Dan long enough to learn that he began with Sam.

He chafed at Sam’s lifesaving moral myopia, but it shaped Daniel J. Boorstin, and Boorstin’s search for his father morphed into a lifetime pursuit of being American.

I’m investigating beliefs that I’ve built myself around, that I cherish or mock because they define the man who molded me. That bias makes me both the worst person and the only person with the tools and the temperament to take it on.

My tale becomes three linked stories: How life in Georgia and the Leo Frank lynching defined Sam; how Sam shaped Daniel’s life in Tulsa so it became the America he would write about, while his close friend, renowned Black historian John Hope Franklin, led a parallel life in the Tulsa Daniel left out; and the people and events through which Dan Boorstin created Daniel J. Boorstin and what that Boorstin saw.

Each story demands a different kind of telling. Though they vary in style and tone they inform each other, scenes from the same movie that flicker to life to illuminate the present.