What Does "Making Us Great Again" Really Mean?

For eight years now, Trump has promised to either make America great again (MAGA) or keep America great (KAG). But how does he, and how do we, define greatness?

Guest essay by Paul Zolbrod

As a lover of words, I like to ruminate on one or another from time to time and suggest others do that occasionally. After this last election, I feel moved to do so with the word great, along with the idea of making America great again. So, with my dictionary at hand, here goes:

Identified as an adjective, its entry includes eleven different great definitions that cover a lot of ground, ranging from bulk to magnitude, physical strength to natural force, and body to spirit, summarized by the noun form, “greatness,” with its denotation of shared approval. Have a look.

This leaves me to ponder over what designation our second-time president-elect has in mind, alert to the irony that few apply to him. Which of those meanings might his fellow MAGA baseball-hatters see in him, now that we are called on to again summon a greatness reputedly lost? I wonder: have voters tried to associate the word as he invokes it with something concrete, precise, and durable, something that he himself embodies or aspires to for all of us? What, in other words, can the slogan mean when that list ends up as an abstraction?

I try to resolve the uncertainty this way: we can read the word great from two perspectives, quantitative and qualitative: by objective measurement carefully made, or by subjective appraisal casually applied to each raw definition—or in more strictly semantic terms, denotatively or connotatively. Start with Donald Trump’s own greatness, such as it may be. Do we calculate it by how much he’s worth? By the cash value of his buildings and golf courses? By the bankruptcies one by one? What then should we subtract from his greatness, with his felonies and other arraignments? His lawsuits? His unpaid bills? Or should we overlook such tangibles and appraise his greatness qualitatively, like reckoning whichever one of those definitions might apply, according to what we think we’re restoring by voting him back into office? 

In my estimation, nothing I manage to tabulate qualifies Trump as someone great. But what do I know? How do we reckon greatness in another when we see it? Many of us have sensed its quality when we see it in others. Two examples come to mind for me.  First, there’s Dr. Lawrence Pelletier, then president of Allegheny College, where I taught for thirty years. He avoided spotlighting himself, did not micromanage, but instead gave faculty room to govern itself. Under his administrative leadership the college innovated while others got the credit. Then there’s my immigrant dad, an unskilled worker in Pittsburgh’s busy freight yards who rode the trolley to work for upwards of fifty years, through good times and bad: a loving father who kept food on the table no matter what and neither complained nor lost his good humor. “A man of peace,” the rabbi pronounced at his memorial, “who never spoke unkindly of anyone,” as I listened proudly, aware now of how greatness can accrue modestly in someone, even when taken for granted by others.

The example of those two self-effacing men suggests that personal greatness grows from within, not with flamboyant hunger for attention, praise, or power. Greatness generates its own uniqueness in meeting internal needs and the needs of others, rather than striving for external ones. Of course, my sample criteria for personal greatness offers but a keyhole to the wide range of qualities used to elect others thereto, which other folks seek vicariously in the news, in sports, in entertainment— across celebrity’s wide spectrum, often to overcome one’s own ordinariness. As adolescents my two kids regarded Michael Jackson great, as did my son with Michael Jordan. Donald Trump apparently finds greatness in Hulk Hogan.

Then there is greatness on a national scale, where it ebbs and flows, usually driven by great people. I think of historical events like the signing of the Declaration of Independence, led by Thomas Jefferson and his fellow signatories; the Constitutional Convention and its ratification under old Ben Franklin’s sage guidance, then fed by Madison’s and Hamilton’s Federalist Papers. Other pinnacles of national greatness mark our country’s history: the resolution of the Civil War under Lincoln’s unifying leadership, bringing a putative end to slavery’s racial discrimination; the New Deal, piloted by FDR’s legislative skills; the long-awaited Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King. There are others: our pair of World War I and II victories featuring generals like Pershing, Eisenhower, and MacArthur, in company with Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman—all of whom displayed personal lapses but clearly demonstrated greatness. 

On the other hand, glimmers of the nation’s greatness could also fade, as the antebellum years drove a still young Republic to war with itself, followed by the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. Our record with North America’s native population is spotty, to say the least. Nor were we at our best with our stab at imperialism during the Spanish-American War. Like its individuals, this country can be magnanimous and at the same time veer away from greatness, as when the Marshall Plan flourished in Europe as McCarthyism broke out at home. No nation’s history follows a clear trajectory of greatness. We need the work of historians and their ongoing search for new evidence and reexamination of the past to better understand ourselves. We cannot “make America great again” merely by decree or voting it so.

Which brings me back to the word great: to what Donald Trump had in mind by invoking it, and what it means to those who voted for him. That still puzzles me. As I see it, it may signify, to him, some level of self-aggrandizement that can’t be quantified. For his Republican Party acolytes who should know better, it could be the perks of remaining in office. As for many among the rest of us, who knows? Maybe greatness signals an element now missing from our lives, or a longing for something once there but lost. Wealth? Dignity? Agency? All part of the human condition that only poets can quantify with the special language they invoke in a search for a meaningful existence.

Consider these two poems, for example. Let them speak for themselves. 

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

—Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing.”

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Snow-Flakes,”

National greatness? As a man of letters, I find it in a rich literary heritage we seem to have ignored during the last several presidential campaigns—if not forgotten entirely.  Whitman shows democracy in action along the new republic’s streets and waterways.  Longfellow wanted our young nation to become one of poetry readers. With other distinguished American authors, those two ushered in a literary cavalcade which European readers never could have imagined. After all, modern democracy emerged here in North America, not over there, and those early writers responded. James Fennimore Cooper gave an early boost to the idea of a westward-bound frontier, to be examined and re-evaluated clear up to writings by Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry. Nathaniel Hawthorne critically appraised the New England version of Puritanism; Emily Dickinson recrafted a Yankee version of old Protestant hymns into a new idiom of self-reflection; following Thomas Jefferson’s example, Ralph Waldo Emerson rebranded American public education; Henry David Thoreau gave his fellow Americans a transcendental vision of nature; as the author of “The Raven,” Edgar Allen Poe ushered in a distinctly American Gothic style. Nor did any of them hesitate to single out missteps in the making of a new nation, whose written record is neither single-mindedly nor blindly nationalistic.  

Those along with other early American authors helped forge a written record termed by the twentieth century literary scholar F. O. Mattheisse an “American Renaissance,” in a book he published under that title. Schooled in the forties, kids of my generation were first drawn into that tradition as we began reading Longfellow’s short poems in fifth and sixth grade. Then we advanced as we made our way through our secondary years; either by assignment or on our own, we read the works of other writers in addition to those two, all equally alert to the uniqueness of the American experiment.  Routinely, we learned to examine other, more challenging writings in college core documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers. Advanced literary and historic study still enjoyed widespread appeal well into the seventies, along with the humanities. Elements of that written legacy could be seen in our political discourse as recently as Ronald Regan’s appeal to the image of America as a “beacon on a hill,” where it still resonated, however dimly, before making way to MAGA hats.

While not quantified mathematically, that fuller literary record endures in print for all who care to draw from its great tradition, now lost somewhere among today’s apps and algorithms, social media’s cacophony, STEM’s narrow appeal to vocationalism, and the demise of the humanities as a worthy career pursuit. A great American legacy of letters remains available at the local library for anyone aspiring to explore it, including those Congressional Trumpsters with their vaunted Ivy League degrees, who have evidently bypassed it. Even Donald Trump might have read about it under different circumstances—but he chose to watch television instead.

National greatness abides. It behooves each of us to try living up to its ideals. If our next Commander-in-Chief cannot set an example, we must. 

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Now in his early nineties, Paul Zolbrod has become aware that as a “Depression Baby” whose memories begin in the thirties, his is the last generation raised in the shadow of the Victorian age and the first to experience the transition to today's fully electronic mass media—radio, movies, television, and digital distribution, with its explosive capacity to arouse all the senses simultaneously. Raised in heavily industrial Pittsburgh among working-class immigrants, and educated at the University of Pittsburgh, he spent thirty years as an English Professor at Allegheny College, then enjoyed a twenty-five year post-retirement career teaching at the Navajo Nation’s Dine' College, New Mexico Highlands University, and Pacifica Graduate Institute. His latest book, Paradise Revisited, a comparison of John Milton’s epic and the Navajo creation story, is scheduled for publication this summer.