On a recent visit to the local Barnes & Noble, two books on the new arrivals shelf caught my eye: American Struggle by Jon Meacham and American Rambler by Isaac Fitzgerald.
It wasn’t the cover design, or the authors’ names. It was the word “American.”
I began to see it everywhere. American Pastoral. American Psycho. The Quiet American. American Prometheus.
A casual browse had become an encounter with a national mythology—something vast, contradictory and alive in the imagination. “American” brings with it its dreams and appetites, its innocence and hubris, its faith in the future and its recurring sense of loss.
Across literature, art, music, movies, and business, American permeates cultural life. It lends itself to an extraordinary range of human experience. It can make something sound hopeful, sinister, elegiac or grand. American Gothic. American Graffiti. American Pie. American Beauty. American Pastoral.
A Protagonist
It is as though America itself has become a protagonist. Attach “American” to a person, an experience or a work of art, and we begin to read it through the ambitions, beliefs and contradictions the word has come to represent. The word summons a character we feel we already know. Before the story begins, we have expectations about what this character believes, what it wants and how it might behave.
American Prometheus, the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, demonstrates this particularly well. In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and suffered for giving it to humanity. “American” brings the ancient story into the atomic age. Scientific genius, national ambition and immense destructive power converge in a man who must live with what he helped make possible. America becomes implicated in his triumph and his tragedy.
Walt Whitman recognized the literary possibilities of the American experience. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” he wrote in the preface to Leaves of Grass in 1855. It was an audacious assessment of a country still less than a century old, though perhaps he understood how much material its extravagant ambitions would supply.
The American Dream
America had committed itself in writing to liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness. Such declarations give a country something to live up to. They also give storytellers something to work with. Someone believes in a promise, pursues it and discovers what the pursuit demands.
The American Dream comes with a plot. At its heart lies a belief that circumstances can be overcome, effort can change a life and tomorrow can contain possibilities unavailable today. The historian James Truslow Adams helped popularize the expression in his 1931 book The Epic of America, during the Great Depression. That it gained its hold amid economic collapse says something about its power to imagine something beyond the evidence of the present.
You need never have set foot here to recognize the desire to escape the circumstances of your birth or become the author of your own life. “American” gives those human aspirations a particular cultural expression: the open road, the fresh start, the almost insolent conviction that the future need not resemble the past.
Reinvention and redemption follow naturally. There is always the possibility of leaving, starting again, becoming richer, freer or simply different. Failure need never be the final verdict. The fallen hero earns another chance; someone who has lost everything finds a reason to begin again. Applied to the country itself, the same story sustains the hope that America can confront its failures and fulfill its promises. Even disappointment leaves room for a sequel.
Popular music gives that feeling an emotional reach. Don McLean’s “American Pie” remembers a country through its music and the hopes of youth. Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” especially in Willie Nelson’s recording with Simon, brings a bruised intimacy to the national dream, the feeling of carrying on when confidence has been shaken.
In both songs, “American” allows private emotion to become something shared. We hear people taking stock of their lives and, through them, a culture taking stock of its promises.
Borrowing the Promise
The same accumulated meaning and promise carries into business.
American Express, American Airlines, American Standard, American Eagle: “American” gives a company a substantial introduction. Enterprise, independence, ingenuity and ambition come with the adjective, along with the suggestion that being American is itself a recommendation. A business can sound like an institution before we know what it sells.
American Standard takes the thought a little further. The name has an agreeable air of having settled how things ought to be done.
These companies draw on meanings established far beyond commerce. Generations of stories, images, songs and public declarations have invested “American” with associations a business can call upon to lend authority to its own promise. The name arrives with a measure of credibility already attached, although that inheritance has its drawbacks.
A company acquires associations it cannot control, and patriotic confidence at home may receive a cooler reception abroad. Familiarity can also come at the expense of distinction. When many businesses claim the same national virtues, “American” may tell us more about their aspirations than what makes them worth choosing.
Politicians contest the same territory more explicitly. The midterm elections supplied their own crowded anthology of American promise: renewal, restoration and competing visions of what the country could become. Each appealed to a particular understanding of what America means, what being American entails and how its promise might be fulfilled. The electorate was asked to choose who gets to write the next chapter.
Perhaps that is the deepest source of Brand American’s narrative power. It carries a promise whose fulfillment remains in question. The artist explores it, the writer tests it, the singer gives it voice, the business borrows its confidence and the politician seeks the authority to renew it.
American is not just its own poem, it’s the great unfinished story.
BrandingBusiness is a global B2B branding agency dedicated to building powerfully effective B2B brands that lead with clarity and perform with purpose. For more than 30 years, we have helped forward-looking clients to navigate change, enter new markets, unify cultures, and drive sustainable momentum toward their growth plans.