William F. Buckley Jr., in deciding to write a novel, realized he needed a protagonist. The character he created, Blackford Oakes, struck editors and readers as “distinctively American.” When one such editor asked Buckley in 1978 to describe “the American look,” he responded:
I do so only on the understanding that I reject the very notion of quintessentiality. It is a concept that runs into itself, like F. P. Adams’s remark that the average American is a little above average. The reason you cannot have the quintessential American is the very same reason you cannot have a quintessential apple pie, or indeed anything composed of ingredients. In composites, there has got to be an arrangement of attributes and no such arrangement can project one quality to the point of distorting others. This is true even in the matter of physical beauty. An absolutely perfect nose has the effect of satellizing the other features of a human face, and a beautiful face is a comprehensive achievement.
As for distinctively American qualities, one is spontaneity, “a kind of freshness born of curiosity and enterprise and wit.” Oakes, for example, bedded the Queen of England three days after meeting her, which was “wonderfully American,” Buckley wrote. It was “a kind of arrant but lovable presumption.” Buckley of course couldn’t resist adding a touch of Yale to such a character. He wrote of Oakes that an American, and especially a Yale man, might have “self-confidence; a certain worldliness that is neither bookish nor in any sense of the word anti-intellectual.” Buckley also attributed the particular handsomeness American men possess to their expression: “The American look, in the startlingly handsome man, requires: animation, tempered by a certain shyness, a reserve.”
An American disposition is characteristically worldly. An American is sure of what he is and for what he pledges allegiance:
The American must — believe. However discreetly. Blackford Oakes believes. He tends to divulge his beliefs in a kind of slouchy, oblique way. But, at the margin, he is, well — an American with American predilections and he knows, as with the clothes he wears so casually, that he is snug as such; that, like his easygoing sweater and trousers, they . . . fit him. As do the ideals, and even most of the practices, of his country.
Happy Independence Day. Like Buckley and Blackford, wear your country’s ideals with cheer and conviction.