Joe DiMaggio came out of the fog of San Francisco’s North Beach, the eighth of nine kids born to a Sicilian fisherman who couldn’t read English and couldn’t understand why his boy wouldn’t take the boat out. The father wanted nets and the smell of the wharf. The son wanted center field. That quarrel, between an immigrant’s caution and his kid’s ambition, played out in a hundred thousand homes across this country, mine included, and it is the whole American story in miniature. The fisherman’s son ended up standing in Yankee Stadium with fifty thousand people chanting his name, and the old man finally understood why the boy wouldn’t fish.
That was the deal America offered, and as we hit the country’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, the question I keep asking is whether we still believe that we’re in the business of honoring it.
