To think about 9/11, start eighty-two years earlier. This is my favorite story about who we used to be.
In the summer of 1919, with soldiers home from World War I, the U.S. Army tested itself: If an enemy invaded the West Coast, how quickly could troops equipped with a new generation of cars and trucks, still an early technology, drive across the country to join the fight?
The Transcontinental Motor Convoy covered 3,251 miles from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco in sixty-two days, mostly on unpaved highways, with 81 cars and trucks. A young lieutenant colonel named Dwight Eisenhower went along as an observer, and he thought the dirt paths through the intermountain West didn’t deserve to be called roads. The not-quite 300 soldiers on the convoy broke dozens of primitive rural bridges and stopped to fix them, dragged trucks through mud and silt with ropes, and made their own replacement parts for damaged vehicles in a rolling machine shop. It was hard, dirty, exhausting travel.
But the convoy’s biggest problem just kept getting worse as it went west: The small towns where they took their scheduled stops were excessively pleased by the arrival of the motorized column. Whole communities turned out to greet them. Towns threw dances and picnics and banquets; soldiers arrived at their evening destinations and found tables laden with fresh pies and roasted chickens. A logistics exercise produced weddings and babies, an awkward reality that impaired the military objective of testing the cross-country speed of a wartime maneuver, and the convoy commander had to learn the art of gently declining an insistent brunch invitation. You can see some of that hospitality here, and look for the banquet in the giant canopy tent around the 4:14 mark:
Americans liked each other. Americans recognized each other, and felt pleasure to host a crowd of strangers. To a small town in Indiana or Nebraska, a military convoy from the East Coast was a bunch of our guys, a bunch of us, and the party started when the first trucks hit Main Street. The story is not about duty or obligation, and it’s not at all a story about obedience or a grim nationalism. It’s about a big rolling party that made people feel good.
On 9/11, people acted over and over again on their sense of mutuality and shared identity. In Manhattan, not famously a place where strangers smile at each other on the street, people died trying to help their injured countrymen. You can find these stories everywhere, the people who sat down to die halfway down a smoke-filled staircase but then felt a stranger’s hand pulling them back to their feet. William Crowther, still remembered as the man in the red bandana, “carried one burned woman down 17 flights, went back up, led another group out, and went up again.” He died doing it.
Immediately, instinctively, without hesitation, people who could help stopped for people who needed help. Firefighters died refusing evacuation orders, saying over the radio that they wouldn’t leave injured people under any circumstances:
“I refuse the order,” Captain Patrick Brown said. He died with his countrymen, choosing to share their danger when they were too badly hurt to help themselves, and not because anyone thought that he was required to. The opposite: His chain of command told him to run, and he wouldn’t.
When the towers fell, the evacuation of Lower Manhattan by water was explicitly ruleless and self-organizing. A Coast Guard lieutenant announced over the radio that everybody with a boat should just do whatever they had to do, and hundreds of boats swarmed the city to grab people and race for safety.
On 9/12, rural Wyoming and small town Arkansas were horrified and enraged by an attack on New York City and Washington, D.C., in a spontaneous moment of mutuality and shared identity. They attacked us. They attacked Iowa and South Carolina as much as they attacked Manhattan.
Some time has passed since then, and there are some obvious questions that can’t be avoided.
TWANLOC: Those who are no longer our countrymen. If you haven’t read it, take a moment with the report on the Socialism 2026 conference from the pseudonymous writer at the Substack page called Bad Cattitude, which concludes that “the core of their beliefs stands antithetical to human flourishing.” Their beliefs are also antithetical to shared identity and mutual sympathy. They are not us, and they very much don’t think that we are them.
A major terrorist attack on an American city in 2026: What would the reaction look like? How would we behave in the streets as people fought to survive?
What culture is waiting to be tested?
