Barack Obama

Crevecoeur’s ‘Letters from an American Farmer’ puts forward the ideas that if you work hard and to the best of you’re ability, you can achieve great things in America. You undergo great change that would be not possible in Europe and can reach your full potential. In particular in Letter III What is an American? Pg 59, Crevecouer writes, ‘From nothing, to start into being; from a servent, to the rank of a master; from being the slave of some despotic prince to become a free man, invested with lands to which every municipal blessing in annexed! What a change indeed!’. This portrays America as the place of transformation, the place where you make something of yourself through hard work and dedication. This ties in with the contempary example I have chosen to use of Barack Obama the current US President who came from humble beginnings and through hard work and determination made a name for himself. ‘I was raised mostly by a single mom and my grandparents. And Michelle, she had sort of a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ perfect family,” he said to laughter. 'She did. They were wonderful… By the time we graduated from law school, we had between us, about $120,000 worth of debt. We combined and got poorer together. So, we combined our liabilities. Not our assets.’

I think the phrase on pg 44 ‘The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions’, made me think instantly of Obama. Obama I feel, represents the new vision of America we experience today through his campaign for change and the fact he is the first black president publically overcoming slavery and segregation once and for all.

“It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where we are today, but we have just begun. Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”

Here, Obama appreciates the hard work from the past and preaches how the nation has to work together to achieve the change in America today. Obama said in a speech during his campaign, ‘Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek’. I think these quotes from Obama both tie in with the idea that Crevecoeur represents in particular on pg 44 Crevecoer says, ‘Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world’. This shows that he believed people produced change in America through their own hard work and dedication. It also has strong significance to equality shown through people of all nations coming together to create a new race 'the american', which can be related to the overcoming of racism in America through the positive action of a black president.