Fathers and Sons, American Style

Men love to talk about the big subjects: politics, war, religion, and football.  There is, however, one subject that is taboo among men—the subject of fathers. Interestingly, men talk easily and often with much gusto about their mothers, but they rarely talk about their fathers with other men except in the most superficial ways. The subject is too sensitive, too fraught with our deepest hopes and fears.

No matter who or what we have become, there is almost always one looming presence in a man’s life—a father. The absence of a father in a son’s life represents a void of incalculable loss. A boy without a father is abandoned to a cruel world. History will look unkindly on those who have promoted America’s 50-year experiment with fatherless boys, but that is an essay for another day.

American society has always held out the promise to fathers that the lives of their sons will be better than their own. This is the American Dream. The greatness of our society for several hundred years was to have delivered on that promise for the vast majority of American fathers. Historically, America was the place where the sons of farmers, factory workers, bus drivers, waiters, carpenters, janitors, and mechanics could become doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, professors, entrepreneurs, and presidents.

To be a father in America offers enduring satisfactions. American fathers typically live to see their sons exceed their own accomplishments. What could be better than that?

To be a son in America is, however, a more complicated matter. It comes with fewer promises and greater burdens. A father’s hopes become expectations for sons. Deeply ingrained in the American psyche is the idea and the reality that by working hard and living one’s life by certain virtues that one can achieve just about anything, including surpassing the socio-economic status of our fathers. Even our history teaches us that the child born in a log cabin to poor parents can one day be president of the United States. 

A son’s burden in America is not simply socio-economic, though. Ironically, no matter what one’s life accomplishments, no matter how much one has exceeded the economic and social status of one’s own father, American sons still often feel inferior to their fathers. The medical doctor who is the son of a barber or the lawyer who is the son of a plumber or the Fortune 500 CEO who is the son of a pawn-shop owner, somehow feels that he is not the quite the man that his father is or was. Why this should be so is not easily explained.

No matter who our father is, no matter whether he is a bank CEO or a street sweeper, no matter whether his work collar is white or blue, we live in the long shadow cast by his expectations for us. Sons are expected to surpass the accomplishments of their fathers. I often meet men of wealth, power, and high social status who are still driven by deeply rooted insecurities that they haven’t lived up to the expectations of their “working-class” fathers.

In the end, though, there is something much deeper at work here. What sons fear most is that they don’t have their father’s moral character. Great fathers come in many forms, but they all share common virtues that stand as a looming presence in a son’s life. As young boys, we see how hard our fathers work, we see what it means to live a life of honesty, justice, integrity, fortitude, and courage. We see that our fathers did everything they could for us. We see the meaning of devotion complete. The effect of that on a boy’s psyche is incalculable. It goes to the marrow.

There is a scene in Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel The Road that captures the deepest meaning of fatherhood when the nameless father says to his nameless son, “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?”

Yes. I do understand. Never for one moment as a boy did I ever think that my father wasn’t there to protect me. That was his greatest gift to me.

Many years ago I was on a packed subway train in London, England with my then six-month-old son strapped on my back in a baby backpack. The car was full of menacing hooligans who were taunting and threatening the other passengers. I distinctly remember telling myself, “I will kill you if you touch my son.”

Fathers protect, first; then they cut a path forward for their sons; and, finally, they point them in the right direction and let them go. That’s what fathers do.

It is, of course, also true that not all grown men are virtuous all the time, but they almost always are in the presence of their children, and that’s the only thing that matters in the life of a child. Sons see their fathers as anchors whose virtues provide the necessary moral weight and stability that is required in the life of a boy. A good father never fails to be there for his children.

Most importantly, the relationship between a father and son goes to the very heart of what it means to be a man. Manliness, rightly understood, is a virtue, and for most boys the deepest symbol of what it means to be a man is embodied in the person of their fathers. Every boy has a father who defines what it means to be a man for better or worse.  What young boy does not think that his father is brave or gallant in some way? Fathers give sons that first and lasting glimpse of what manly honor is and why it matters. 

In the end, it comes down to this: a good father shows his son how to be a man. This is why we all live with the fear that we haven’t lived up to the moral expectations of our fathers. It haunts us. This is why men can’t talk about their fathers. Our reverence cuts too close to the very core of who we are as men. Boys love their fathers too much to talk about them. 

As a son, I live and will probably always live in the shadow of my father even after he is gone. As a father of two sons, I live with the happy expectation that they will surpass me in all that they do. The wheel turns, and so it goes.