I can date the beginning of this web site precisely. I was sitting in the bleachers at my step-daughter’s graduation from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. It was Saturday afternoon, May 25, 2006. The temperature was in the high 90s. My wife was in a wheelchair, having been injured at work a week earlier. I listened to a speech by the class valedictorian so blandly predictable that it was almost a parody of its genre. I don’t remember what made me think of identity then, but I did. I took the idea of creating a new web site from this event.

Identity Independence? It had the ring of speeches given on the 4th of July. “As an American, I demand my identity independence!,” I thought to myself. Were we Americans not politically and culturally independent? I had my doubts with respect to the Iraq war. A group of neo-cons with ties to right-wing Israeli politicians had maneuvered the United states into a war that was becoming increasingly costly in terms of budget outlays and human lives. And now people were talking about a war with Iran. A staff person at the local office of a U.S. Senator confirmed to me that the military option was “still on the table.”

Apart from the issue of nuclear capability, Iran threatened western hegemony in the Middle East. What was so bad about Iran’s president Ahmadinejad? He denied the Holocaust. So America was ready to go to war with a country in some part because its president denied the Holocaust? Was this an article of faith in our national religion? Under the U.S. Constitution, aren’t we supposed not to have state-established religions? What was happening here? What was happening, it seemed to me, was that the United States was losing its political bearings. We were becoming a political and cultural colony of another nation.

This was also a time when, as a member of a history association, I received a complimentary copy of a book from one of this organization’s board members who had written a book on U.S. history in the 20th century. What caught my eye was the statement that, while Charles Lindbergh was a hero for his solo flight across the Atlantic, he was Hitler’s dupe when it came to politics. This book stated that Lindbergh’s organization, America First, was financially supported by the Nazi government. I was sure that this statement was untrue. I wrote the author asking for evidence to support the statement about Nazi financial support. I did receive a response but it evaded the question. This was another reason to doubt the integrity of our present culture.

Lindbergh’s sin, of course, was that he actively opposed America’s entry into World War II at a time when American Jews were determined to overthrow Hitler. In hindsight, their cause was justified. But at the time, Lindbergh and others were patriotically seeking to spare the nation of the horrors that involvement in a war with Germany would bring. For his effort, he was viciously maligned. Even now, sixty years later, we have novelists like Philip Roth insinuating that the peace-loving Lindbergh was a Nazi. We have respected historians ready to embellish historical facts to make him look foolish. More ominously, we have politically powerful groups now pushing America into war against Iraq, Iran, and the Islamic world.

The task was to regain control of our own house. From the bowels of ithe American population there needed to come new leadership that would protect the interests of average citizens, finding the best in our heritage to rekindle community pride. What was this community? What was my own identity? As a college-educated person born and raised in Detroit and now living in Minneapolis, I needed to find some community somewhere that I could consider “my people”. But it was becoming increasingly difficult to find such a group.

With respect to identity, I would start with the fact that I am an American. Who else is an American? Since the 1960s, personal identity in the United States has become increasingly associated with race. Black Americans have a well-established identity as persons descended from slaves who have fought to secure their dignity and equality with whites. But I was a white person. If America’s central story is focused on black people’s fight for racial equality, what does that make me? As a white person, I would either be part of an oppressive class dedicated to keeping black people down or, to distance myself from this dismal image, I would have to demonstrate a John Brown-like zeal in helping black people in their struggle against repressive whites.

Many whites in my acquaintance have, indeed, adopted the second posture. It is an article of faith among many politically active whites that white people enjoy inherent “privilege”. They alone can be “racist”. And so my identity as a white American becomes someone loaded down with racial guilt. Since the Civil Rights model is so potent politically, other groups such as feminist women, gays and lesbians, and immigrants have also loaded me down with their kind of guilt. If race is a core feature of American identity, then for me my identity would be a source of shame unless, of course, I became an advocate for white people’s pride. If I moved in that direction, however, I would be seen as a white supremacist. Except for isolated groups here and there, this kind of community does not exist.

American identity can, of course, be associated with the American government and its history. I could be a “proud American” if I served in the Armed Forces and especially if I was wounded in service of my country. Is that what it would take to regain a positive identity? I, however, did not serve in the U.S. armed forces. While I was not a pacifist or conscientious objector, I have generally deplored the militaristic drift in U.S. foreign policy. While honoring our nation’s veterans, I could not honor the politicians who so lightly sent them off to war. President Bush’s misadventures in Iraq are especially appalling. If my identity were tied to such activities of the U.S. government, I would be ashamed to be an American. This bellicose President and his minions have squandered our national legacy.

But if U.S. politics and our government are increasingly bad, that does not mean that goodness cannot be found among the American people. As Americans in search of a positive identity, we need to look for the good things in our society and in our history. So, early on, I wrote an article for this web site titled “Some American Identities”. How did Americans see themselves at various times in history? Reviewing the list, I thought that several of these identities were based on contentious comparisons with other types of people. My own preference was to find a character type that stood alone in its achievements. That led me to the creative persons in American history who were responsible for inventing products, founding industries, or otherwise contributing to a better society.

Having grown up in Detroit at a time when the automobile industry was in full bloom, I admired the people who had built and maintained that industry. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford would head the list. Others such was William Durant, Walter P. Chrysler, Charles Kettering, and William S. Knudson were also “captains of industry” who had played a pioneering role. In the 1950s, there were people like C.E. Wilson, Harlow Curtice, Henry Ford II, K.T. Keller, and George Romney. I honored them all.

America was in love with the automobile, and executives of the automobile companies were managing a creative function in society. Even those who put the high-horsepower engines and giant tail fins on 50s-era cars were displaying creativity. Labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and Jimmy Hoffa were creatively building organizations to protect workers in that industry. Ralph Nader was ably advocating for increased auto safety. They were all part of an America that was healthy and strong.

Beyond a certain point, however, managerial leadership tends to lose its creative edge as large organizations perpetuate what has successfully gone before. So if automobile-company executives ignore the signs of long-term limitations upon petroleum supply and build gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks instead of fuel-efficient cars to boost short-term profit margins, such activity is less to be admired. Corporate leadership in America seems increasingly self-interested, quick to reward itself monetarily while sticking with systems and practices developed by others.

When Wall Street analysts force top managers to seek increased quarterly earnings above all else and college professors presume to teach sage business practices, one can assume that this part of society is in decline. And when writers and academics malign historical figures such as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford because they made public statements that offend certain groups or used their influence to steer their nation away from war, we have crossed the line into becoming a nation with a culture of back-biting and lies - not something on which to base my identity.

So I must ask once again: Who am I? Who are my people? The quick answer is that I have no people of my own. I have no real community to which I belong - only the false community created by government . Alternatively, education would seem to be a prime creator of identity. But is it not shallow to judge a person by the four years that he or she spent in college while ignoring the many years spent before and after that experience? Educational distinctions are an easy way to sort people out in our society, but they are largely unauthentic. We need to look more deeply into the human experience.

I created the web site, http://www.identityindependence.com, almost on a whim. Its focus on personal identity did not lend itself to an academic discipline which would allow it to be clearly positioned somewhere in the culture. But the topic had a life of its own. I found that, among my various web sites, this one was generating comparatively fast growth in the volume of traffic. I was constantly discovering new angles to the subject. Therefore, haphazardly, one new page soon followed another. There was no plan to develop the site in a particular way. It was spontaneous and fun.

A chart appearing below lists the pages of the web site and gives the sequence in which they were added. The first pages, created in early May, were focused on American identity and its various threats. But I did not want to harp on cultural enemies or get too heavily into identity politics. If my own identity was threatened, the solution lay with me rather than with someone else needing to be defeated.

As a stab in that direction, I wrote two articles concerned with the psychological effect of education: “The paradoxical disadvantage of education” and “In search of my own identity”, which was autobiographical. The idea here was that personal self-esteem depends upon having met a tough challenge whereas, for many people, society is organized to avoid the possibility that such challenges will appear. The educational system sets itself up as a guarantor of success, falsely I supposed.

Toward the end of 2006, quite by accident, I created a number of pages about my own ancestry and family history. The identity which one receives through ones parents, either genetically or culturally, exhibits much of that authenticity that I was seeking. It started with a computer search through Ancestor.com and was developed further through a collection of written materials and photographs stored in a file cabinet.

Then, in February 2007, I began adding newspaper articles with subjects that pertained to personal identity. They were proof that the topic has much relevance today. Whether in regards to the individual search for religion or spirituality or the “narcissistic” exhibitions of young women and men on MySpace.com, identity is important to people, both as individuals and as groups. Computer web sites lend themselves to reaching out to likeminded individuals, sharing an identity in common.

The following chart lists the pages of Identityindependence.com in the order that they were added to the site. The lefthand column gives an approximate date when each was added. The next column gives the name of the page file. The page title appears in the next column. Finally, in the column on the right the name of the summary page giving its category is listed.

date introduced	file name	title	summary group
late May 2006	identity	Identity Independence	summary
late May 2006	index	Identity Independence	summary
late May 2006	americanidentity	Some American Identities	American
early July 2006	fordlindbergh	Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Jews, and the Fight to Define American Identity	PC
early July 2006	mystory	In Search of My Own Identity	principles
early July 2006	whoami	Who am I?	principles
early July 2006	educationparadox	The Paradoxical Disadvantage of Education	principles
mid July 2006	boycrisis	Boy Crisis / Man Crisis	PC
mid July 2006	contact	Links and Contacts
early Aug. 2006	threeprinciples	Three Principles of Personal Identity	principles
mid Aug. 2006	ingersites	Inger Sites’ Take on American Identity	American
mid Aug. 2006	detroit	Detroit Chauvinism	American
mid Sept. 2006	globalization	Our National Identity and Globalization	American
mid Sept. 2006	microtarget	Techniques to Define Political Identity	principles
mid Sept. 2006	myspace	Teen Identities in Cyberspace	principles
mid Sept. 2006	tecumsehbrother	Tecumseh’s Brother, the Shawnee Prophet	American
late Oct. 2006	black&white	Black and White Identity	PC
mid Dec. 2006	citizenship	The Government’s Idea of What it means to be an American	American
mid Dec. 2006	raceworkshop	A Neighborhood Workshop on ending Racism	PC
mid Dec. 2006	jewishconspiracy	Is there such a Thing as a “Jewish Conspiracy”?	PC
early Jan. 2007	familytree	My Family Tree	case
early Jan. 2007	fatherfamily	The Birth Family of William McGaughey Sr.	case
early Jan. 2007	motherfamily	The Birth Family of Joan Durham McGaughey	case
early Jan. 2007	ourfamily	The Family of William and Joanna McGaughey	case
early Jan. 2007	resume	William McGaughey's Resume	case
early Jan. 2007	documents	Some Documents Establishing Personal Identity	case
mid Jan. 2007	case	Case of Identity: William McGaughey, creator of this web site	summary
mid Jan. 2007	politicalcorrectness	Political Correctness as a Threat to Authentic Identity	summary
mid Jan. 2007	someprinciples	Some Principles of Personal Identity	summary
mid Jan. 2007	thoughts	Thoughts on American Identity	summary
mid Jan. 2007	fouradventures	Four Adventures	case
mid Jan. 2007	mplscommunity	Everywhere a Stranger	American
mid Jan. 2007	communityperspectives	Perspectives on Community Life in America	American
mid Feb. 2007	obama	Senator Barack Obama and Racial Identity	PC
mid Feb. 2007	religion	Pick your own Religious Identity	principles
late Feb. 2007	character	Identity through one's place in a story	principles
late Feb. 2007	purpose	Seminar on Purpose for Persons Approaching Retirement Age	principles
late Feb. 2007	spirituality	Children's Spirituality	principles
late Feb. 2007	narcissism	Are Today’s College Students too Narcissistic?	American
early March 2007	gender	A Priority Put on Gender-Neutral Language	PC
early March 2007	racialbias	The Discrimination Casino	PC
early March 2007	neocon	The Neo-Cons	PC
early March 2007	shopping	Grocery Stores as Indicators of Personal Identity	principles
mid March 2007	diversity	Questioning Creative Diversity	PC
mid March 2007	georgewbush	Neo-Con Intellectuals Seduce Bush with Leadership Talk	PC
late March 2007	branding	Personal Branding	principles
late March 2007	wrongwithpc	What is Political Correctness and what's wrong with it?	PC
late March 2007	archbishop	A Discussion of Race at Lucille’s Kitchen	PC
late March 2007	disclaimer	A Disclaimer	PC
late March 2007	unequal	Unequal Identities	principles
late March 2007	unconsciousbias	Unconscious Discrimination	PC
early April 2007	bandc	Efforts to Promote American Identity	American
late April 2007	blackness	Speech on Forced Identity Wins First Place in State Contest	PC
late April 2007	thymos	The Need for Personal Recognition	principles
late April 2007	african	African Students Talk of Themselves and America	American

Prior to creating this web site, I had created a number of others. The most important one was http://www.worldhistorysite.com, which was originally created in 1999. Traffic has been building on this site to the point that it now averages more than 1,500 visits per day (compared with nearly 300 visits for Identityindependence.com). Still another web site, http://www.goldparty.org, was created mainly in 2005, suggesting a new approach to politics.

All three web sites contain parallel pages in five other languages - French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Italian - in addition to English, the language in which they were written. The Babelfish language translator on Altavista.com created the pages in languages other than English. While English speakers are by far most numerous, the web pages in these other European languages represent an attempt to break out of the provincialism of our culture and achieve a certain global reach.

The following table summarizes the volume of traffic to http://www.identityindependence.com from the summer of 2006, when the site first appeared, through March, 2007. “Visits” gives the number of times the site was entered. “Pages” gives the total number of pages that were visited. “Hits” also counts graphics and, for that reason, is rather misleading as an indicator of traffic. Even so, as one can see, there are sharp volume increases in all three categories.