Exercises

The American character (II)

The Influence of the Frontier

The special quality of American culture arises from what the American land and climate did to men who brought with them the glories and the burdens of European culture. Released from the feudal restraints which still clung to ownership even in the seventeenth century, they were driven by long hunger to possess land of their own. The hazards of settling that land—taking it from the Indian by treaty or battle, struggling through trackless forests to find it, hewing out homes and raising crops with nothing but a few simple tools, dying sometimes in battle or from weather or hunger—these hazards quickly changed into Americans the Europeans who survived. It was struggle that shaped the American spirit.

The frontier experience, so strong in its impact, so harsh a teacher, brought new traits to the fore. The hard conditions of the daily life made for crudeness in manners. The competition for favorable land (or later for gold), the need to kill in order to stay alive, the absence of law and order made men touch, brutal sometimes, and quick to resort to brute strength. This violence has continued in such aspects of our life as gangsterism, race riots, corrupt politics, union racketeering and the violent political attack.

Hard as the life was, it also offered great riches, sometimes for a small return. Hence the "get rich quick" philosophy—the belief that hard work and a little luck would turn all things into gold. Traders got rich furs from the Indians for mere trinkets. Out of the earth came gold, silver, oil—other than the shower of gold Zeus rained down upon Danae. Then came the robber barons to make vast fortunes by manipulating railroads, and finally the gambling in stocks which affected everyone until the Wall Street collapse in 1929.

But the frontier fostered positive traits too. It encouraged energetic activity and dignified labor with the hands. It made of the independent, self-reliant farmer a symbol which still influences our national life. It produced a resourceful, inquisitive, practical-minded type, able to turn his hand to any sort of work, preferring to govern himself in small, easily adaptable to a new environment, relatively free of class distinctions, full of optimism and faith in the country which had rewarded him so well.

All these traits live on, one way or another, in the contemporary American. The frontier has not disappeared with the spanning of the continent, or the end of homesteading. As a matter of fact, the government still has lands for homesteading which it disposes of at the rate of forty thousand to fifty thousand acres a year. More important, the pioneer spirit is deeply embedded in the American's concept of himself.

   The American Creed

What then are the ideas or beliefs that shape American character?

Says George Satayana: "This national faith and morality are vague in idea, but inexorable in spirit; they are the gospel of work and the belief in progress."

Clyde Kluckhohn finds implicit in the American creed a faith in the rational, a need for moralistic rationalization, an optimistic conviction that rational effort counts, faith in the individual and his rights, the cult of the common man (not only as to his rights, but as to his massed political wisdom), the high valuation put on change and progress, and on pleasure consciously pursued as a good.

Equally strong is the American's faith in his institutions. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution lay down the fundamental principles of self-government with such clarity and finality that we are prone to regard them as an American invention, or at any rate as principles and rights which are peculiarly ours. These hallowed documents provide us with basic principles which, thanks to their deistic background, are presented as coeval with creation and incapable of being questioned or upset. Therefore we do not have to agonize over basic principles; they are given us, once for all.

The lack of reflectiveness which observers find in us arises partly from this conviction that our goals are set and do not need to be debated; we have only to work hard in order to reach them. To create, to build—to clear a new field, sink a new mine, start a new civic organization, develop a new business—this is what Americans admire. This is what they dream of. Like all creators, they are suspicious of critics.

For this reason, and because they are active participants rather than passive observers, they feel obliged to defend the country against any outside censures, no matter how bitterly they attack its shortcomings themselves. De Tocqueville, much as he admired the United States, found this patriotism irritating. If you stop praising them, he complains, the Americans fall to praising them-selves. What he observed, of course, was part of the love and be loved pattern which in spite of its naiveté has obvious advantages over the hate and be hated regimen which has determined so much of human history.

    Humor

The sense of humor is often the most revealing aspect of a culture. Surely humor has never been valued more highly in any civilization than in this one. Will Rogers is venerated as a national hero for his pungent, earthy comment on the American scene—for his gift of making Americans see what is ridiculous in themselves. Mark Twain, in many ways our most representative writer, is admired not so much because of his skill at picturing American life as for his humor. It is part of the optimism of our outlook that we prefer comedy to tragedy, and that the funny men get top billing and top salaries on television.

Humor is the great reliever of tension, the counterbalance to the dash and roar of our fastpaced industrialized life with its whirring machines, traffic snarls and frayed tempers. Humor shows these very things to us in such a way that we can laugh about them.
    Nothing is too sacred for the comic transformation; in fact, the more sacred the topic, the stronger the impact. Jokes about the minister are legion. Says the parishioner to the minister who explains that while shaving he was thinking about his sermon and cut his chin: "You should have been thinking about you chin and cut the sermon."
    That tensions exist in the home life, however, the humorist loves to point out. No joke has the changes rung on it more frequently than that of the woman driver who is usually pictured sitting in the midst of a wrecked car. ("Didn't you see me signal that I'd changed my mind?") Men probably wreck far more cars than women, but it satisfies the male ego to think that women have not yet mastered the machine.

The shop which advertised that it would "Oil sewing machines and adjust tension in the home for $1" had already relieved the tension through humor once the unintentional double-entendre was recognized.

A popular variant of the dominant female is the mother-in-law. Year after year the jokes about her continue—evidence not so much of any serious tension as of the Freudian implications─projection of marital friction onto an associated but less immediate object, seeing in the wife's mother the inevitable approach of the mate's old age and hence one's own.

Humor reveals our attitude toward children—our love of their innocently wise comments on life, our delight in the evidences they give of being fully formed individuals with rights and spunk of their own, even to the point of talking back to their parents. (Says the little girl at the table, urged by her mother to eat up her broccol: "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.")

Can psychiatry help to overcome the frustrations of life? "There's nothing wrong with the average person that a good psychiatrist can't exaggerate," said the comedian, thus confirming our suspicions and making it a little easier for us to put up with ourselves.

The thirst for humor drives advertisers to resort to it, in the hope of catching an audience long since jaded by all the other appeals. "You die—we do the rest," an undertaker advertises. What welcome relief from the usual unctuousness of his kind!

American humor, in short, confirms the importance of mating and the family, the high status of women and children, the pace and tension of life, and above all the love of humor itself as an approach to life more to be prized than riches, a gift to be cherished and applauded. The minister uses it in his sermons, the doctor in his healing, the lawyer in his pleading, the teacher in his teaching. About the worst thing we can say of a man is that he has no sense of humor. For humor is regarded as an essential part of "the American way."

It helps to equalize, and we believe in equality. It is often a symbol of freedom, for it permits the common man to speak freely of his leaders; it helps him cut them down to size. It deflates stuffed shirts. It allows us to look at ourselves in perspective, for when we laugh at ourselves we have surmounted our shortcomings. And in a land where new contacts are always being made, humor provides a quickly available emotional unity—not subtle or regional but universal, one which lets us feel immediately at home anywhere. It is the grammar of confidence, the rhetoric of optimism, the music of brotherhood.

    What is an American?

"I can't make you out," Henry James has Mrs. Tristram say to the American, "whether you are very simple or very deep." This is a dilemma which has often confronted Europeans. Usually they conclude that Americans are childish. But one cannot accurately call one society mature, another immature. Each has its own logic.

What is it then that makes Americans recognizable wherever they go? It is not, we hope, the noisy, boasting, critical, money-scattering impression made by one class of tourists. The only thing to be said in their defense is that, released from the social restraints which would make them act very differently at home, they are bent on making the most of this freedom.

Americans carry with them an appearance which is more a result of attitude than of clothing. This attitude combines a lack of class consciousness, a somewhat jaunty optimism and an inquisitiveness which in combination look to the European like naiveté . Also a liking for facts and figures, an alertness more muscular and ocular than intellectual, and above all a desire to be friendly. (Let us, for the moment, leave out of the picture such stigmata as gum chewing, too much smoking, and an urge to compare everything with Kansas City or Keokuk.)

To boil it down to the briefest summary, American characteristics are the product of response to an unusually competitive situation combined with unusual opportunity.

Americans are a peculiar people. They work like mad, then give away much of what they earn. They play until they are exhausted, and call this a vacation. They live to think of themselves as tough-minded business men, yet they are push-overs for any hard luck story. They have the biggest of nearly everything including government, motor cars and debts, yet they are afraid of bigness. They are always trying to chip away at big government, big business, big unions, big influence. They like to think of themselves as little people, average men, and they would like to cut everything down to their own size. Yet they boast of their tall buildings, high mountains, long rivers, big state, the best country, the best world, the best heaven. They also have the most traffic deaths, the most waste, the most racketeering.

When they meet, they are always telling each other, "Take it easy," then they rush off like crazy in opposite directions. They play games as if they were fighting a war, and fight wars as if playing a game. They marry more, go broke more often, and make more money than any other people. They love children, animals, gadgets, mother, work, excitement, noise, nature, television shows, comedy, installment buying, fast motion, spectator sports, the underdog, the flag, Christmas, jazz, shapely women and muscular men, classical recordings, crowds, comics, cigarettes, warm houses in winter and cool ones in summer, thick beefsteaks, coffee, ice cream, informal dress, plenty of running water, do-it-yourself, and a working week trimmed to forty hours or less.

They crowd their highways with cars while complaining about the traffic, flock to movies and television while griping about the quality and the commercials, go to church but don't care much for sermons, and drink too much in the hope of relaxing—only to find themselves stimulated to even bigger dreams.

There is of course, no typical American. But if you added them all together and then divided by 226 000 000 they would look something like what this chapter has tried to portray.

(2 160 words)

(From An American Grab Bag, United States Information Agency, 1986 )

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