神马文学网 preface
来源：百度文库 编辑：神马文学网 时间：2024/04/19 12:39:18
Preface
This book has been written in response to the burgeoning study of the
Making America is not a collection of essays but a collaboration by two dozen leading American scholars and critics to represent the character and culture of their nation. Internationalist in experience and outlook, each has brought his or her own discipline, authority, and topical expertise to a common effort to understand the American experience. Within severely restricted space, the authors were asked to provide objective information on their subjects, to pursue developments through time, and to apply a critical point of view.
The organization of the volume reflects a concern for the processes by which character has been formed in the
Omissions have been as unavoidable as they are regrettable, and each reader will make his or her own list of lacunae: agriculture, the social welfare system, work and the workplace, the organization of business, political parties, American music, diet and the household. An early, still incomplete, table of contents projected no fewer than seventy essential topics. But where important subjects and themes have not been featured individually, it is hoped that the book will provide sufficient structure and starting points so that they can be more meaningfully addressed.
The reader who chooses to move through the chapters in sequence should experience the dynamics of the still evolving character and deepening culture of the American people. Most will use the book in a selective fashion, pursuing personal interests and comparing their own knowledge and perspectives with, say, Sam Bass Warner, Jr., on "Urban America," Norman Corwin on "Entertainment and the Mass Media," Tamara Hareven on "The American Family," or Martin Marty on "Religion in America." The work will serve as the basic course text in some curricular settings; in others instructors will cut and tailor modules suitable for their particular audiences in history, literature, society, politics, and American studies.
I expect that the recommendations for further reading will prove a most valuable feature of the book. The authors have selected their bibliographies carefully with several objectives in mind. Librarians and directors of research and teaching centers will want to check their holdings for the key works identified here and set about filling in gaps. The further readings should suggest new course possibilities and assist instructors in preparing syllabi and lectures on a wide range of subjects. Students can mine the bibliographies for research topics and can base papers and theses on the documentation and criticism that are described.
Preparing this volume has taken several years, interrupted by the other professional obligations of the scholars involved and my own tour as director of the American Studies Research Centre in
Luther S. Luedtke
Introduction
The Search For American Character
by Luther S. Luedtke
I speak of the American in the singular, as if there were not millions of them, north and south, east and west, of both sexes, of all ages, and of various races, professions, and religions. Of course the one American I speak of is mythical; but to speak in parables is inevitablein such a subject, and it is perhaps as well to do so frankly... As it happens, the symbolic American can be made largely adequate to the facts; because, if there are immense differences between individual Americans... yet there is a great uniformity in their environment, customs, temper, and thoughts. They have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistibly in a space otherwise quite empty. To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the
It is a commonplace to state that whatever one may come to consider a truly American trait can be shown to have its equally characteristic opposite. This, one suspects, is true of all "national characters," or (as I would prefer to call them) national identities so true, in fact, that one may begin rather than end with the proposition that a nation's identity is derived from the ways in which history has, as it were, counter pointed certain opposite personalities; the ways in which it lifts this counterpoint to a unique style of civilization, or lets it disintegrate into mere contradiction.
Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society
An article headlined "6,000 Line up for U.S. Citizen Oath" was given only a picture and three short columns in an interior section of the Los Angeles Times on June 29, 1984. The immigrants gathered at the Shrine Auditorium to swear allegiance to the
In the auditorium foyer, where League of Women Voters members handed out voter registration forms, one new citizen asked Rosemary Fitzpatrick if she were a Democrat or a Republican. "I want to do it right," the man said. Fitzpatrick explained that he would have to make up his own mind. This event, so common and inevitable as to be scarcely newsworthy, nevertheless holds the keys to an ongoing process by which American character has been formed for over three hundred years. It typifies the American experience in at least three ways.
First is the continual ingathering of the enormous diversity of races and peoples driven or drawn by religious, political, and economic forces that have chosen to make the
What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendent of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is a American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and prosperity will one day cause great changes in the world.
After two hundred years the sources and composition of the "new race of men" have expanded far beyond Europe, but the process of constant uprooting, transplantation, adaptation, and renewal continues.Although the massive waves of migration that added some 37 million foreign born to the population of the United States from the 1820s to the 1920s are unlikely to recur, in the last decades the United States has reopened its doors to an uncounted number of Latin Americans (both legal and undocumented aliens) and to hundreds of thousands of refugees from Southeast Asia. Results of the 1980 census indicated a total national population of 226.5 million, of which 26.5 million (11.7 percent) were black, 14.6 million (6.4 percent) Hispanic, 1.4 million (0.6 percent) Native American, and 3.5 million (1.5 percent) Asian American. To speak of these as minority populations is misleading, for the nation has no clear ethnic majority. The largest specifically identifiable ethnic group that of British ancestry accounts for only 15 percent of the population, as compared to 13 percent of German ancestry, and 8 percent Irish. The
A second key to the American experience that can be read from the
On oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjur all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law... so help me God.
Thus six thousand more aliens were made Americans. The majority of Americans will never attend citizenship training classes or pass through the ritual of citizenship with such self-consciousness as the quarter million immigrants who are "naturalized" annually, but the civics instruction and the pledges of allegiance that suffuse our educational system and public observances habituate Americans to consider their citizenship, like their religion, a matter of personal responsibility.
The third key is closely related to the second, namely, the political ideological core of the American commitment. In undertaking to "supportand defend the Constitution and laws of the United States," the new Americans gave their personal allegiance to a national polity rooted in concepts of justice, equality, the inalienable rights of the individual, and government by and for the people. "Natural and subconscious forces have generally contributed to the process of a nation's coming into being more than free human decisions," noted Hans Kohn. "Not so with the Anglo-Americans. They established themselves as a nation without the support of any of those elements that are generally supposed to constitute a separate nation" such as common descent, a common religion, an historically defined territory, cultural uniqueness, or a distinctive language, law, or literature. The European origins of the American colonists, the newness of their culture, and their constant mobility precluded any such organic solidarity. The tie that united the colonies, and at the same time separated them from all other nations, was founded "on an idea which singled out the new nation among the nations of the earth." This idea, expressed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, embodies what it means to be an American; it is the English tradition of liberty, which could develop in
These doctrines, like the resulting institutions, have shown a remarkable vitality and immutability for over two hundred years in what has been called "the first new nation." While Americans may hyphenate their identities for particular or communal reasons as Irish-Americans, Afro-Americans, Asian-Americans they unite under higher principles to endorse their common citizenship.
Merely to remind ourselves of its ideological core, of course, hardly does justice to the colorful skein of American life today or the complex and manifold ways in which an American identity has evolved. The skeptic, indeed, might well ask whether it is not futile to seek a palpable commonality among a population so large and ethnically diverseas that of the
Scotchmen and Irishmen are more unlike Englishmen, the native of Normandy more unlike the native of Provence, the Pomeranian more unlike the Wurtemberger, the Piedmontese more unlike the Neapolitan, the Basque more unlike the Andulasian, than the American from any part of the country is to the American from any other... It is rather more difficult to take any assemblage of attributes in any of these European countries and call it the national type than it is to do the like in the
In our own time Gunnar Myrdal has reiterated the same point in sociological terms: "...most Americans have most variations in common though they are arranged differently in the sphere of valuations of different individuals and groups and bear different intensity coefficients."
For over a century and a half observers of the United States the seasoned and scholarly and skeptical as well as the transient and impressionistic have written a catalog of American traits and remarked on its coherence. It is, as Clyde Kluckhohn claimed, "based upon stubborn and irreducible facts of repeated observations that have amazing continuity through time." Lately, the forces of instant nationwide communications, constant mobility, a homogenizing popular culture, and the standardization inherent in mass production and a highly technological culture have steadily reduced the margins of idiosyncratic behavior in the
To be sure, the foundation of a people's character forms far earlier than their self-consciousness about it. The question of a distinctive American character was moot for the first hundred years and more following the settlements of the early seventeenth century. The early settlers, primarily British, saw themselves as colonists and an extension of the European empires. Not until the early eighteenth century did their nurture and patrimonial stake in the new land, combined with spatial, commercial, and emotional distance from
Nevertheless, there were premonitions of difference from the outset,even predating the first settlements. America, as Howard Mumford Jones illustrated in O Strange New World!, inherited a legacy of medieval and Renaissance dreams and romantic visions: "The concept that the New World is the peculiar abode of felicity lingered for centuries in the European imagination and, like the youth of America, is one of its oldest traditions." Goethe's declaration "Amerika, do hast es besser/Als unser Continent, das Alter" was a late expression of a well-established sentiment. It is a "profound and central truth," Jones wrote, that American culture arises from the interplay of two great sets of forces the
The New World fell heir not only to pastoral visions, which collided over time with the realities of wilderness and frontier, but also to the Old World's religious and economic designs.
We will never prove to platonic satisfaction that there is an essential American character. The authors of this volume, however, share enough confidence in the reality of the national identity to narrate the processes and evaluate the forces natural, cultural, social, and ideological through which it has taken shape. Assuming the existence of the "American," it is the purpose of this initial essay now to discuss the formal search for reasonable and verifiable generalizations on character and value in the
The Study of American Character
The scholarly study of American character began before the turn of the century. Michael McGiffert has paid tribute to Harvard's man of letters Henry Adams (1838-1918) as "the first professional historian to take cognizance of the national character as a legitimate subject for investigation." Challenging the reigning academic concern with political and diplomatic history,
Creative scholarship in this field also has been heavily indebted to the American Studies impulse that flourished after World War II and to the commanding pursuit of intellectual and literary history in American universities through the two postwar decades. With the continuing development of the academic disciplines since the 1930S, particularly in the social and behavioral sciences, the concept of national character has gained conceptual clarity and methodological rigor.
It would be impossible as well as redundant to survey here the full historical and scientific literature on American national character. Thomas Hartshorne has traced the concept into the 1960s history graphically in The Distorted Image: Changing Conceptions of the American Character Since Turner, and other works mentioned in the Further Reading section provide a wide commentary. My intention is to indicate some of the major twentieth century themes in American character study, the periods of special activity, the search for conceptually and scientifically coherent methods, and the nature of current writings in the field, especially the emphasis on continuity and paradox.
Between the World Wars
The social and psychological conditions of the period separating the First and Second World Wars were not favorable to a balanced analysis of the American character. The spiritual waste of the First World War and the ensuing return to "normalcy" introduced a decade of general skepticism, intolerance, and conservatism. Nativists pointed with alarm at the prewar immigrants ghettoed in American cities and, playing on the fear of alien ideologies, the Red Scare, and a general spirit of isolationism, closed the doors of asylum with legislation in the early 1920s that severely restricted further immigration. The apparent values of the decade were its materialism, conformity, and provincialism; its representative man was Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt. Turning their backs on the car, church, and club culture at home, the more sensitive intellectual and literary spirits of the nation expatriated to
Historians, too, reflected the spiritual bifurcation of the times. Nativist-minded historians tended to exaggerate the virtues of agrarianism and the frontier individualism, self-reliance, adaptability, and independence and to portray the essential American as immune to the artistic and industrial qualities of the city, which was the typical venue of the new immigrants. As Thomas Hartshorne notes, they "asserted that the distinctive qualities of the American, produced by racial inheritance and the selective influences of colonization and the frontier, were not well suited to industrial and urban life," and they blamed the immigrant for the decline of America from its early idealism to the plane of crass materialism.
In response the antinativists argued that the real danger lay with the established Americans, who had begun to take liberty for granted, and that the new immigrant, with his deep idealistic devotion to freedom, might help "save the American character from the twin dangers of commercialism and materialism." Amidst a fervid writing on Americanization, assimilation, and immigrant heritage, Horace Kallen advanced his manifesto of "cultural pluralism" as a means for preserving liberty and diversity in the face of numbing uniformity. Like Van Wyck Brooks and George Santayana before him, Kallen depicted the
In the
The stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depressionappeared to some observers as a judgment on the reactionary and self-satisfied twenties. Under the personal and economic pressures of the 1930s, the national character was not an immediate focus of study. Emphasis shifted from the national and abstract to the local and particular as politicians, anthropologists, journalists, and artists joined in a process of diagnosis and repair. Encouraged by
A number of forces gathered during the 1930s in preparation for the major study and celebration of American character in the decades that followed. Important contributions were made to the history of immigration, labor, and the American city during this period. Under the impetus of the Lomaxes and Constance Rourke, American folklore, humor, and life ways became a new focus of attention.
Ruth Benedict broke ground in the field of cultural anthropology by characterizing the psychological coherence of cultures while Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Clyde Kluckhohn, following psychoanalytic perspectives, laid the foundation for the study of personality and culture. Hartshorne has used the 1930s as a dividing line in American character studies between commentary by "philosophers, novelists, journalists, add literary critics" and the emergence of a new field of inquiry in the social sciences, particularly in sociology, anthropology, psychiatry, and social history. Questioning the concept, or utility, of the "typical individual" for studying a heterogeneous society, these scholars adopted a cultural approach and "turned to value analysis as a means of generalizing on a society-wide scale."
Assault on the American national character coincident with and greatly affected by the events of the Second World War. Here was a clear moral and ideological confrontation that, unlike the internal complexities ofthe 1930s or the ambiguities of the First World War, the nation knew how to confront. Both the wartime and postwar conditions evoked the conviction that
Work in the social sciences and the humanities reflected the enlarged sense of purpose and a desire to understand
In the
While Ruth Benedict undertook her investigation of the Japanese national character to gauge the will of a wartime adversary (see The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, (1946)), the Library of Congress commissioned numerous studies that used content analysis to get at persistent patterns of culture. European intellectuals' interest in notions of "national soul" during the 1920s and 1930s had goaded some social scientists into attempts to distinguish the relative effects of nature and nurture. The study of American character in the 1940s was part of an international examination of popular and elite behavior.
Social and institutional history saw bold new writings like Oscar Handlin's Boston's Immigrants (1941) and Alice Felt Tyler's Freedom's Ferment (1944). The expression of American uniqueness was also marked in literary history and criticism. F. O. Matthiessen defined the great tradition in The American Renaissance (1941), and a battalion of scholars collaborated in writing The Literary History of the United States (1946), whose editors acknowledged: "The disruptions of the war and postwar eras, far from presenting handicaps, have stimulated interest by emphasizing the need for cultural redefinition." A new standard of intellectual history was set by works like Ralph Henry Gabriel's The Course of American Democratic Thought (1940), Perry Miller's The New England Mind (1939, 1953), and Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), which found the key to the American creed in the playing out of Lockean liberalism in a politically and socially unoccupied continent.
Calling the 1930s and 1940s the "heroic age" in the study of American intellectual history, John Higham has noted the dominance of the 1950s "by intellectual historians and their varied allies, the general historians who relied, as [Richard] Hofstadter, Edmund Morgan, David Potter, and Daniel Boorstin did, primarily on cultural interpretations." Higham continued:
The most exciting, as well as the most controversial, single achievement of intellectual historians in the 1950s was a fresh vision of the meaning of
Driven by the new confidence of American intellectual, cultural, and literary history, American area studies programs proliferated across the country in the 1940s and 1950s, many of them, significantly,insisting on the title "American Civilization." American Heritage and the American Quarterly were founded in 1949 to provide outlets for essays and articles addressed to the growing American studies audiences, and scholars committed to a unifying comprehension of the national experience organized the American Studies Association in 1951. Similar associations came into existence in
International crises and confrontation with alternative ideological systems are particularly likely to arouse self-consciousness about national unity and values. This was conspicuously true at the time of the American Revolution and again in World War II. It continued in the Cold War of the 1950s, when scholars and scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer noted that the conflict with the
The lack of clear ideological imperatives and strategic objectives in the
The Social and Behavioral Sciences
The engagement of the social and behavioral sciences with the study of national character has followed generally the same pattern as literary and historical studies tilling and seeding in the 1930s, a harvest of works during the war and postwar decades, reconsideration of directions in the 1960s and 1970s. Over the last half century anthropology, psychology, and sociology have brought to the field their respective preoccupations with culture, personality, and social structure. Their theoretical interests and research contributions reflect both the internal development of the disciplines and the public exigencies of the times.
By the mid-1930s the field of anthropology was moving from description of social norms to the investigation of personality as an expression of culture, that is, the ways in which individuals internalize cultural values and learn appropriate behavior. As Alex Inkeles and Daniel Levinson have pointed out, Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture "went beyond the mere behavioral description of the individual as a product of his culture, to characterization of the psychological coherence of the culture as a whole." In linking social cultural and personality systems, Benedict motivated other anthropologists to study the relations of culture and personality and to explore the "basic personality structure" of Americans. During the war and its immediate aftermath national character became a major field of study for anthropologistsand allied behavioral scientists interested in the psychology and character of nations. "The decade from 1935 to 1945," according to Inkeles and Levinson, "bracketed by Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) and Kardiner's Psychological Frontiers of Society (1945), was the seminal period of development. The period that followed was one of self confident affirmation as the results of wartime research and new field work poured in." By the early 1950s, however, bothered by uncertainty about future conceptual directions anthropology had largely withdrawn from personality and culture research, and from national character studies in general.
Social psychologists remained aloof from personality theory and national character research through the 1920s and 1930s, both because of their commitment to experimental techniques and the association ofgeneralizations about group character with race theory and stereotyping. Beginning with the late 1930s the introduction of psychoanalysis and related viewpoints from clinical psychology stimulated interest among psychologists in "personality and culture" studies. "It was not," Inkeles and Levinson wrote, "merely that anthropologists turned to psychoanalysis. What was equally important, a number of creative psychoanalysts turned to anthropology and other social sciences." An inclusive psychosocial approach was envisioned in the fertile intellectual environment of the 1930s and 1940s. By the mid-1950s the study of personality in a societal perspective had been accepted as an appropriate concern for academic psychology. In the recent past, however, psychoanalysts have been generally uninterested in pursuing the relationships between personality and social systems.
Sociologists made little effort to study personality as a factor of social organization before the 1950s, but then began to stress the importance of "the motives, dynamics, and modes of adaptation of the members of society." David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950) particularly enhanced the study of social character. Reflecting the general postwar concern with autonomy and conformity in a mass society, Riesman depicted a shift in the character and values of middle class Americans from an "inner directed" type (whose values were inculcated by parental instruction and example) to an "other directed" type (shaped by peer group pressure).
The anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists who took up national character studies illuminated the adaptation and innovation that take place among individual Americans, their social groups, and the historical context in which they function. The attention of these social scientists to basic personality structures, nurture and child rearing, and functional adjustment to the values demanded by the society brought theoretical sophistication to the discussion of national character and found new use for impressionistic accounts of daily experience like those provided by nineteenth-century travelers to the United States. Throughout the 1950s the exploration of the American character was promoted by such theses as David Potter's People of Plenty (1954), which speculated about the influence of abundance in shaping American character, especially in child-rearing, and William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), which advanced the thesis that the Protestant ethic of work, thrift, and deferred gratification had been replaced by socialization and conformity.
The status of national character studies in the contemporary social sciences has been summarized by Inkeles and Levinson in these terms:
The concept of national character is an important but problematic one in the social sciences It has been strongly rejected in the hereditanan or racist forms in which it was couched by earlier writers. Seen in more modern perspective, however, it poses fundamental problems for social-scientific theory and research: To what extent do the patterned conditions of life in a particular society give rise to certain distinctive patterns in the personalities of its members? To what extent, that is, does the socio-cultural system produce its distinctive forms of "social character," "basic personality structure," or "modal personality"? Further, what are the consequences, if any, of this patterning in personality for stability or change in the societal order?
The global warfare of 1939-45, followed by the dismantling of European empires and a multiplication of independent new nations, has also elicited a vigorous concern for national identity from political scientists.
The study of nationalism is heavily indebted to the work of historian Hans Kohn, whose magesterial The Idea of Nationalism (1944), like other seminal works of the period, was written when the "problem of nationalism" was becoming especially apparent. Kohn's book was essentially a history of ideas, a survey of nationalism's "long period of incubation from Ancient times to the French Revolution." In his American Nationalism: An Interpretive Essay (1957) Kohn examined the ideological origins of the American nation and, from a comparative perspective, the forces that unified and gave a distinctive style to the American people.
At the same time Karl W. Deutsch, like Kohn an emigre from
In Symbols of American Community, 1735-1775, for example, Richard L. Merritt, a former research assistant to Deutsch, applied symbol and content analysis to the questions of when the colonists began to think of themselves as "Americans" rather than British subjects, what process brought the semi-isolated colonies into integrated political communities, and whether American community awareness preceded or followed formal political integration. To gauge the colonial outlook as British, American, regional, or local, Merritt quantified the frequency and distribution of geographic place names appearing in colonial newspapers over a forty-year period and substantiated that the shift from colonial to American national consciousness was well advanced before the colonists undertook to revolt against the Mother Country.
A decade after the publication of Deutsch's Nationalism and Social Communication, political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset analyzed the social and ideological development of the
The psychological consequences of worldwide social mobilization, extended communications, and nation building have been well articulatedby
Such conceptual and applied work in political sociology and social psychology should highlight the internal difficulties confronting new nations and increase appreciation for the simpler times in which American nationhood and identity were forged. American political institutions were created in conditions of relative well-being among a people who already had achieved levels of literacy, education, communication, and assimilation that were supportive of nationality.
National Character as Modal Personality Structure
In his methodological essays, Inkeles has pointed out three traditional perspectives for regarding national character as a nation's typical institutional patterns (political, social, economic); as a history of behavior and actions; and as cultural themes (values, religions, ethos, the arts). For a modern and scientifically feasible alternative he has proposed that national character "be equated with modal personality structure; that is, it should refer to the mode or modes of the distribution of personality variants within a given society." The quantitative and empirical requirements of this approach are facilitated by the development in modern behavioral sciences of "measures for recording individual opinion, habit, belief, behavior, and psychological disposition. These permit us to base our assessment of the American national character on the direct study of representative samples of the population of the
Among the continuities that Inkeles has marked are the conviction of America as a promised land, based particularly on pride in American government and political institutions; independence and self-reliance, accompanied by the imperatives of persistence, hard work and initiative; commitment to communal action, voluntarism, and "organizational democracy"; trust and respect for the mutual rights of others; optimism; authoritarianism; equality; and a "restless energy, pragmatism, a tendency toward brashness or boastfulness, this-worldliness, a preference for the concrete, and a certain discomfort in coping with aesthetic and emotional expression." All "can be documented by recent empirical psychosocial tests still to be part of that syndrome that makes up the modal personality pattern of the current population of the
In explaining how the masses of American immigrants possibly could have acquired the attitudes and values that typify the American character structure, Inkeles granted some validity to the theory of selective and differential recruitment of immigrants, but ascribed more importance to "the responsiveness of government, the experience of equality, the active practice of democracy, and the relative abundance of the material means of existence." He has also given large credit to the modern public school system, which by its nature instills such elements of the American national character as "a sense of personal efficacy and of openness to new experience, a sense of self-reliance, and striving for independence from traditional authority."
Other modal approaches to national character also have been introduced. In their influential study The Civic Culture (1963), for example, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba examined modal political attitudes in population samples from five democratic nations, preparing the way for further research in "political culture." A variety of behavioral and attitudinal studies, based on multinational comparisons and quantitative data, have tried to put into more systematic form the notions explored by "culture from a distance" scholars.
Although given new scientific credentials, the intent and result of such inquiry are not far different from the "typical" American drawn by Tocqueville or canvassed by other nineteenth-century observers. Lord Bryce, too, was certain that character molds opinion and can be read through it, observing in The American Commonwealth (1888) that "the public opinion of a people is even more directly than its political institutions the reflection and expression of its character."Bryce found the American people over all to be good-natured, hopeful, educated, moral, religious but unreverential, commercial, associative but unsettled, changeful, and conservative.
Value Analysis
The new social science approaches to national character, with their negotiations between individual personality and the social group, have given a high degree of prominence to value analysis from conceptual work in the 1950s to the "values clarification" movement of the 1970s and 1980s. The search for a dominant and enduring value system as the index to national character makes particularly good sense in a heterogeneous nation and an age of mass communication. "Formerly regarded as supplemental to the study of personality traits, behavioral patterns, and institutional structures," Michael McGiffert has pointed out, "the examination of values has now been widely accepted as a coordinate approach in national character analysis; many scholars have found in it a key to aspects of the American character which are less accessible by other avenues of investigation." These scholars tend to divide into two camps those who emphasize consensus and "the 'core' or 'focal' values by which the value system...is ordered and unified," and those who stress the diversity, pluralism, and tensions within American national values. A related theme concerns the relative changes and continuities of values over time.
Definitions of value vary from Robin Williams's "criteria for selection in action" to Ralph Henry Gabriel's "an ideal, a paradigm setting forth a desired and esteemed possible social reality." Concurring that they "are by definition criteria, that is, ideals, goals, norms, and standards," Ethel Albert cautioned that values, known chiefly through verbal behavior, not be mistaken for the actualities of conduct. Furthermore, cultures tend to maintain two orders of value: "high-level ideals [that] are not intended for universal, literal realization," and the secondary values that are the practical guides tobehavior. The contrast between its ideal and realistic values and between its standards and achievements help define the characteristic tensions of a society. Tracing those tensions has been a major task of modern American historians and social scientists. Many inventories of
· An activist approach to life, based on mastery rather than passive acceptance of events
· Emphasis on achievement and success, understood largely as material prosperity
· A moral character, oriented to such Puritan virtues as duty, industry, and sobriety
· Religious faith
· Science and secular rationality, encouraged by a view of the universe as orderly, knowable, and benign, and emphasizing an external rather than inward view of the world
· A progressive rather than traditionalist or static view of history, governed by optimism, confidence in the future, and a belief that progress can be achieved by effort
· Equality, with a horizontal or equalitarian rather than hierarchical view of social relations
· High evaluation of individual personality, rather than collective identity or responsibility
· Self-reliance
· Humanitarianism
· External conformity
· Tolerance of diversity
· Efficiency and practicality
· Freedom
· Democracy
· Nationalism and patriotism
· Idealism and perfectionism
· Mobility and change
Even a cursory view of these and other attributed values will turn up apparent contradictions and tensions. Can a people, for example, be simultaneously idealistic and materialistic? Conformist and individualistic? Law-abiding and violent? Dedicated to both work and leisure? Religion and science? Agrarianism and industrialism? Competition and love? It would be convenient to suppose that in a nation of a quarter of a billion people the putative values and traits of Americans are parceled out in internally consistent packages to separate groups within the culture. But while there will be saliences of value in various groups and regions, we know that not only does the "modal personality" of adult Americans contain such apparent antitheses as those enumerated above, but also that most Americans hold them in some form of suspension. Walt Whitman cleverly observed for the American people of the mid-nineteenth century:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Reconciling and explaining the multitudinous American character has provided a school of scholarship in the most recent period occupied with "paradox," "counterpoint," "dilemma," and "enigma."
Dilemma, Paradox, and Polarities
Perhaps the most enduring contradiction in American culture has been the coexistence of an official creed of individual freedom, equality, opportunity, and justice with de facto when not de jure discrimination against black Americans. Gunnar Myrdal posed this problem in his momentous study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), while also concedingthat belief in the "American Creed" had been a major factor in actually changing the position of the Negro for the good. Three decades later, Daniel Bell has traced other ominous fault lines in the American character in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). According to Bell, America is a schizophrenic nation; its culture is drifting toward hedonism and consumerism even while its societal structure stands on the old virtues of thrift, hard work, self-denial, and efficiency.
While some critics of the 1970s portrayed a nation bewildered and schizophrenic, others saw the dualities in American life as typical a dialectic that had long characterized the nation. In his People of Paradox (1972), Michael Kammen cited a few of the single-factor explanations that have been ventured to account for the American character, but also noted the dualities that have struck prominent observers of the American scene: Alexis de Tocqueville commenting that individualism and idealism were as characteristic of America as conformity and materialism; Van Wyck Brooks describing two main currents running through the American mind, the transcendental current of Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson and the "practical current which Benjamin Franklin made into a philosophy of common sense." From the very beginnings of the nation, Kammen wrote,there has been contention over the meaning of
Kammen sought a means of getting beyond both monocausal explanation and the conflict-versus-consensus polarity of much historical argument by calling attention not to deformities or uniformities but to biforrnities in American life. "What finally matters," he offered, "is the particular configuration of tensions within a national setting, as well as the behavioral, intellectual, and emotional consequence of that configuration." One way to reconcile the host of explanations for American character might be to demonstrate a style of mind attuned to function amidst deeply felt antitheses. Considering the alternatives facing most Americans, psychoanalyst Erik Erikson claimed:
Thus the functioning American, as the heir of a history of extreme contrasts and abrupt changes, bases his final ego identity on some tentative combination of dynamic polarities such as migratory and sedentary, individualistic and standardized, competitive and cooperative, pious and free-thinking, responsible and cynical, etc.
As Kammen observed, "The United States may very well be the first large-scale society to have built innovation and change into its culture as a constant variable, so that a kind of 'creative destruction' continually alters the face of American life."
Robert Wiebe has advanced a similar thesis in The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (1975). Eschewing the notion that historical and social continuity needs to imply uniformity, Wiebe perceives
Lately, in his American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1981), Samuel P. Huntington has argued that
While social and intellectual historians generally have woven a richer, more complicated pattern of American character from the warp of values and the woof of experience, three polarities in particular have called for analysis: individualism and conformity, idealism and materialism, equality and achievement.
In his essay "The Quest for the National Character," David Potter observed that in the long history of thought about American character from Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tosqueville to David Riesman there have been, at bottom, two basic explanations around which almost all other interpretations can be grouped. "The most disconcerting fact about these two composite images of the American," Potter thought, is that they are strikingly dissimilar and seemingly about as inconsistent with one another as two interpretations of the same phenomenon could possibly be. One depicts the American primarily as an individualist and an idealist, while the other makes him out as a conformist and a materialist.
To unlock these seeming contradictions, Potter turned to the American commitment to equality, which Tocqueville called "the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived." Following the logic of equality of opportunity, one encounters an individual committed, in competition with his fellow Americans, to earn the rewards that skill and talent can bring. So compelling was this competitive race that everyone had a kind of obligation to succeed and to manifest the tangible results of his success. "Here, certainly, an equalitarian doctrine fostered materialism, and if aggressiveness and competitiveness are individualistic qualities, then it fostered individualism also." To reconcile the American idealist depicted by Jefferson and the conformist of Tocqueville's presentation, Potter turned to that "strand of equalitarianism which stresses the universal dignity of all men, and which hates rank as a "violation of dignity." The American commitment to progress, based on a prior belief in the perfectibility of man, is idealistic. Yet "American idealism has often framed its most altruistic goals in materialistic terms for instance of raising the standard of living as a means to a better life." The American, in George Santayana's epigram, has been "an idealist working on matter."
While Potter sought in equalitarianism a key to reconciling polarities of individualism and conformity, idealism and materialism, Seymour Lipset has regarded equality as itself one side of a pair of central values that have determined American behavior and institutions. Before the doctrine of equality was enunciated in the Revolutionary period, the Protestant ethic of work and individual achievement had set its imprint on American life. These two cultural themes, equality and achievement, according to Lipset, established a dynamic interaction that has continued to shape the national experience. They may be mutually supportive, inasmuch as "the ideal of equal opportunity institutionalized the notion that success should be the goal of all, without reference to accidents of birth or class or color." On the other hand "the equalitarian ethos of the American Revolution and the achievement orientation of the Protestant ethic...also involve normative conflict." The inevitable variations in personal talent and skill obviously lead to differential rates of success, to material inequality, and to the emergence of a stratified society that, in turn, "has been checked by the recurrent victories of the forces of equality in the political order." American society, Lipset claims, has exhibited a high level of continuity as it perpetually realizes the significance of the two basic values to which it is committed.
The two supposed conversions in American character that probably have had the widest celebrity are a sacrifice of individualism for conformity, and the demise of the achievement ethic. Yet even these notions may be evoked more by idealization of the past than by present-day realities. The mirror that foreign commentary holds up to
Similarly, daily observation lends little support to the criticism that the aspiration level of Americans is in general decline. The ambition, savingst and work habits of new immigrants to the
At the time of this writing, the newest dialectical formulation of American life has featured a drama of "individualism and commitment." Taking their title, purpose, and technique directly from Tocqueville's Democracy in America,
In Sum
Two hundred years ago Thomas Jefferson imagined a nation in continual revolution each generation shaping its own politics and laws, expressing its own culture and society. Surely the historical forces of the past two centuries the recurrent immigration, population shifts among the regions of the country, the massing of metropolises and urban belts, the challenges of science, technology, and industry, the opening up and mixing of the world through modern communications, the anticolonialism and nation building of this century have been sufficient to induce drastic changes. And yet, notwithstanding the great schism of 1861-65 and periodic eras of deep self-criticism, the nation has held its elections like clockwork every two years, admitted citizens, extended the franchise, and added states in orderly process. Sociologists of the 1950s decried the erosion of American individualism, self-direction, work, and religiosity in a culture of joiners, consumers, and hedonists. Social historians of the 1960s deflated some of the hubris in the American "thing" by turning inside-out the pockets of poverty and strains of discrimination in the culture. Today we seem to be rediscovering the durability and persistence of American values and to accept an agenda of unfinished business for
This introduction will end as it began, with the contemporary press and the expression of a new national coherence. In a 1980 essay for Time Magazine called "The Return of Patriotism," Lance Morrow declared that, following "a decade and a half of retreat from institutions, identity, directions, and commitment," Americans were again reaching for unity. While "at its worst, American patriotism degenerates into a coarse form of national self-congratulation," in its higher forms, American patriotism has a sort of abstraction about it that makes it uniquely difficult and valuable: it is a devotion not to a specific physical place, gene pool, cuisine or cultural tradition, but to a political and social vision, a promise and the idea of freedom.
The rhythms of nationalism also were the topic of a front page story in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, March 18, 1984, titled "Patriotism: An Ebb and Flow Fervor." Richard Meyer began his article by noticing evidence of resurgent patriotism: "Three-quarters of Americans polled last summer and fall think their nation's way of life is best. The number of volunteers for military service is up. ROTC is thriving on college campuses." How to explain the historical swings in Americans' feelings about their nation? Meyer sought his answer in the national experience and personal psyche. Some of the historians and social scientists he interviewed cited a reaction to the modern ailment of anomie, the fear of disconnectedness; others called attention to the "status anxiety" of the large numbers of Americans who moved into the middle class during the prosperous 1950s, 1960, and 1970s, and to the quest for identity among our large number of first- and second-generation immigrants.
Regarded as an "
Further
Most students of American national character sooner or later draw on the observations of foreign scholars, journalists, statesmen, and men of letters who have visited the
Americans, too, are perenially crisscrossing the land "in search" of
Nationhood and the growth of American nationalism can be approached through Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origin and Background (
Two dozen movements and moments in
Howard Mumford Jones surveys the marriage of old world myths and traditions to new world conditions in Strange
Any consideration of the effect of the natural and social frontiers of America should begin with Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), which includes his famous essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893), and with Ray A. Billington, (New York, 1966) and Billington, ed., The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (New York, 1966). For literary and other expressions of the frontier ethos, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), Harold P. Simonson, The Closed Frontier: Studies in American Literary Tragedy (New York, 1970), John William Ward, Andrew lackson: Symbol for an Age (New York, 1962), Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1980), and Richard S. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973) and The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York, 1985). George W. Pierson broadened the discussion by arguing that the process of mobility and migration, not geographical frontiers per se, was of first importance, in "The M-Factor in American History," American Quarterly 14 (Summer 1962).
Efforts to grapple with the American character that were motivated by wartime patriotism include Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (New York, 1943), a pioneer anthropological attempt to determine how American culture works, and Denis W. Brogan, The American Character (London, 1944), a friendly effort to explain American attitudes and principles to the British. Geoffrey Gorer's The American People: A Study in National Character (New York, 1948) is a simplified, nettlesome portrait from the "psychocultural" point of view of a British anthropologist. See also Geoffrey Bateson, "Morale and National Character," in Civilian Morale, ed. Bateson (
Essential for background are Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York, 1929) and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York, 1937). The 1950s brought such seminal theses as David Riesman, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character (New Haven, Conn., 1950); William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York, 1956); and David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago, 1954). For other writings by Potter on the national character, including "Abundance and the Turner Thesis," "Is America a Civilization?," "The Quest for the National Character," and "American Individualism in the Twentieth Century," see History and American Society: Essays of David M. Potter (New York, 1973) and Freedom and Its Limitations in American Life (Stanford, Calif., 1976), both edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher.
The 1950s also saw a growing methodological interest among social scientists. Elting E. Morison, ed., The American Style: Essays in Value and Performance (New York, 1958) offered Clyde Kluckhohn's "Have There Been Discernible Shifts in American Values During the Past Generation?," Robert Oppenheimer's "Theory Versus Practice in American Values and Performance," and W. W. Rostow's "The National Style." The American Anthropologist 57 (1955) featured a series of anthropological interpretations of American national character, including Cora du Bois's "The Dominant Value Profile of American Culture."
These and other writings by historians and social scientists on national character, American character, and culture and personality will be found in two excellent annotated bibliographies by Michael McGiffert, "Selected Writings on American National Character," American Quarterly 15 (Summer 1963) and "Selected Writings on American National Character and Related Subjects to 1969," American Quarterly 21 (Summer 1969). McGiffert's gathering of thirty historical and scientific essays, The Character of Americans (1964; rev. ed.,
Ralph Henry Gabriel's UNESCO paper "Traditional Values in American Life" (1960), reprinted in Gabriel, American Values: Continuity and Change, ed. Robert H. Walker (Westport, Conn., 1974), is an excellent directory of American values (in law, religion, education, science, economics, arts, society, and international relations), the traditions out of which they have come, and their chief attributes. Francis Hsu's "Amencan Core Value and National Character," in Psychological Anthropology, ed. Hsu (Homewood, Ill., 1961) represents the contradictory values noted by behavioral scientists as manifestations of a single core value, self reliance, which expresses itself psychologically as fear of dependence.
For definitional and state-of-the-discipline reports see George A. De Vos, "Nahonal Character," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 2 (New York, 1968), emphasizing modal psychological structures and personality and culture, and H. C. J. Duijker and N. H. Frijda, National Character and National Stereotypes: A Trend Report Prepared for the International Union of Scientific Psychology (Amsterdam, 1960), an extensive treatment with bibliography on the concepts, methods, and prospects of national character study. Walter P. Metzger, "Generalizations about National Character: An Analytic Essay," in Generalization in the Writing of History, ed. Louis Gottschalk (Chicago, 1963) takes up the problem of definition and classification before proposing a "dramaturgical model" for the analysis of national character. Robin J. Williams, Jr., "Individual and Group Values," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 371 (May 1967) charts a road to more systematic and comprehensive study of values. See also Anthony F. C. Wallace, Culture and Personality (New York, 1961) and Daniel Bell, "National Character Revisited: A Proposal for Renegotiating the Concept," in rhe Study of Personality: An Interdisciplinary Appraisal, ed. Edward Norbeck et al. (New York, 1968).
Thomas L. Hartshorne, The Distorted Image: Changing Conceptions of the American Character since Turner (
Gunnar Myrdal offered a classic definition of the "American Creed" in An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols. (New York, 1944). See especially Chap. 1, "American Ideals and the American Conscience." Employing "American identity" interchangeably with "American nationality" and "American character," Philip Gleason weighs the ethnic factor in his thoughtful and comprehensive essay "American Identity and Americanization," in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
Much of the contemporary effort to establish character as a legitimate field of social science inquiry, with polling, quantification, and empirical verification, has been associated with Alex Inkeles, author of numerous studies of modernization and social change. Especially relevant here are Inkeles and Daniel J. Levinson, "National Character: The Study of Modal Personality and Sociocultural Systems," in The Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. G. Lindzey and A. Aronson, 2nd ed., vol. 4 (Reading, Mass., 1969); Inkeles, "National Character and Modern Political Systems," in Psychological Anthropology, ed. Francis L. K.
Hsu (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), which surveys studies of the relations between personality patterns and political systems and proposes more effective means of delineating the "democratic character"; Inkeles, "Continuity and Change in the American National Character," in The Third Century: America as a Post-lndustrial Society, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (Stanford, Calif., 1979); and an ensuing dialogue, "Follow Up: The American Character," The Center Magazine (Center for Study of Democratic Institutions), January/February, 1984.
Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York, 1963), pursues themes of American exceptionalism and the conditions for stable democracy in a world of "revolutionary equalitarian and populist (New York, 1972), and Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). See
For further historical accounts of the struggle of unity and dissent and the fluctuations of order and disorder in American society, see Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967), Rowland Berthoff, An Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American History (New York, 1971), and Bernard Sternsher, Consensus, Conflict, and American Historians (Bloomington, Ind., 1975), an historiographical treatment. The theoretical and conceptual essays in John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979) consider at a high level of sophistication the impact of the new social history on the history of ideas in America.
Finally, the American Studies movement has had a peculiar institutional as well as intellectual stake in formulations of the national character. Persons interested in tracing this movement over the past half century might consult Tremaine McDowell, American Studies (Minneapolis, 1948), Sigmund Skard, American Studies in Europe: Their History and Present Organization, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1958), Joseph J. Kwiat and Mary C. Turpie, eds., Studies in American Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images (Minneapolis, 1960), Robert Merideth, ed., American Studies: Essays on Theory and Method (Columbus, Oh., 1968), Cecil F. Tate, The Search for a Method in American Studies (Minneapolis, 1973), and Luther S. Luedtke, ed., The Study of American Culture (DeLand, Fla., 1977).