As Charles Ingalls drove his family west across the frozen Mississippi river, he had no idea that his daughter’s stories would be immortalized as classic American history. Though they were only one family out of tens of thousands to push into America’s heartland, they existed at a time of pivotal transition from homesteading to mass industrialization. Yet despite the dramatic changes in where and how people lived, the fundamental aspects of America remained unchanged. This essay explores who and what Americans are, the threads that stitch our society together, and how the earliest aspects of our culture continue to shape who we are today.
As a furniture builder I have some appreciation for the industrious capability of the early settlers. That is to say, I can only sense the great chasm that exists between twenty-first century woodworking, and raising a family, fending off Indians, and building a homestead. It’s remarkable to consider that for Charles Ingalls, felling trees and building a cabin with no recourse except what he could provide for himself, was simply part of the task of being a man. Yet tens of thousands of settlers chose the dangers and unpredictability of the frontier, over the relative stability of settled lands.
It is this choice, in fact, that makes America what it is. The United States represents a type of natural selection that began with the earliest settlers and continues with modern immigration today. Consider, for example, the type of person who decides to push westward across the Appalachian Mountains, with only a wagon, axe, and his wits to see him through. Today those same people contend with deserts, rivers, and human trafficking while in search of something better. The fact is, most people, whether then or now, will avoid the frontier. For most, even an uncomfortable life is preferable to the possibility of dying. It is no wonder then that America is a collection of inwardly directed, self-reliant, anti-intellectual individuals, who lack pretense and are suspicious of those who harbor it. From necessity more than intelligence, the frontier selected for the bootstrap American while rejecting all aspects of class and European hauteur. “Here there are no aristocratical families,” writes French American Michel-Guillaume Jean De Crèvecoeur. “[N]o courts, no kings, no bishops…The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.” He continues, “The rich stay in Europe; it is only the middling and the poor that emigrate.” (Crèvecoeur, 1782).
In this sense, America disposed its people of class by virtue of geography, while simultaneously instilling a great value for self-reliance and inner-direction. This inner-direction as Sociologist David Riesman (1963) wrote, is defined as an increase in personal mobility, accumulation of wealth, expansion, exploration, and colonization (p. 14). Riesman goes on to say, “the source of direction for the individual is ‘inner’ in the sense that it is implanted early in life by the elders and directed toward generalized by nonetheless inescapably destined goals” (p. 15). In other words, the modern traits of American exceptionalism are engrained in us by prior generations and ultimately those forged by the frontier. In this way, the traits of the most adventurous settlers echo through modern American society.
The frontier, therefore, dispelled all notions of intellectualism by rejecting whatever debate might have been associated with the luxury of the upper class. As Crèvecoeur pointed out, these were not the people to make the journey in the first place, but had they crossed the Atlantic Ocean en masse, they would have found little utility for European intellectualism in the frontier. Indeed, America’s anti-intellectualism, cultivated by the harsh reality of the wilderness, persisted well into the twentieth century. Historian Richard Hofstadter (1966) cites President Eisenhower, who defined an intellectual as, “a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows” (p. 10). This sentiment illustrates the collision between academia and American independence. Ironically, Eisenhower, a West Point grad and hard-nosed Texan, embodied this dichotomy himself. Yet, like Riesman’s inner-direction, America’s anti-intellectualism is born of a frontier where a man’s wits, not his social status, were often the difference between life and death. This environment cultivated a distaste for the superfluous as much as it fueled America’s expansion and industrial might. As the frontier of America’s wilderness diminished, we turned our attention, with no less rugged individualism, to the frontiers of industry and the world.
In summary, Americans are, in a very literal sense, a product of our environment, formed both by our geography and the generations who raised us. America’s culture is not homogeneous in a sense that binds us together in groups, but instead we our bound to one another as individuals. Though modern technology has radically changed how Americans live, there is still no escaping the individualism and self-reliance of our ancestors.
References
Crèvecoeur, M.G. J. (1782). “What is an American?” Letter III of letters from an American farmer.
https://americainclass.org/sources/makingrevolution/independence/text6/crevecoeuramerican.pdf
Hofstadter, R. (1966). Anti-intellectualism in American life. Vintage Books.
Riesman, D., Glazer, N., & Denney, R. (1963). The lonely crowd: A study of the changing American
character. Yale University Press.