The Americans, Vol. 2: The National Experience (The Americans #2)

Example 1: New England Versatility.
New Englanders “greatest resource was resourcefulness” as exemplified by their entrepreneurial success with cod fishing and factories. The lack of specialized workers was a blessing in disguise for America because it made room for the generalists who were willing to think outside the box. Important innovations were made because “Americans did not know any better.” The American genius was less for invention than for experiment. New England versatility shaped two tendencies in American civilization: 1) machines, not men, became specialized; 2) general intelligence and open minds were more valuable than trained hands.

Example 2: Pioneers.
American searched for new communities as they headed west to conquer a continent and they did not wait for government to prepare their way. However, the rugged individual is a myth. Communities formed before there were governments to care for public needs or to enforce public duties.

Example 3: Boosters.
“Boosters” are people who promoted new settlements and towns. Rather than building walls to keep strangers out, boosters attracted new citizens and enticed them to leave the comfortable East for the chance at Western community and prosperity.

Example: Southerners.
In contrast to other fluid communities, the South, with its deep roots was like an island. “No other part of the nation became more conscious of its identity or more passionately asserted its homogeneity.” Belief in uniformity tended to create uniformity. The south became the most unreal, most powerful, and most disastrous oversimplification in American history.”

Example 1. American Land was Vague.
Nothing did more to keep the American open to “happy accidents” than the seemingly endless amount of land. Never before had so populous a modern nation lived in so ill defined a territory.

Example 2: American Language was Vague.
“The new riches of an American language were not found in the pages of an American Shakespeare or Milton but on the tongues of Western boatmen, town boosters, fur traders, explorers, Indian fighters, and sodbusters. America had no powerful literary aristocracy, no single cultural capital, no London. And the new nation gave the language back to the people.”

Example 3: American Symbols Were Vague.
America formed a nation before it had “a national spirit of the kind which elsewhere had created nations.” In the Old World, national symbols and popular heroes had commonly been “a byproduct of a long history of wars and of the struggle for nationhood.” Americans created their own symbols, and the first example was the mythologizing of George Washington, “who attained a stature in death which he had never attained in life.” Washington became all things to all Americans.

Example 4: American Governance was Vague.
American pragmatism ensured diffusion of administrative authority. In the federalist system, political unity was left to political parties, which focused practical energies and enthusiasms. Political parties thus became one of the most effective nationalizing influences in American life.

The diffuseness of American life broke down dogmas and blurred distinctions. Ideology was displaced by organization. Sharp distinctions of thought and purpose were overshadowed by the need to get together on nearly self-defining common purposes. So long as problems of American political life remained compromisable, the political parties were the great arenas of compromise. When this ceased to be true, the nation itself would be on the brink of dissolution; and the political parties; like the nation itself, would have to be reconstructed.