Ours was a country created by wildcatters and entrepreneurs, hustlers of every kind. Wide open spaces made for solitude as much as for community, which in turn made for still more extreme individualists—people alone for months on end marinating in their own thoughts and feelings and fancies. The spaciousness also made it easy for Americans, especially at the start and again more recently, to sort themselves into homogeneous, self-reinforcing geographic clusters where all the inhabitants share the same script.
