Americanness

Inquiries into the Thought and Culture of the United States

Simon J. Bronner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429841309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Americanness: Inquiries into the Thought and Culture of the United States analyzes several core themes that connect Americans because of, and despite, their pronounced diversity.

The book investigates shared ideas and ideals, such as individualism, mobility, materialism, and future-orientation, that drive an overarching American worldview. Simon J. Bronner begins with ideas of space and time as they formed and changed through the history of the United States, before moving to the emergence of modern American culture. He examines reasons America is characterized as having a "victory culture" that extends to the American legal, military, and business complexes. This victory culture is further analyzed by looking at the country's relationship with the game of football—a sport that thrives in America but has not caught on in other countries. Finally, the volume probes American consumerism driven by a desire for individual prosperity in a supposedly egalitarian society. Using interdisciplinary approaches drawn from psychology, sociology, ethnology, and history, Bronner seeks explanations for people invoking, and evoking, ideas that they perceive as American.

This book would be an invaluable addition to courses on American history, sociology, cultural studies, and American studies.

1

Space

DOI: 10.4324/9780429452970-2

Eyeing their destination for the first time after an arduous voyage from England, Puritans aboard ship were not much impressed by the shore. But once inland, they waxed poetic about the glorious wooded lands that stretched out for what seemed like eternity. Francis Higginson, a Puritan minister, upon arrival at the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 wrote:

here wants as it were good company of honest Christians to bring with them horses, kine [cows], and sheep to make use of this fruitful land. Great pity it is to see so much good ground for corn and for grass as any under the heavens to lie altogether unoccupied, when so many honest men and their families in old England, through the populousness thereof, do make very hard shift to one by the other.

(Higginson 1950, 78)

For his followers convinced to become settlers in strange surroundings, the value of the New World space was in the familiarity of cleared, arable land that could be made into property. Property marked wealth, and was largely inaccessible to their common sort back home. They described much of the shoreline as wooded “wilderness,” but crediting the indigenous population with their agricultural skill Higginson gushed, “a man may stand on a little hilly place and see divers[e] thousands of acres of ground as good as need to be, and not a tree in the same” (72). The new spaces seemed more fertile, more wondrous than what they remembered in England. He observed, “This country aboundeth naturally with store of roots of great variety and good to eat. Our turnips, parsnips, and carrots are here both bigger and sweeter than is ordinarily to be found in England,” and added:

the abundant increase of corn proves this country to be a wonderment. Thirty, forty, fifty, sixty are ordinary here; yea Joseph’s increase in Egypt is outstripped here with us. Our planters hope to have more than a hundredfold this year, and all this while I am within compass; what will you say of two hundredfold and upwards? It is almost incredible what great gain some of our English planters have had by our Indian corn.

(72)

With this vast expanse of fecund space to be had, the settlers were puzzled that the natives “had no certain fixed place of abode” and did not lay out property in private lots (Hennepin 1950, 294). They appeared to be more communal and have far more fidelity than the settlers to preserving their natural surroundings. In the settlers’ perception, the natives viewed space as what one could see as a broad landscape rather than as private, finite plots of land. The Puritans considered their social as well as spatial differences with the Natives based on the Puritans’ European experience. Compiling a guide to the language of the New England Natives, Puritan minister Roger Williams speculated that perhaps their unusual beliefs and migratory ways owed to their being one of the lost tribes of Israel, and called them a “Folke,” in recognition of their communal social structure in contrast to the hierarchical settlers’ society (Williams 1643, 7). Louis Hennepin, a Belgian Franciscan missionary accompanying La Salle in 1678 on an expedition to the western part of New France, echoed Williams’s comparison of natives with Jews as the European racialized “others” and pointed to their use of space as evidence:

One would be apt to suspect that these savages of America originally sprung from the Jews, some of whom might casually have been wrecked and cast upon that part of the world, for they have several customs not unlike theirs. They make their cabins in the form of tents, like as the Jews did. They anoint themselves with oil, and are superstitiously addicted to divination from dreams.

(Hennepin 1950, 294)

Although a false claim, the symbolic equivalence of Jews and Natives by Williams and Hennepin in different locations of the North American continent underscored the centrality of individually owned property and the dependence on boundaries—social and physical—to the settlers’ conception of New World space.

The growth of the New World land to the settlers was often framed in biblical terms of the Garden of Eden, which now could be reclaimed (Smith [1950] 1978). Listening to the stories of the Illinois nation, Hennepin took note of the contrast of Christian and Native creation beliefs. He wrote:

They say, much like the former, that a woman came down from heaven and hovered awhile in the air, because she could find no place to set her foot upon. The fish of the sea, compassionating her, held a council to determine who should receive her. The tortoise offered himself and presented his back above water. The woman placed herself upon it and stayed there. In time the filth of the sea, gathering and settling about the tortoise by little and little, formed a great extent of land, which at present is that we call America.

(Hennepin 1950, 293)

Hennepin, as a missionary wanting to convert the natives, tried to explain the land-based idea of the Garden of Eden as paradise, from which they were expelled (Hennepin 1950, 292). Instead of Eve made from Adam’s rib, the Illinois related the story that “some time after the spirit came down again to the woman, she brought forth a daughter from whom…is descended that numerous people who now take up one of the largest parts of the universe” (Hennepin 1950, 293).

Early on in the history of North America, colonists divided the space “that we call America” into South and North east of the Appalachian Mountains and the West beyond them, before referring to the “Far West” beyond the vertical marker of the Mississippi River. From a political or commercial standpoint, region might be an official unit that designates a section of a country below the nation, or state. It might combine states or suggest service areas within a state. In this kind of organization, the justification for drawing boundaries is of coverage from an administrative or distribution center. The lines of demarcation might be variously planned by population density, geographic markers, or travel routes. Sometimes boundary lines become disputed and need to be settled administratively as was done by the survey of the famous “Mason–Dixon Line” between 1763 and 1767 that originally settled a conflict between Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, and later was socially perceived as the dividing line between North and South. More often, the state represents official boundaries that do not necessarily follow cultural connection, while region connotes from residents’ viewpoint the place with which people feel socially and environmentally familiar beyond the neighborhood, town, and city.

In contemporary America, when questions of place are raised, people usually reply with reference to physiographic characteristics—high mountains, deep valleys, and extended plains—that become noticeable to one’s view, and residence, because they are different from others surrounding them and presumably affect those who interact with them. Travelers might use region as a frame of reference for geographic location and direction, such as indicating that a place can be found to, and therefore in, the south or west. Although appearing to be a way to get one’s bearings rather than referring to cultural difference, designations such as southern and northern California can evoke folklore defining their differences in a large expanse of coastal land in a state. There might be an allusion to northern California slang in a variation of a traditional riddle-joke “How many northern Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb? Hella!” [probably a contraction of “hell of a,” it is an intensifying adverb usually substituting for “very”]. There is the southern California equivalent in the parodic answer, “They don’t screw in light bulbs; they screw in hot tubs” (or the variation, “one to screw it in and six to share (groove on) the experience”), suggesting an unconventional hedonistic, affluent lifestyle (Dundes 1981). The unofficial division of North and South spaces in this case conveys the view that one affiliates with a regional culture. More so than describing a nondescript “area” or “state” for habitation, region often suggests a social as well as geographic cohesion, a historic and cultural “sense of place,” in an extensive environment.

Region and its relation to nation as a larger unit and locality as a smaller one are significant factors of constructed and inherited cultural identity that are expressed through various traditions and practices. In the United States this is more of an issue than in other countries because the nation had a colonial past of settlement, an indigenous population that established living patterns on the land, borders marking a western frontier that continuously expanded, and a varied landscape and demographic profile. It was not composed of kingdoms that could provide borders based on areas of control, but when compared to the ruling powers of Europe, Africa, and Asia, the United States also was lacking in an ancient lineage that could contribute to regional and national consciousness. Much of the political attention in forming an American “New Republic” in the eighteenth century was therefore cultural and concerned with whether a unified national identity could be maintained while allowing strong pastorally based regional roots to sprout. The dividing line between sectionalism, considered negative, and a healthy regionalism as part of a national whole, cultural as well as political, continued through the divisive Civil War and Reconstruction era in the nineteenth century, the civil rights era in the twentieth century that raised a discourse of race and ethnic domination in regional self-identity in the North and South, the federal “War on Poverty,” also in the twentieth century, that focused on conditions in the Appalachian region, and in the twenty-first century an added awareness of border culture and Southwest history in immigration conflicts at the border. Thus regional culture, usually based on a pastoral ideal established during the colonial period, informs political as well as psychological issues on American places and their relation to the nation and those surrounding it.

A cultural region is one in which residents over a geographic area share a number of expressive features that differ from others. Language, food, and architecture are often the most noticeable cultural expressions that tend to follow regional lines, but queries related to the land might also include place names and legends, festivals and customs, hunting and fishing practices, and agriculture and animal husbandry. Cultural geographers refer to folk regions as native or “emic” perceptions of place beyond the immediate community or residence (Clements 1979; Nicolaisen 1976a). Richard M. Dorson, for example, drew attention to “Little Egypt” as a folk region, and regional identity, in southern Illinois recognized by residents and expressed in various forms of folklore such as speech, games, and songs (Levin 2006). Although there is a historical explanation for the name owing to establishment in 1818 of Cairo, Illinois, because of the analogy between the Mississippi and Nile rivers, a better-known migratory legend relates the regional cohesion of the area when it boasted a plentiful harvest of corn that rescued people to the north suffering from a drought or frost (Dorson 1964, 296–97).

From an ethnographic perspective, a folk region is one associated with a tradition-centered group that dictates much of the round of life in a place. Dutch (or Amish) Country in Pennsylvania, Cajun Country, and the Upland South have all been described as folk regions in this sense, because the dominance of a way of life is more apparent and goes beyond uses of oral tradition to include occupational foodways and architecture that suggest an immersive “cultural landscape.” Indeed, the association of these places with “country” suggests a separatist “sense of place.” Self-identification as being regionally distinctive, and exoteric names for residents as a group, can reinforce this view. For example, in the mostly rural Pine Barrens of New Jersey (Hufford 1986), residents referred to themselves proudly as Pineys to mark their difference from industrialized, urbanized New Jersey to the northeast and metropolises of Philadelphia and Baltimore to the south, and in the multi-ethnic Upper Peninsula of Michigan, folklorist Richard Dorson ([1952] 2008) heard the slang term of “Yoopers” that appeared to him to be both self-deprecating (in response to outsiders’ perceptions of backwardness) and boastful (taking what others hold as negative to be positive and a sign of social belonging).

The operative question in American thinking about region as “homeland” while nation is “country” is how the connection that people make to space is cultural and is sustained through interpersonal, intergenerational transmission, practice, and especially in a mobile society such as the United States through diffusion and hybridization of traditions. A theory that is frequently tested about American regional formation concerns the mixing of ancestries and the formation of new identities in homelands. Questions arise about the ways that European settlers adapted Native-American traditions or rejected them as they took control of the land culturally as well as physically. Another issue was that as the Eastern Seaboard became dominated by white English rule, and a split in economy grew between the plantation South (using slave labor from Africa) and the North (with its yeoman tradition), there was a relative integration of African and non-English patterns (particularly of the German, Celtic, and French) in the westward movement. There was also a different kind of mobility from the Caribbean up the Mississippi River. When the United States annexed former Mexican areas in 1848, another ethnic-regional mix emerged that led to recognition of the “Spanish Southwest” as an extensive cultural or folk region.

A way that perceptions of space shaped regional identity and a difficulty with national unity was in the association of plantation economy with the Lowland South. The idea of the plantation derived from an English farming system of working an agricultural estate with resident labor. Puritans famously established their New England settlement as Plimoth Plantation but their single-crop plantations were on a smaller scale than in the South and could not be sustained into the nineteenth century. Eyeing what they perceived as an undeveloped wilderness further inland, settlers looked beyond their religious enclaves to individualistically farm their own properties to the west, expand their domain, and cultivate wealth (Bercovitch 1975; see also Miller 1956). This land grab had tragic consequences for the Native-American population whose communal claims to hunting grounds obstructed the colonialists’ individual aspirations for property ownership (Lepore 1999). Indeed, it marked a shift from the communal ideals of the Puritans to what historian Sacvan Bercovitch (1975) describes as the roots of capitalist individualism in America. It further marked New England as a distinct region of small-scale farms and crossroads villages and port cities. When textile mills created an American system of manufacturing in the early nineteenth century, they drew on the farms for their labor (Hounshell 1985). Although the yeoman ideal was popularly associated with New England “pioneers” clearing the land and forming a backbone of small-town life, the region also was significant in the growth of urban-industrial centers that affected a paradoxical image of city wage-earners from varied immigrant and racial backgrounds.

Figure 1.1 Reconstruction of Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth, Massachusetts, 2005.

Source: Photo by Muns. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Demand in industrialized Europe for raw products from the New World such as sugar, indigo, and tobacco supported the plantation economy and landscape. Attracted by the moist soil and long growing season of the South, plantations were organized with states specializing in different crops. Virginia led in tobacco cultivation while rice prevailed in South Carolina. At first planters relied on indentured labor, but that was expensive and it became increasingly difficult to compel Europeans to come to the difficult conditions of southern climate and disease. Lured by the promise of land, many indentured servants often sought out farms of their own rather than stay in service. Planters turned to African slavery to fill in labor shortages. By 1840, the U.S. Census counted 2,312,352 slaves in the Lowland South or 47 percent of the area’s population. The Upland South in contrast was half that number. The plantation system in the American South peaked in the mid-eighteenth century but had a resurgence with the spread of cotton plantations in the Deep South in response to increasing demand from European countries. After emancipation, the dependence on the plantation landscape and master–servant relationship continued with tenant farming and Jim Crow laws that created a racialized debtor underclass and limited mobility. With depletion of the soil because of single cash crops such as tobacco, many white farmers, turned pioneers, were impelled to migrate west across the Appalachian Mountains to find new lands. The South did not build the concentration of industrial-urban centers as the Northeast and the Old Northwest did. Based upon this heritage of plantations reliant on large, flat expanses of land, an elite white planter class, and African slavery, the South, divided between the Lowlands and Uplands, developed a strong regional identity indicated by the political rhetoric of the “Solid South” that suggested a national unity and white master class worldview (Fox-Genovese and Genovese 2005; Grantham 1992; Taylor 1961).

Figure 1.2 “The Old Plantation.” C. 1880.

Source: Lithograph. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

If “worldview,” i.e., a general outlook that reflects an internalized value system, is subjective evidence from expression of beliefs and customs, objective evidence in the form of dialect, housing, and gravestones has been used to map smaller regional affiliations then the meta-region of the South (Dundes 1971; Marshall and Vlach 1973). Examples of regions named by this process are the Pennsylvania Culture Region (PCR) that crosses state lines and the Mormon Culture Region (MCR) in the American West (Gastil 1975, 165–74, 237–43; Glass 1986; Meinig 1965; Yorgason 2003). Analysts use this procedure to identify exceptions to regional formation in which “isoglosses” or subregions form (e.g., “Delmarva” also known as the “Eastern Shore” between the PCR and Lowland South and the “Down East” culture extending from coastal area of northeastern Maine into Canada’s maritime provinces that show differences, some of them ethnically and linguistically based, from the larger New England region). They also will try to assess areas of ethnic mixing and cultural exchange that could result in hybridized, urbanized, or creolized regional cultures emerging (e.g., the “Metropolitan New York Region” and Creole or Cajun culture of Louisiana).

Subjective approaches base regional influence, and indeed individual and social agency to create or “perform/practice” place-based identity, upon the “esoteric” self-perception of residents and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Space
• 2. Time
• 3. Winning
• 4. Money
• References
• Index