Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character

Made in America

A Social History of American Culture and Character

CLAUDE S. FISCHER

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

CLAUDE S. FISCHER is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including To Dwell Among Friends (1982), America Calling (1992), Inequality by Design (1996), and Century of Difference (2006). He is also the founding editor of Contexts magazine.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2010 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2010

Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-25143-1 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-25143-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-25145-5 (electronic)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fischer, Claude S., 1948–

Made in America : a social history of American culture and character / Claude S. Fischer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-25143-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-25143-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. National characteristics, American. 2. United States—Civilization. 3. United States—Social life and customs. I. Title.

E169.1.F538 2010

973—dc22                                                   2009024798

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

To Avi and Leah,

who will help build the American future

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

1 THE STORIES WE TELL

2 SECURITY

3 GOODS

4 GROUPS

5 PUBLIC SPACES

6 MENTALITY

7 CLOSING

Notes

List of Abbreviations

Works Cited

Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

I have spent much of the last twenty years immersed in American social history, reading a trove of detailed yet evocative studies of ordinary people’s everyday lives in times long ago. Partly it was just fascination with the stories, learning about the routines, challenges, and outlooks of early tobacco growers fighting disease in the Chesapeake region, farm girls going to work in the mills of antebellum Massachusetts, businessmen striving to make a go of it in new Midwestern towns, young brides trying to fashion a domestic home on the barren Western frontier, and myriad other players in the American experience. Immersion in this literature has been a pleasure, not only an education.

But I also wanted to use this rich scholarship to address the classic issue of modernity. What has modern life, the coming of industry, technology, metropolises, and wealth, meant for the experiences and personalities of average people? Are there distinctively modern individuals, and if so, what are the culture and character of such individuals? Sociology, my profession, arose in response to these questions, and sociologists remain entranced by them.

This book applies what I learned from social historians—and from other scholars as well—to a few facets of the modernity question, American version. It starts with the basics that condition culture and character: life, health, security, and assets. Modern Americans gained much more of each; did those gains translate into greater confidence or perhaps a greater pursuit of goods? The book then turns to Americans’ personal relationships, describing the proliferation of small groups, public activities, and social choices in modern life. Strikingly, the voluntarism that distinguished the culture of colonial America—a melding of individualism with community—seems to have strengthened and expanded over time. Modern life allowed more Americans to become more typically American, to be independent persons in voluntary communities. The book finally turns to character, asking whether modern Americans think or feel differently than their ancestors did; are they, for example, more skeptical or more anxious? Strikingly, the answer is, much less than one might imagine. Yet more Americans gained cognitive skills and developed emotional habits which enabled them to more fully participate in the voluntaristic culture that characterizes America.

*

I must first acknowledge the social historians upon whose findings this book is built. Their efforts to uncover the lived past were long and hard work. Having done some historical research myself (America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone), I can testify that working the archives requires serious discipline. I hope I have been faithful to their scholarship.

Research support for this book has been slim but steady, small annual grants from University of California, Berkeley’s Committee on Research. It has funded, over much of two decades, many students to help me sift through the voluminous literature: John Chan, Cristina Cielo, Christine Getz, Graham Hill, Steven Kerr, Benjamin Moodie, Michael Pelton, Jon Pennington, Tom Pessah, Amy Schalet, Lisa Stampnitzky, Charles Stephens, Jennifer Utrata, Ann Wood, and Richard Wood. Avi Fischer and Leah Fischer provided a bit of help, too.

As this project matured into a book, I benefited from partial readings by Michael Hout, John Levi Martin, Peter Stromberg, Viviana Zelizer, and Sharon Zukin, and by sociology editors Karl Bakeman and Tim Sullivan. James T. Sparrow read and commented on the whole book; Paul DiMaggio did the same with such intensity and thoroughness that he could have asked for coauthorship.

Working with the University of Chicago Press team, led by legendary and exuberant editor Doug Mitchell and his assistant Tim McGovern, has once again been a delight. Mary Gehl edited a complex manuscript with diligence. Matt Avery gets credit for the design and Levi Stahl for the marketing campaign (and book naming).

Finally and fulsomely, I thank my family. My children, Avi and Leah, patiently watched me disappear into the study to work on this project from their toddler years to their adulthood. Ann Swidler played two roles. It will be clear to many sociologists that I have engaged and appropriated some of her ideas without giving full credit; you can learn something over one-third of a century of marriage. And she has unstintingly, enthusiastically sympathized with and supported all my efforts, small and large, from rooting for the Giants to this lengthy project. A woman of worth . . . The heart her husband safely trusts in her, and he shall have no lack of gain.

1. The Stories We Tell

The former drover George C. Duffield, whose memoir of a cattle drive inspired the television series Rawhide, recalled his mother’s life on the Iowa frontier in the 1820s and ’30s. She cared for the babies, cleaned the floors, made the beds, cultivated a garden, dressed turkeys, cured meat, made candles, preserved fruit, spun and knitted to make clothing, cut the children’s hair, taught them to spell, and did the thousand things for us a mother only finds to do. Hall of Fame ballplayer Cal Ripken Jr., whose Iron Man career inspired thousands of little leaguers, recalled his mother’s life during the 1960s and ’70s. Because his father was also a ballplayer, she did some of both parents’ duties. She kept score at his games, coached his hitting, and bucked him up when he lost. When Cal Sr. was home, she joined in family basketball games (she had a really good two-handed set shot). On the road, she packed and unpacked, set up housekeeping, did the laundry, handled the family budget, and settled the children’s quarrels. Ripken did not mention, as Duffield had, the food, clothing, barbering, and schooling that his mother took care of—that went without saying. He noted instead the emotional support and companionship she provided.¹

Such contrasting memoirs illustrate how greatly Americans’ everyday lives changed over a century and a half—both in the mundane details of life and in their personal nature. This book asks how Americans’ culture and character developed over the nation’s history. The long answer to that question is complex, partial, and sometimes surprising. The short answer is that centuries of material and social expansion enabled more people to become more characteristically American, meaning—among other things—insistently independent but still sociable, striving, and sentimental. Answering this question calls for a history that is not focused on presidents and politics but on ordinary people living ordinary lives, a social history. The question generates many detailed inquiries pursued in the chapters that follow. How have longer life spans affected Americans’ sense of control over their lives? How has greater wealth affected Americans’ taste for luxury? Have more city living and faster communications enriched or depleted individuals’ social ties? Have Americans become increasingly satisfied or more discontent?

Understanding the cultural and psychological path Americans have taken not only satisfies our curiosity, it helps us think about the path Americans should take. Historians, for example, have intensely debated the mindset of farmers in the colonial era. Did they try to shrewdly maximize their families’ wealth, or did they simply follow traditional, local practices? Behind this question lies a broader one: were American farmers individualists from the earliest colonial days or did they become so only in the nineteenth century? Energizing this debate is the feeling that if early Americans subordinated their individual interests to those of the community, then more collective arrangements could work in America again. If, on the other hand, early Americans calculatingly pursued their private interests, that would seem to imply—incorrectly perhaps—that Americans are self-interested by nature and suggest—incorrectly perhaps—that communitarian reforms are futile. What historians discover in, say, farmers’ ledgers from the 1700s does not logically imply taking one political position versus another. But history is psychologically, rhetorically compelling. That is why political combatants wheel out their own versions of history: as artillery in battles for public opinion. As to this example, the historical record suggests that Americans’ degree of self-interestedness has changed little over the centuries. In other ways, however, Americans’ character did change; they seemed, for example, to become more sentimental.

The fundamental contrast between early Americans and today’s Americans in their circumstances of life, the material and social conditions that influence culture and character, can be captured by the word more. Modern Americans have more of almost everything: more time on Earth, more wealth, more things, more information, more power, more acquaintances, and so many more choices. Not more of absolutely everything—twenty-first-century Americans, for example, have fewer siblings and cousins—but generally, more Americans gained more access to more things material, social, and personal. Americans began as a people of plenty, in historian David Potter’s words, but became even more so. And, over the generations, more of those who had been outside the circle of plenty and outside the culture of independence which that plenty sustained—a culture which I will describe shortly—joined it. In this sense, more Americans became more American.

Before elaborating on these ideas, I need to address some conventional misunderstandings of American social history. I discuss several specific myths of the American past and a few habits of thought that currently cloud our views of that past.

MYTHS OF AMERICAN SOCIAL HISTORY

Much of what we know—and I include many sociologists such as myself in the we—is mythical. Some myths are mere folktales easily and often debunked, like the story that the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Other myths are more subtle. For example, the familiar lament that families no longer take dinner together assumes that typical Americans had until recently shared such meals. However, this supposedly timeless tradition arose only among the middle class in the late nineteenth century. Similarly, people often regret that religious holidays are no longer sacred holy days. But such holidays, too, are often recent inventions or reinventions. Over two hundred years ago, for example, the American Christmas was more a carnival of excess than a religious experience. It was only around the end of the nineteenth century that the family-and-church Christmas that modern Americans consider to be traditional developed, thanks in some measure to A Christmas Carol and ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.²

More important than these sorts of misconceptions is the deeper, conventional wisdom about American history that academics, politicians, journalists, and writers of all sorts regularly invoke. Hardworking historians have in recent decades mined rich veins of archives, bringing to the surface stories of how Americans of the past really lived, revealing how much those conventional assumptions turn out to be myths or half-truths. Here are five illustrations.

* Myth: over the generations Americans moved around more. The belief that residential mobility increased is one of my favorite myths, because it is so widespread, so contrary to fact, and yet so resistant to correction. Many learned essayists speak of our increasingly mobile society and the disorientation all this modern moving around supposedly creates. In 2001, for example, the editorial page of the New York Times attributed recent changes in American family life in part to the ever-growing mobility of Americans. In 2008, an eminent psychiatrist explained a spurt in suicides by Americans’ more frequent moves away from friends and relatives. In fact, Americans moved around less and less in those very years and less and less over recent decades. Furthermore, modern Americans change homes and neighborhoods less often than Americans did in the mid-twentieth century and less often than Americans did in the early nineteenth century, the years of George Duffield’s childhood.³

* Myth: Americans turned away from religion. Sage commentators sometimes mourn, sometimes celebrate, the decline of religion and the rise of existential doubt. In fact, proportionately more twentieth-century Americans belonged to churches than belonged in prior centuries. Rates of membership fell a bit after the 1950s, but participation in churches still remained more widespread than in earlier eras. Whether modern churchgoers remained believers or became skeptics is hard to determine, but evidence suggests that Americans have generally kept the faith.⁴

* Myth: Americans became more violent. The specter of violent crime haunts contemporary Americans and they typically believe that life was safer in earlier days. This perception is basically wrong. Criminal violence fluctuates sharply in the short term—historically low in the 1950s, rising rapidly in the 1960s through 1980s, and then declining almost to 1950s levels by 2000. In a longer view, early-twenty-first-century Americans run a notably lower risk of being assaulted or killed than Americans ran in the nineteenth century or before. The general culture of violence—including bar brawls; gang attacks; wife, child, and animal abuse; eye-gouging fights; and the like—dissipated.⁵

* Myth: Americans became increasingly alienated from their work. Many commentators assume that modern industry forced workers who had been independent craftsmen into specialized, repetitious, subservient, and disheartening jobs, pointing to, say, the unemployed artisanal carriage-maker forced to work on the automobile assembly line. This certainly happened to many individuals. But if we consider American workers as a whole, far more of them and their children gladly left the drudgery of farming or labor, such as stevedoring, to move into more stimulating jobs, such as industrial and clerical work, however imperfect those were. Americans’ labor became less alienating.⁶

* Myth: Americans became indifferent to the needy. We once took care of one another, some people say to indict modern selfishness and others say to indict the modern nanny state. In fact, earlier generations did at best a mediocre job of caring for the needy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans gave some assistance to longtime neighbors who were widowed, orphaned, or disabled through no fault of their own. However, the destitute who were strangers, newcomers, or morally suspect instead received directions to leave town. In the twentieth century, growing affluence and a variety of government programs virtually eliminated starvation and radically reduced poverty. These and other signs indicate growing—not lessening—sympathy over the generations.⁷

Such mythic misunderstandings of American social and cultural history persist. Sometimes, they even determine public policy, say, about crime or poverty. The myths in part follow from the systematic ways that we—both scholars and the general public—think about history, about how we tell stories.

Habitual Stories

Nostalgia contributes to mythologizing the past. As individuals, we draw on the gauzy memories of our own childhoods; as a culture, we share a millennia-long grief about the loss of Eden. Scholars, even secular ones, are not immune. Polemicists of both the Right and Left share the yearning for a mythic past. Nineteenth-century continental writers who bemoaned the loss of gemeinschaft—the small and intimate community yet untainted by modernity—accepted the romantic images of rural life in that era’s fiction and painting. Longing for a world we have lost spurs both reactionaries to call for a return to the past and radicals to call for a revolution against the present.⁸

We also have a habit of seeing our specific moment in history as an epochal turning point. Judeo-Christian tradition invests historical events with great import; each drives us closer to the End of Days. Here, too, secular thinkers share this inclination. Hegel and Marx, for example, were convinced that the novelties of any particular era represented the fulfillment of some hidden purpose implicit throughout earlier historical progression. Such thinking leads us to exaggerate change, to read our time as the best of times or the worst of times, or even both at the same time (as Dickens labeled both the age of the French Revolution and his own era, about seventy years later). But this habit of thought misleads us. Most generations live, by definition, in ordinary times. Why not us?⁹

Another habit is to view the past as normal, natural, and eternal, thereby making today seem abnormal, unnatural, and changeable. Many traditions, like the family Christmas or mothers’ spiritual role in the family, seem immemorial only because people cannot remember when those practices started. Many supposedly timeless folkways turn out to be recent developments, including the Zambian bride-wealth system, Maori creation myths, celebrations of birthdays, and Americans’ renderings of customs from the old country.¹⁰

We weave stories, creating the past perhaps as much as remembering it. Precolonial New England was a forest primeval, for example, only in the romantic stories of nineteenth-century authors. (The natives had already heavily worked over the land.) Holidays, statues, and television docudramas are all about constructing what historians call collective memory. Intense struggles break out over how those memories ought to be constructed. For several years after 1968, partisans fought over whether Americans would remember Martin Luther King Jr. as a liberator, or as a troublemaker, or not at all. The institution of a national holiday settled that argument. It is no wonder that noisy disputes break out over school history books, for example, over how to best describe the lives of women or the conditions of slaves in the past.¹¹

It is no wonder, as well, that Americans of differing backgrounds remember the nation’s history differently. In a survey conducted in the 1990s, almost all white respondents asked to describe the American past answered largely in terms of their own families’ histories. Black respondents, in contrast, more commonly described the past in collective, racial terms. Ironically, although the black interviewees often talked about slavery and oppression, most of them said that the nation was making progress. White respondents, on the other hand, overwhelmingly said that their own families were doing fine but the nation was in decline.¹²

We typically tell and understand history as a set of stories (narratives, academics say) rather than as just one thing happening after another. Stories provide coherence, plot, and dramatic tension; they tell us why things happened and what the moral is. The Civil War, for example, tested the proposition that all men are created equal and provided a new birth of freedom, according to master storyteller Abraham Lincoln. One grand story about America is triumphal and romantic: Americans built a shining city on the hill by pioneering, gumption, democracy, welcoming immigrants, and so on. Disenchanted historians of the 1960s recast the American story as bitter and tragic: Americans’ hopes were dashed by heroes undone, Indians murdered, Africans enslaved, workers repressed, immigrants deracinated, environments befouled, and so on. During the early 1990s, essayists dueled in the journals of opinion about a set of national historical standards that a team of historians had developed for teaching of fifth- through twelfth-grade history. Conservative critics saw the proposed content as too tragic, too critical. One of them wrote, A nation grown cynical about its own history soon ceases to be a nation at all.¹³

The romantic and tragic versions of American history derive in part from greater epics of Western history. One epic is utopian: modern society is the summit of, or at least a station on the way to, Progress. The other is dystopian: modern society is a pit into which we have fallen. Other possible sagas, such as seeing history as an endless cycle of pretty much the same thing over and over, make little sense to Westerners. Most Americans tacitly believe both stories, the optimistic and the pessimistic. (Regular people are not ideologically consistent—and why should they be?) Depending on the events of a particular day, we see progress or decline. In the last several decades, Americans seem to have increasingly seen decline.¹⁴

The Modernization Story

Many scholars have long held onto a specific story called modernization theory: once, Western societies were traditional—small, simple, and intimate—and then sometime between the sixteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, material conditions, social arrangements, and cultural ideas changed radically, bringing forth modern society—large, complex, and impersonal. The many variants of this story all presume that a social revolution occurred—for example, the rise of manufacturing or the development of science—which had cascading effects. Societies are so tightly woven that changes in one domain radiated through others and eventually altered how people think and feel. The result, goes the theory, was a shift from tradition to modernity.¹⁵

Criticisms of modernization theory fill the pages of academic journals. Critics attack, for example, its assumption that societies are tightly knit, or its image of earlier communities as simple and orderly. Of particular interest to us is the charge that modernization theory generally depicts twentieth-century America as the quintessential modern society, but America does not really fit the theory. Typically, the modernization thesis assumes that a people have had a feudal past, peasantry, and common heritage—think of a remote Alpine village. But none of these existed in early America. Often, critics imagined that they had buried modernization theory—only to see its ghost soon again roaming the halls of academe. It rises from the dead because it provides a powerful, all-encompassing story, one which corresponds to popular understandings and one which can tie together many historical strands.¹⁶

Indeed, historians bemoan all the loose threads that comprise the study of American social history. Especially since the 1960s, researchers have uncovered a treasure of detailed information about the past—about family patterns, neighborhoods, work, leisure, immigrants, slaves, farmers, homemakers, and the new middle class, each in particular communities and years. But this fortune became burdensome. We were—and still are, wrote one historian in 1992, snowed under by an avalanche of information, much of it unassimilable into a coherent national narrative. And so historians ask: how do we develop larger frameworks of meaning that help to grasp the . . . long-run historical change and continuity? Modernization theory remains, mainly by default, the most common framework.¹⁷

Perhaps historians should be guided by no grand story at all and just tell what happened, one thing after another. But this is not really possible. No one is an unfocused lens; we all fix on certain issues, attend to some themes and not others. Similarly, try as we might to avoid reading some coherence, plot, or moral into history, eventually we must sum it all up and try to make sense of what happened. In the next two sections of this introduction, I outline the topics in American social history I have selected to explore and the summary story I have extracted.

THEMES AND THESIS

My purpose is to sketch how American culture and character changed—or did not change—over the course of the nation’s history from the colonial era to the turn of the twenty-first century. This is, of course, an outrageously vast and absurdly ambitious goal. By necessity, therefore, I focus on only a handful of themes and give only brief attention to many other worthy topics, such as Americans’ work lives and how they dealt with race. I am struck that underlying most social trends is the vast expansion, between the years shortly before George Duffield’s childhood and the years of Cal Ripken Jr.’s childhood, in how much more Americans had gained materially, socially, and culturally. How did having so much more in so many realms—more clothes, more comfort, more clubs, more religions, more acquaintances, and so on—alter how Americans thought, felt, and behaved?¹⁸ The specific themes are as follows.

* Security. By the middle of the twentieth century more Americans were freer from physical and economic threats than ever before. This development was uneven; for example, young Americans faced increased economic vulnerabilities at the turn of the twenty-first century. Still, the long span of American history brought average Americans a level of material security that even wealthy Americans in earlier periods could not achieve. How much that reality translated into feeling secure is less certain.

* Goods. From the start, Americans were a people of plenty, and their collection of goods only accelerated. Observers have long said that all this buying and owning corroded American character and may have turned Americans into a consumerist nation. The evidence suggests that in this respect, however, American character did not change. Americans today may be entranced by consumer glitter, but so were Americans centuries ago. Critically, mass production, mass distribution, and mass credit meant that more Americans could attain the goods that were part of the good life. Security and goods together created a foundation for the expansion of middle-class American culture.

* Groups. America began as an unusually individualistic society—more precisely, a voluntaristic society, as I explain below—and only became more so. More Americans participated in more groups of more kinds, including relatively new kinds of groups, such as clubs, work teams, and free-floating friendships. They not only took advantage of these social options to form new sorts of bonds, they also used them to maintain independence from and voice in each group. The broadest example is how women gained greater power in American households.

* Public spaces. American culture emphasizes the small, voluntary group, and the spareness of early American settlement encouraged private life. But through roughly the nineteenth century, more Americans discovered and joined in a vibrant public life on city streets, in department stores, at amusement parks, and in movie houses. Then, as the twentieth century unrolled, Americans moved back into their private homes and parochial social groups. Americans’ participation in politics followed a similar arc of greater and then lesser involvement in the public space.

* Mentality. For centuries, middle-class Americans worked on their selves—their characters—whether they were colonial landowners copying the British gentry or religious enthusiasts preparing their souls for salvation. As America became materially and socially richer, more people engaged in such self-perfecting. Americans became no smarter nor more rational than their ancestors, but they gained a set of cognitive and practical tools to operate in the world, tools that gave them greater command of their lives and themselves. Americans learned to restrain their disruptive emotions and cultivate their socially useful ones, like sympathy and sentimentality. The end result was probably somewhat better mental health and a bit more happiness.

What runs through these seemingly disparate themes is an argument: the availability and expansion of material security and comfort enabled early American social patterns and culture to expand and solidify, to both delineate and spread an American national character. With growth, more people could participate in that distinctive culture more fully and could become more American.

This claim is somewhat unusual among grand narratives about Americans. Writers more commonly describe modern American culture and character as a break with or even a reversal of the past—and usually for the worse. Many, usually in the mid-twentieth century, depicted modern Americans as having lost their ancestors’ individuality, as having become sheep in a mass society. Others, usually in the late twentieth century, described modern Americans as self-absorbed, even selfish individualists who have torn apart the tight-knit communities of their ancestors. I am unpersuaded by assertions of revolutionary change in either direction and am more impressed by continuity over the centuries. (This, perhaps, is why Tocqueville’s 1836 classic, Democracy in America, still speaks to us.) Americans came to live, think, and feel more intensely in ways distinctive to mainstream, middle-class American culture; they became more American.

But what do I mean by mainstream American culture and character? By culture, I refer to the collection of shared, loosely connected, taken-for-granted rules, symbols, and beliefs that characterize a people. That culture is declared, sustained, and enforced by what sociologists call institutions, such as family, law, arts, and religion. By national character, I refer to ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that individuals typically share with others in their nation. A central feature of American culture and character is voluntarism.

Voluntarism

The first key element of voluntarism is believing and behaving as if each person is a sovereign individual: unique, independent, self-reliant, self-governing, and ultimately self-responsible. Free men of early America stressed the importance of attaining what they called competency or virtue, the independence that came with having enough property to support a household on one’s own. The second key element of voluntarism is believing and behaving as if individuals succeed through fellow-ship—not in egoistic isolation but in sustaining, voluntary communities. I describe American voluntarism in more detail in chapter 4, but here I point out a few of its implications and address some objections.¹⁹

In a voluntaristic culture, people assume that they control their own fates and are responsible for themselves. Contrast that notion to what most cultures have historically presumed, that individuals are only parts of a social whole, acting out roles determined by God or fate and by those who rank above them (think, for example, of the medieval serf). A voluntaristic culture encourages people to examine and improve themselves, because they can and because their individuality is key to their fortunes. A voluntaristic culture implies procedural equality; each person is free in principle to join or leave the group and none can coerce another. Because success means doing well in voluntary groups, a voluntaristic culture also encourages individuals to strive for status. In several ways, then, many traits that outside observers have for generations described as particularly American—such as self-absorption, can-do confidence, egalitarianism, conformism, and status-striving—derive from a voluntaristic culture.²⁰

To be sure, observers have described many other ways that Americans stand apart, such as their intense faith, moralism, violence, and cheeriness. These distinctive traits may derive from sources other than voluntarism and may in some ways contradict voluntarism. It may be hard, for example, to square belief in a God who has a plan for everyone with belief that each individual is responsible for his or her own destiny, but people do. Cultures, as well as individuals, need not be and are not logically consistent. The core distinction of American culture, I am arguing, is its voluntarism.

Even in the eighteenth century, more Americans than Europeans participated in a voluntaristic culture. Visiting European gentry often complained in particular about all the equality they saw in America. Yet most Americans of that era were still not fully part of this culture. Most did not see themselves as autonomous self-creators nor as free to join or leave social groups; they saw the world more the way members of the subservient classes in feudal Europe did. They were dependents without competency: servants, slaves and descendants of slaves, subjugated natives, wives, children, the poor, the ill, the uneducated, and the newly arrived. Over the centuries, however, servitude nearly disappeared, and more Americans in these categories became part of the now-majority, middle-class or bourgeois culture of voluntarism.1

Voluntarism provides a frame for weaving together many threads in the story of American social change, but loose strands still remain. Other things happened, ranging from the construction of a racial caste system to the multiplication of television sets, that shaped American culture and character. The expansion of voluntarism is a central story I tell, but it is not the only one that needs to be told.

Objections and Responses

After the 1960s, many American scholars, now focused by civil rights movements on diversity, objected to studies of national character. One historian wrote in 1988: The concept of a national character has been shattered by the historical pluralism of the past two decades; like Humpty Dumpty it is beyond saving. Americans are too varied to have a national character or a common history. How, they asked, can one lump the experiences of men and women, black and white and Latino, worker and farmer, and so forth into one box? True: most societies are complex, pluralistic, and often conflicting, including that of early America. Nonetheless, out of this variety emerged a dominant social character, which I describe as voluntarist, which originated among Northeastern Protestants and then spread and gained power over time. Increasing proportions of women, youth, ethnic minorities, and the working class adopted that culture, even after sometimes resisting it. (Nineteenth-century Catholic institutions, for instance, tried to protect their immigrant members from the American culture’s insistence on free thinking.) While many scholars emphasize the survival of ethnic diversity into the twenty-first century, what is sociologically striking is the extent to which the American mainstream has overflowed and washed away that diversity, leaving behind little but food variety and self-conscious celebrations of multiculturalism.²¹

Those skeptical about national character can point, for example, to the fact that homicide rates in Louisiana run about nine times higher than those in North Dakota, as large as a gap as that between the Ukraine and Iceland. They can also point to how much is shared across national borders, for example, the political similarities of English-speaking societies. Both arguments—that the United States is internally diverse and that it is in some ways similar to other nations—are valid challenges to the idea of a national culture. Nonetheless, important distinctions do coincide with national borders. All but a few small American states have homicide rates higher than those of other Western nations; so we can say that the United States is distinctively violent among affluent, Western societies. And American voting rates run substantially below those of comparable English societies; so we can say that Americans are distinctive that way, too. Discussing distinctive national character does make sense.²²

A different challenge to my description of American national character points out that voluntarism hardly applies to the extremely involuntary experience of slaves and their descendants unto this day. Does this not negate the claim of a singular, national character? No. All national cultures are complex and contradictory. The centrality in American life of this particular contradiction is precisely what earned its racial caste system the label of The American Dilemma. Nonetheless, in the centuries-old contest between the Northeastern culture of voluntarism and Southern hierarchical culture, it is clear which side has had history—and armies and wealth and ideological power—on its side, which side has long claimed national dominance. The victims of the defeated system, which was finally defeated only about a generation ago, are now and only too-slowly benefitting.

Skepticism about national character leads many scholars to also reject the common description of America as an exceptional society. For over a century, many historians influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner have sought to explain American history in terms its special traits, such as an open frontier. Sociologists have wondered why the United States avoided the socialism of Europe and speculated that its wealth or ethnic diversity explains its distinction. But the notion of exceptionalism is now in ill repute, according to an historian writing in 1995. The ill repute rests in part on linguistic confusion. Exceptional can mean unusually good or, in some renderings, being immune to the general laws of history. Both implications rankle many scholars. The common meaning of exceptional, however, is simply unusual. In many ways, America is in fact noticeably unusual among major Western countries. Americans, for example, are the most accepting of economic inequality, the most religious, the most patriotic, and the most voluntarist of Westerners. All societies, of course, are exceptional in some fashion—not better, not worse, but distinct in their own particular ways. Much of America’s history broadened and strengthened its distinctiveness.²³

Saying that American social history moved in the direction of deepening its national culture risks implying some sort of inevitability, of suggesting that history unfolded in some destined fashion. In truth, that social history involved starts and stalls and reversals, such as economic depressions and civil disorders. Some events stymied the widening of the American mainstream—the rise of Jim Crow, for example—and others accelerated it—like the economic boom after World War II. Moreover, Americans fought over these cultural patterns, in apocalyptic fashion on the battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg, but also in more mundane ways, over issues such as public schooling, alcohol, and women’s rights. There was no inevitability. Still, the general trends toward greater security, increasing wealth, and more social groups meant that, in the long run, American voluntarism expanded.

EVIDENCE, CAVEATS, AND AUDIENCE

How do we know how American culture and character changed over the centuries? Too often, one picks up a book addressing this topic only to discover the author intently describing changes in how intellectuals talked about American culture and character. Ideas do matter, but typically the winds of intellectual ferment hardly disturb the deep currents of social transformations. (Can we, for example, take seriously the claim made by one author that quantum theory unsettled Americans’ sense of security, given that most Americans do not believe in evolution, much less invisible quanta?) Difficult as it is, we must search for direct evidence of how average Americans thought, felt, and acted.²⁴

There is so-called hard evidence: the censuses, surveys, and administrative records that measure Americans’ behavior and sometimes their opinions and feelings as well. But the farther back we go, before World War II and certainly before 1900, the more we must rely on so-called soft evidence, such as diaries, letters, memoirs, and news accounts. We must also infer people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior from the material aspects of their lives. For example, historians surmise that early Americans rarely invited guests into their homes, because those homes rarely had chairs. Others infer from tiny tombstones carved with only the word Baby that early American parents were emotionally distant from their newborns. Whether using a survey result from 2005, a young girl’s diary of 1835, or kitchenware from 1685, researchers must be skeptical of all evidence, search for confirmation, compare it to others, and place it within a larger set of such data. With such an approach, historians have learned a great deal about how ordinary people lived—and even thought and felt—in the distant past. I have constructed this book largely from many of their richly detailed studies.²⁵

The sheer volume of what scholars have learned poses another complexity. The wide scope of this book necessitates compromises in depth. Each topic has an almost bottomless literature to which I cannot do justice; to be complete would require an encyclopedia. To charges that I have missed important pieces of scholarship, I plead no contest. But I hope that the literature which I have sampled fairly represents what historians know of these topics.²⁶

Such limitations also partly explain my focus on the American mainstream. Because I am trying to describe changes in average Americans’ lives, I devote less attention to those whose experiences diverged from the average. The working and middle classes get more attention than either the elites or the destitute, Protestants get more attention than Catholics and Jews, Northerners more than Southerners, the native-born more than immigrants, and whites more than nonwhites. This necessarily means that readers can challenge some of my summaries as insufficiently attentive to class, regional, religious, racial, or ethnic variations.

My focus on the mainstream is not, however, just a practical expedient; there are also substantive reasons. First, the American middle class lives and promulgates the distinctive and dominant character of the society. To see national change, we need to look at these people. Second, much of this book’s story is precisely about the widening of the mainstream, about the ways more Americans joined the broadening center. Few American adults, for example, held voting and property rights in the early 1800s; eventually most did. By the twentieth century, to take another example, far more Americans than ever before followed a common life course: attending school through late adolescence, taking a first fulltime job, marrying, having children, seeing the children leave home, living as an empty-nest couple, and then retiring. Different categories of Americans varied greatly in how much and when they moved into the mainstream. Most notably, far fewer African Americans than European Americans could share this lifestyle. Nonetheless, clearly more and more Americans joined the mainstream culture.²⁷

These topics raise moral and political implications. Too often, grand narratives of American history serve political commitments. Sometimes, even matters of minute detail, such as how colonists dressed or how tall Civil War enlistees were, seem to signal the author’s position on twenty-first century politics. One observer has remarked that all of American history today is a plain where contestants for the soul of the United States quite openly wage war. The dispute is commonly not about the facts in question but how to label or spin them. For instance, middle-class women in the early twentieth century had more sexual experiences at a younger age than their mothers had had. Is that sexual liberation or sexual licentiousness? Was this empowering of or harmful to women? In the end, history does not unfold according to a political or moral logic that lines up all the changes into neat moral phalanxes. I hope to avoid entangling this historical account with political strings. In previous books, I have not hesitated to focus on the class and caste inequalities of modern America. While such themes also emerge in this book, the focus is elsewhere, on the expanding circle of American culture and character. There is an American cultural center; its assimilative pull is powerful; and it is distinctive—or exceptional. The historical record speaks.²⁸

And to whom does it speak? This book addresses a few kinds of readers. I hope it informs nonhistorians, like my fellow sociologists, about the magnificent research trove unearthed by American social historians; we can benefit from an historical perspective. I also hope that historians will find an outsider’s view of their research and the application of material from other social sciences useful. Most ambitiously, I hope that this book will brief general readers about the evolution of American culture and character and its implications. Because that general audience is so important, I have written the book for readers who have a basic familiarity with American history and a curiosity about the questions addressed here, but little time or patience for scholastic argument or detailed documentation. (Those, like me, who love the argument and the details can consult the endnotes.)

For all the focus on mentality and lifestyles, we must start with the basic material conditions of life. For example, Mrs. Ripken, busy as she was, could still be baseball coach, basketball playmate, and emotional guide to her children in ways that Mrs. Duffield, caught up with basic feeding and clothing of her children, could not. The next chapter addresses the fundamental question of how Americans’ survival and security changed over our history.

1 A note on language: this culture has been labeled bourgeois, middle class, liberal, individualistic, and modern. There is certainly some overlap in these terms. I occasionally use the labels bourgeois or middle class, because the bourgeois and the middle class—rather than the gentry or those people too subjugated to have competency—lived this culture the most and they promoted it to other Americans. The terms liberal and individualistic do not fit American culture quite as well, because they both fail to acknowledge the critical role of community. The term modern is often entangled with debates around modernization theory. When I use modern, I simply mean these days rather than in earlier times.

2. Security

In early 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere. He was also a man whose grandfather had been killed by Indians. He saw his infant brother die, he lost his mother when he was ten and his older sister when he was nineteen, and he grieved when Ann Rutledge—perhaps his sweetheart, perhaps just a friend—died of typhoid. He buried two of his four sons before they had reached the age of twelve and a third when he reached eighteen. He had a wife who was emotionally unstable, suffered depression himself, and would die prematurely and violently. This Job-like litany was perhaps severe even in the nineteenth century, but its like was familiar to Lincoln’s contemporaries. For example, most parents of that era buried at least one child, an experience that mercifully few American parents faced a century later. Life was precarious.¹

Over the centuries, American life became much less precarious. The threat of arbitrary and unpredictable calamities from illness or injury or economic misfortune abated. Being able to count on food, shelter, and safety from one day to the next helped more Americans gain confidence in their own power and a sense of self-reliance. More Americans made plans, charted their careers, scheduled their childbearing, designed their children’s education, arranged their retirements. Greater physical and economic security probably lowered Americans’ feelings of anxiety. In myth, the past appears to be seemingly unproblematic, but the prospect of, for example, a crop-destroying blight probably once frightened Americans more than the specter of a job layoff does today.

Security grew neither smoothly nor without interruption. In some periods, during domestic wars, for example, it stalled or even slipped back. The early twenty-first century seems to be such a period. A new insecurity has entered every mind, regardless of wealth or status, said United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan in December 2001. He was alluding, of course, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which took nearly three thousand lives. Foreign threats loomed again. But of probably deeper, more everyday, consequence was the growing economic insecurity that average Americans experienced from the 1970s into the financial crisis of the late 2000s.²

The historical expansion of security was unevenly distributed. In some eras, for example, when medicine began to seriously improve, richer Americans gained much more than poorer ones did. In other eras, for example, when public health measures took effect, the poorer gained the most, because their conditions had been so bad. Such qualifications in mind, we can still say that modern Americans lived with far more security and predictability than their ancestors did, even than their presidents did. Whether Americans’ feelings of security kept pace is a more complex question.

SECURITY FROM DEATH AND DISEASE

Several cold numbers describe the context of Abraham Lincoln’s miseries. In 1850, when his son Willie was born, a typical, white baby boy had only a 75 percent chance of making it to his first birthday and could expect to live only to thirty-eight. (Willie did not make it past ten.) One hundred and fifty years later, a white baby boy had a better than 99 percent chance of surviving his first year with a life expectancy of seventy-five years. Black babies have notably shorter life expectancies, albeit they are still longer than ever before. In the nineteenth century, even young men who had made it through infancy and childhood ran great risks. About one of every four men who turned twenty in 1880 failed to reach forty-five; a century later, only one of every fourteen died that early. Americans of the early generations faced—and feared—death regularly. The average woman of the revolutionary era would have already buried both of her parents and four of her children by the time she reached middle age. The diaries and letters of American mothers show that the experience of infant death formed a constant backdrop . . . [of their] experiences and emotions. It was not until after World War I that the typical mother would live to see all her children grow up. And because chronic injuries and illnesses diminished, she could expect to see them grow up healthy. This improvement did not, however, follow a smooth upward course; the generation of Lincoln’s ill-fated sons may have been one of the most short-lived in the nation’s history. And, while America was once an especially healthy nation, by 2000 it had lost that distinction.³

Perhaps a Paradise

The first generations of European settlers in America discovered abundant wildlife, dense forests, rivers teeming with fish, and endless acres of fertile soil. This profusion meant that after the first difficult decades, the newcomers could count on living relatively well. By the mid-eighteenth century, they had discovered the most efficient crops for the new land and, through expanding trade, brought yearlong variety into their diets. Colonists of the 1700s ate as much meat as Europeans did two centuries later, avoided the periodic famines that afflicted Europe, and probably toiled less for better fare than Europeans did. Largely dispersed across the countryside, Americans also evaded many of the epidemics that devastated Europeans, who were typically crowded into villages and cities. New Englanders enjoyed the best health in the colonies, thanks in part to freezing winters, which eliminated many pathogens. (So healthy and fertile were the Puritans that, although originally relatively few in number, their descendants dominated the North two hundred years later.) Elsewhere, especially in the humid South, death took many adults and left behind many young orphans. Still, colonists generally could view their land as blessed by Providence. White Americans were born in greater numbers and grew ever taller, healthier, and longer-lived than their cousins back home. We can understand why European observers tended to describe early America as both an Arcadian garden of plenty and as a land of upstarts and braggarts.⁴

Life for others in the New World, however, worsened. Old-World diseases arriving from Europe, often in the veins of young children, effectively annihilated many Indian tribes in the early 1600s. A settler’s journal refers to a plague which swept away most of the inhabitants all along the sea coast, and in some places utterly consumed man, woman, and childe, so that there is no person left to claim the soyle which they possessed. Infections, displacement, wars, and a psychological malaise that depressed their will to bear children shrank the Northeast Indian population by perhaps 80 percent within a century. African slaves, too, paid a price for opening up the New World. Those who survived the middle passage faced new diseases, grueling work, and often brutal treatment. In the early 1700s, one-fourth of imported slaves in the Chesapeake region died within their first year. On average, slaves lived only five years after arrival. (And yet these conditions were better than in the West Indies!) It was not until the later 1700s that Africans in North America lived well enough to enlarge their numbers by childbearing. Many Europeans who arrived as servants faced similarly harsh conditions. In the early 1600s, about 80 percent of white indentured servants died of illness or maltreatment.⁵

As healthy as they were by comparison to Europeans, Indians, and servants, colonial freemen of competence typically led brief and hazardous lives. They struggled with accidents, Indian attacks, unsanitary homes, nutritional deficiencies, the perils of childbirth, and occasional plagues. In many communities, well-off families evacuated low-lying areas for higher ground during the pestilential summer months. Still, chronic pain and debilitation were commonplace. Historian Robert Darnton, reflecting on George Washington’s ruined teeth, ruminated that it seems incongruous, but having read thousands of letters from the eighteenth century, I often think of the dread of rotting teeth, the horror of the itinerant tooth puller, the sheer pain in jaws everywhere in the early modern world. Diarists of the era recorded months of continuous affliction. Benjamin Franklin cast about for some redeeming virtue in chronic pain. He decided that it spurred people on. " We are first mov’d by Pain , and the whole succeeding course of our Lives is but one continu’d Series of Action with a View to be freed from it. Nighttime commonly brought even more sensitivity and desperation. A well-known New England minister applied a mixture of cow manure and hog fat on his face at night" in search of some palliative. Alcohol provided temporary relief, but many who were pain-ridden—and their families—often welcomed permanent relief in death. The people who lived in such a world of chronic physical pain probably endured their torments more stoically than modern Americans, with their bathroom cabinets of painkillers, do, but nonetheless, their affliction surely increased their distress, depression, and irritability.⁶

Emotional pain, especially the sort prompted by loved ones’ agonies and deaths, also pervaded everyday life. Early Americans responded with religious hopes, but often felt only fatalism and resignation. Many avoided sorrow by avoiding emotional commitments. Parents commonly restrained their ardor for their newly born. A woman who lost eight of twelve infants recorded the brief life of one daughter so:

Sept. 5, 1767. I was brought to bed about 2 o’clock AM of a daughter.

Sept. 6. The Child Baptized Mary.

Sept. 7. The Baby very well till ten o’clock in the evening & then taken with fits.

Sept. 8. The Baby remained ill all day.

Sept. 9. It died about 8 o’clock in the morning.

Sept. 10. Was buried.

Another eighteenth-century woman bore a son in July and barely mentioned him again in her diary until two months later and not by name until yet six months later, when she was more certain of his survival. The diary of Jacob Hiltzheimer, a successful German immigrant who came to Philadelphia shortly before the Revolution, similarly suggests an effort—not always successful—to temper grief. On July 6, 1766, he wrote, My wife gave birth to a son at three o’clock this morning. Hiltzheimer gave no name and made no further mention of the son for the rest of the year. He noted the deaths of grandchildren in passing, rarely naming them. On October 1, 1794: Last night in returning from Thomas Fisher’s, who gave a permit for the burial of my son Thomas’s child in Friend’s ground, I sprained my foot so badly. . . . At four o’clock my son’s child was buried. But, Hiltzheimer does report attending to adult deaths—at the deathbed of his forty-nine-year-old wife in 1790, holding his dying thirty-one-year-old son in his arms in 1793, and recalling the sweet smile of his twenty-one-year-old daughter upon her death in 1794. In early America, such emotional pain was common, as was the emotion work—defensive coolness, seeking religious solace—to blunt it.⁷

Colonial Americans understood the precariousness of life. Puritan ministers stressed death’s whim and the need to stay religiously prepared. Many could recite the saying, as Reverend Cotton Mather did, If an old man has death before his face, a young man has death behind his back; the Deadly Blow may be as near to one as ’tis the other. Similarly, a 1776 gravestone in Schenectady, New York, reads: The soul prepared needs no delay / The summon comes the saint obeys. Over the eighteenth century, Americans confronted their grief more directly; increasingly, survivors placed tombstone epitaphs on more graves, including those of women and children, and in those epitaphs wrote of their sorrow. We get hints here that a less resigned (and more sentimental) attitude to death was coming, but even in 1800 Americans lived not with the cloud of death on the horizon, but directly under its shadow.⁸

For all the briefness and harshness of life, even for the privileged like Hiltzheimer, the land was sufficiently bountiful to instill among a growing number of Americans a sense of optimism and even entitlement. It took a century or more to significantly expand the circle of the self-confident. More difficult times intervened.

No Garden of Eden

The nineteenth century brought dramatic economic growth: farms took over forests and grassland, canals joined rivers and lakes, factories drew power from waterways, and cities expanded. As the economy prospered, however, average Americans’ health deteriorated. Bio-historians have established that adult height is a good indicator of people’s fitness, particularly of how well they eat and of how healthy they were in childhood. American men who were born after 1830 were, on average, shorter than those born earlier. Average life expectancy declined as well. A twenty-year-old man in 1800 could expect to live to forty-seven, but a twenty-year-old man in 1850 could expect to live to only forty-one.⁹

This antebellum puzzle, that the economy grew but Americans shrank, provokes many explanations. Some scholars stress disease: more immigrants from abroad, more travel within, more crowding into the cities, and more Americans working in factories and going to school spread infections farther and faster. Toxic byproducts of industrialization, such as coal smoke, contributed. Disease stunts growth and, of course, raises death rates. (European countries that industrialized before the development of modern public health systems seemed also to suffer increased mortality.) Other scholars addressing the antebellum puzzle stress nutrition: rapid population growth, especially in cities, strained food supplies and raised prices. Customers replaced expensive and nourishing foods with cheaper and simply filling foods. American diets shifted from milk and cheese to bread and sugar, perhaps because livestock became harder to keep in towns. Even on the farm, children born in the midcentury grew up shorter, perhaps because their fathers used more of their land for cash crops. Both the exponents of the disease and of the diet explanations also point to widening economic inequality in antebellum America. Average incomes increased, but differences in wealth widened as well, as did differences in height and longevity. Industrialization left increasing numbers of poor children with less to eat and more susceptibility to disease, while sons of the elite, such as Harvard students, suffered no or little reduction in height. Ironically, male slaves also showed little or no reduction in height, as slave owners protected their financial investments. Average Americans seemed to have become worse off.¹⁰

Townsfolk feared the specter of plague—the First Horseman of the Apocalypse—which rode in regularly. In 1832, residents of Schenectady noted reports of cholera in England and then tracked its advance through upstate New York. Civic leaders mobilized citizens to clean the streets, experiment with chlorine or vinegar disinfectants, reform their personal habits, and join in prayer. In the end, there was little to do that summer but endure more than forty deaths in a town of five thousand people. New York City, further south, suffered far worse. Tens of thousands of the well-to-do fled Manhattan. The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stagecoaches, livery coaches, private vehicles, and equestrians, all panic-struck, fleeing the city and filling up farm homes for miles around. Over 3,500 of those who did not or could not flee, largely poor, immigrant, and black New Yorkers, died. In some neighborhoods death arrived so quickly that bodies remained lying in the gutter. On the Illinois frontier, federal troops carried the cholera into communities which were already beset by seasonal epidemics. Cholera lasted there into 1834; deaths mounted so rapidly that sometimes two bodies shared a blanket for a coffin.¹¹

The seemingly chance course of disease made for painful ironies. While the children of the emerging middle-class grew taller and stronger than the children of the poor, they remained, in this age of scientific ignorance, almost as vulnerable to water-borne germs and contagious infections. Parents in well-appointed homes as well as in shacks experienced losses much as Lincoln did when his Willie died: My poor boy. He was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!¹²

Lincoln’s cry, like that of many other parents in the emerging antebellum middle class, invoked God’s hidden motives as some form of explanation but also expressed a growing