There is a fashion among scholars of America to characterize the “American character,” a fashion that waxes and wanes, writes a dean of social historians, Peter Stearns, in his new essay “American Selfie.” Sometimes sketching a national portrait fits the cultural mood–say, during the bluster of the Cold War–but at other times Americans seem such a disparate assortment of types that trying to describe any one American character seems foolish. Sometimes the portraits depict bright figures–say, Americans as ambitious do-gooders; at other times they expose dark forms–say, Americans as ambitious narcissists. And sometimes the sketches show American character undergoing dramatic change, usually for the worse, while other times they depict a stolid American character that, for better or for worse, has been constant since the nation’s founding.
In “American Selfie,” Stearns addresses in particular my book (after which this blog is named), Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (2010), which he treats as the latest effort to describe an American character of enduring continuity. I appreciate that Professor Stearns felt the book worthy of such attention. My purpose in this post is to address two particular criticisms that he raises. The first, which I dispute, is that Made in America ignores or dismisses evidence of profound change toward less associational life and fewer personal connections, a loss of community. The second, which I largely accept, is that Made in America, like other books arguing continuity, insufficiently explains how a singular national character can stay so constant so long.
Recap
The argument in Made in America: American culture is marked by voluntarism, a combination of individualism and community. Voluntarism treats people as independent, choosing individuals who attain personal goals by joining with others. Individuals act in communities but, critically, in communities that they join freely and may leave freely. (This voluntarism contrasts with the situation of most people in most historical world cultures, that they are fated to stay members of their communities of birth.) The major development in American culture over about three centuries has been the expansion of who can be such an independent chooser. Mainly through growing economic and political security, autonomous individuals increasingly were not just male, white, property-owing patriarchs, but also women, minorities, youth, and the working class. (Growing economic insecurity in some eras, however, can erode access to voluntarism.)
The ethnic diversity of American society, refreshed by waves of immigration, does not change this story, because America culture is so assimilative and dominating that the descendants of immigrants quickly embrace voluntarism, leaving behind elements of their heritages that do not fit. (More on this later.)
Loss of Community?
Stearns argues that I fail to recognize that the community part of voluntarism has withered: “… [M]any of the findings and claims of scholars from Riesman [The Lonely Crowd, 1950] to Bellah [et al, Habits of the Heart, 1986] are either ignored or somewhat casually dismissed…. Most strikingly, the varied evidence about declining associational activity is simply pushed aside—as it must be, of course, if the tradition of voluntarism is to be sustained.”
Of course, I know and respect these sources. David Reisman and Robert Bellah and his coauthors do provide insightful claims about America.[1] However, they do not present actual social science findings regarding historical change in Americans’ level of community involvement. To be sure, there is some evidence about long-term changes in social isolation, but it largely tends to show the opposite trend, showing, for example, increasing church and club involvement from the 18th to the 20th centuries and decreasing isolation of rural households.[2]
Stearns focuses on writings about the most recent couple of generations when he describes a loss of associational life–meaning fewer organizational memberships, the Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, argument; and Stearns alludes to increasing “loneliness” in the 21st century. Here, again, it is not that Made in America ignores these sources; the bibliography is full of them. Rather, the loss of community claim is, even for the short run, is largely wrong. The balance of hard evidence is that associational life has changed but not declined. Nineteen-fifties style formal organizations have waned; other forms of group membership (e.g., book clubs) have waxed. As to personal ties over the last few decades, the evidence is clear that Americans on the whole have not become more isolated nor feel more lonely. My 2011 book, Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970, shows–as does the work of others–that people are at least as tied together now as they were nearly 50 years ago. The manner of connection has changed some–notably, fewer dinner parties, more get-togethers at restaurants–but the ties persist. (For summaries of Still Connected, see posts here, here, and here. Other posts address the loneliness issue–e.g., here, here, here, and here.)[3]
Certainly, there are important exceptions to this generalization. One can see growing disconnection in particular among poorly-educated men: today less often married, less churched, more often drifting than their fathers and grandfathers. (See here.) This is not, however, the result of national cultural or technological “modernization”; indeed, such men are relatively less touched by those developments than are middle-class American men, men who remain reasonably integrated. The disconnection results from less-educated men’s growing economic insecurity. Experiencing the American story in reverse (but in a manner consistent with Made in America’s argument), they have become less empowered as autonomous, choosing individuals.
Over the longer sweep of American history, there have been ebbs and flows in the expansion of voluntarism, but we should not mistake the ebbs as eternal changes. And we should not succumb to the popular impressions of any particular era. In the 1950s, Riesman and others described adult Americans as conformists, their children as a “silent generation.” Yet, about a decade a later, similar commentators described Americans as a people in fervent conflict and their children as rebellious. Likewise, in the 1990s era of televisions in every bedroom and a Sony Walkmen on every head, alarmed observers described Americans as self-isolating and lonely, while in our current era of ever-connected smartphones, alarmed observers describe us as socially too engaged … although somehow still lonely. History has its switchbacks, but the long trend has been to the expansion of America’s distinctive voluntarism–so far.
Explaining Continuity
How could national culture and character remain consistent over ten-plus generations of profound material and cultural changes–from horse and buggy to jet planes, from a woman being unable to control her own property to a woman winning the popular vote for president? Stearns correctly demands a better explanation from those of us who argue for continuity in American national character–something besides simply defaulting to an axiom that culture is enduring, that each generation bequeaths it to the next.[5]
Cultures, though surprisingly enduring, do change. One sees that in the transformation of particular norms–such as the ideal role of women–but not (yet) in the core voluntarism of American character. And one sees cultural change quite well in those immigrant groups whose members after a generation or two in America come to accept that communities of fate must defer to individual choice (for instance, that young people should be free to choose their spouses). American voluntarism not only envelopes immigrants, it is a means to their success in America. Thus, cultural continuity persists through learning from peers and learning from parents, but also from living in a system that presumes and rewards voluntarism–for example, schools that reward exceptional individual performance, laws that presume individual responsibility, politics that require joining up with others.
That American voluntarism has, if anything, expanded at home is due in part to the success it has had in the world. Economic growth, new technologies, and empowerment of formerly dependent Americans–these sorts of changes have only deepened and reinforced voluntarism. On top of that, the emergence of a global American hegemony–economic, political, and cultural (cultural here meaning movies, music, and the like)–has also reinforced the lesson that American character, that being an individual chooser and joiner with other individual choosers, is a winning strategy. If and when this cultural and institutional system starts to fail internationally and domestically, we may see some deep changes in national character.
Stearns’s Change Claim
Stearns closes his essay by arguing that American character has been profoundly altered, particularly in the 20th century. In a series of important books (seven cited in Made in America [5]), Stearns argues that Americans’ emotional make-up has changed toward more self-control, dampened passions, a greater sensitivity to others, less shaming, more parental anxiety, and greater concern with jealousy. The last change, he writes, “seem[s] almost a casebook confirmation” of Riesman’s other-directedness as a new (20th century) American trait.
Made in America accepts some of Stearns’s narratives, but not all. In particular, growing efforts by more Americans to control their emotions and to shape their own personalities is consistent with an expansion of voluntarism. “Self-fashioning” was a prominent part of life among 18th-century American elites; during the 19th century, religious upswelling stressed the notion of self re-creation (as in being “born again”); and by the 20th century, the same project expanded yet further, this time often couched in psychological, therapeutic language. It’s all about individual choice, about who one wants to be and with whom one wants to be it.
Conclusion
As Stearns argues, the on-again-off-again efforts of historians and others to describe an American character display no small measures of hubris. Some think the study of national character has, in the end, no more substance than a casual “selfie.” Others of us think it helps bare some critical truths about American society, both before and now. Stearns concludes that “any effort to capture national character in a huge, complex and clearly changing society, may be futile…. Even if the quest is ultimately hopeless, however, it is clear that the fascination with national characterization remains and that some interesting insights periodically result.”
~~~ NOTES ~~~
[1] I am probably one of the few sociologists in the 21st century to assign some of The Lonely Crowd to undergraduates. (And in 2015–irony alert–I was elected the David Riesman Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.)
[2] Churches: Finke and Stark, The Churching of America (2005). Rural life: see, for example, the USDA’s 1940s Rural Life Studies and Luloff and Krannich, eds., Persistence and Change in Rural Communities (2002).
[3] Stearns also points to the survey literature on declining expressions of trust for formal institutions and “most people” among polled Americans since the 1960s. I address this literature in Made in America, pp. 190-194, largely claiming that these trends are best understood as special consequences of the 1960s rather than evidence of a long-term trend–although it might also signal withdrawal into intimate small circles over the wider public sphere.
[4] He writes: “…for a book on continuity, there is surprisingly little attention to the mechanisms that have allowed Americans to preserve their values despite many decades of unquestionable social change. Fischer ultimately falls back on the claim that key national characteristics were so deeply rooted, and then so sustained by material abundance, that no deeper probe is required.”
[5] Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self- Control in Modern America (1999) is a good introduction.
