The Imperial Self in American LifeStephen J. Whitfield
From Columbia Journal of American Studies Vol. 4, No. 1 2000
The boundaries of class had been smashed in an egalitarian society. The ethos of individualism had caused the lines of family tradition and place to snap. Flux and energy were the marks of a modern democracy. There was thus no clear starting line--and no discernible destination. The race never had a finish. One scholar of Tocqueville's career called this sort of restless energy (a little too cutely) the M-factor in the nation's history: movement, migration, mobility. [9] Geography ceased to be a limitation and became an opportunity. Space ceased to be a dimension in which the vanity of human endeavor was played out and, instead, became a venue of social and individual advancement. The movement from Europe and then Asia and Latin America--and the earlier Middle Passage from Africa--constituted one stage in this process, and movement from east to west was only a phase of an incessant uprootedness. This was nation-building from scratch. The mid-nineteenth century editor Horace Greeley's famous advice ("Go West, young man") was not as frequently followed as his example, which was to go from village to city. [10] Social historians have taught the rest of us that movement was not only from east to west, or even from farm to village to city, but also between cities. In Boston, for example, from the late nineteenth century on, the names of one third to two thirds of all the men showing up in the city census had disappeared from it the following decade, though most of them were presumably still alive. This has been a nation on the road, with almost incalculable consequences for institutional stability and for character formation. The dimension of space was no longer a condition to be accepted, but something to be transcended; and such wanderlust was commonplace enough for a maverick like Thoreau to satirize: "I have traveled a good deal in Concord." [11]
The destination of this restlessness was furthest removed from Europe; indeed one fabled Kentuckian proclaimed that the country was bounded "on the "west [only] by the Day of Judgment." It was there that the archetype of the frontiersman was crystallized and then celebrated in the monograph that Frederick Jackson Turner presented at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The first major academic American historian offered a portrait of those "intellectual traits" that distinguished the American from the European. Turner's frontiersman bears a certain resemblance to the imperial self: "That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism ... and ... that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom . .. these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier." [12] Such masculine individualism of the frontier Turner also identified with the extension of democracy, discerning (as had Tocqueville) the way that a rough and ready egalitarianism is closely intertwined with personal independence from traditional loyalties and stable institutions. Turner was more than an historian; he was a kind of mythmaker.
Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University . He is the author of eight books, including most recently A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (1988), The Culture of the Cold War (1996), and In Search of American Jewish Culture (1999). Professor Whitfield is also the editor of A Companion to 20th-Century America (2004).