Why Are Americans American?

What is there in the U.S. heritage that gives Americans a basic spirit of independence and optimism? In 1893, youthful (31) Historian Frederick Jackson Turner stirred the American Historical Association with a strikingly original theory. Americans were not simply transplanted Europeans. "The existence of an area of free land," said he, "and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development." The distinctive American character was developed in practical everyday life on the free soil of the frontier. By Turner's reckoning, America's character was set in the historical epoch that ended with the closing of the frontier in the 1880s.

In Chicago last week, before the same scholarly association that Turner excited 66 years ago, Historian C. (for Comer) Vann Woodward of Johns Hopkins University looked beyond free land to another fact of American experience: "Free security." Throughout the nation's history, said Arkansas-born Historian Woodward, the U.S. "has enjoyed a remarkable degree of military security, physical security. This security was not only effective and virtually unchallengeable, but it was free." Two oceans and a protective polar icecap were "nature's gift," enabling the U.S. to maintain security inexpensively.

U.S. geographical good fortune shaped American character, according to Historian Woodward. Just as the frontier bred free men and free institutions, so free security lifted a burden from the nation's back. "Might it not be that the sunnier side of the national disposition--the sanguine temperament, the faith in the future, what H. G. Wells once called our 'optimistic fatalism'--is related to centuries of habituation to military security that was virtually free?" asked Woodward. "Free security was certainly related to light taxes and a permissive Government, and they in turn had a lot to do with the famous American living standard." Another boon: "Exemption of American youth from a long training in military discipline that was a routine requirement in other nations." But free security, like free land, is gone forever, gloomed Woodward. And its passing is important. Respectfully, Woodward suggested that Turner's timetable may be 60-odd years early, that the swift arrival of thermonuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles may have closed "an even longer epoch of American history" than the freeland period. "The American outlook has altered and the prospect darkened," said Woodward. "Only the spell of a long past of security could account for the faltering and bewildered way in which America faced its new peril."

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