Growth of Identity

THE AMERICANS: THE NATIONAL EXPERIENCE by Daniel J. Boorstin. 517 pages. Random House. $8.95.

"What then is the American, this new man?" Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville asked the question, historians have been trying to provide an answer--sometimes political (Clinton Rossiter), sometimes economic (Charles A. Beard), sometimes sociocultural (Perry Miller). Latest to make the attempt is Daniel Boorstin, Harvard-trained professor of American history at the University of Chicago, who acknowledges many centers of motivation, supplements his studies with insights drawn from psychology, sociology, political science, economics and literary criticism.

He is writing a trilogy; the first volume, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, won the Bancroft Prize. In it Boorstin protested what he considered an overemphasis on the European origins of American identity, went in search of the uniquely American in America. Now, in the second volume of this enormously rich and suggestive survey, he considers the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, and seeks to trace in the earliest records of the nation the traits that have dominated its later history.

Technology of Haste. Boorstin approaches the problem region by region. In New England, he finds, adaptation required a monumental psychological change. Poor in natural resources, the New Englander exploited his native resourcefulness. "New England," ran the popular taunt, "produces nothing but granite and ice." So energetic New Englanders, making an economic virtue out of a geographical necessity, harvested their rocky hills and frozen ponds, virtually created the markets for their products, shipped granite to Savannah and New Orleans, ice to Persia, India and Australia. The same restless and ingenious spirit drove New England manufacturers who developed specialized machines to replace unspecialized men, ensured the prosperity of the mobile American who could "make anything, do anything, go anywhere."

Many went west. Author Boorstin styles them the "Transients," finds in the story of their trundling, urgent progress the paradigm and impulse for much of later American life. Because they explored an unknown world, mutual assistance was a necessity. Law was invented as needed, government sprang up from the grass roots of democracy, and leadership fell to the organizer, whose powers of persuasion could cajole conflicting interests into cooperation. Because land went to the first man who settled it, the Transients were always in a hurry, and the nation committed itself with almost religious fervor to a technology of haste.

Get-Up-&-Go. Prairie wagons were built for maneuverability and speed--but were not expected to outlast their westward journey. Steamboat racing became a popular passion, despite its appalling accident record: between 1825 and 1850 at least 150 major explosions on western steamboats ("half boat, half alligator") killed more than 1,400 people. The railroads, hastily and flimsily built, also had an appalling accident rate. No one seemed to mind that railroad travelers were jammed together in long boxlike cars without distinction of social class and that stopovers were brief. In time the quick lunch-counter meal became an American institution; gregariousness and "instant community" were taken for granted. "Get-up-and-go" was early established as an ideal for the American character.

At the end of these rollicking journeys lay a new, American style of community, guided by a new, American breed of businessman, the booster, who promoted construction of railroads, saw to the piping of water, digging of sewers, building of schools, laying out of sidewalks, streets and parks. Boosters also founded the pioneer newspapers, in many cases little more than advertising broadsides and forums for the communal chauvinists.

Islands in the Main. The unhappy exception to the expanding national experience, says Author Boorstin, was the South. Its cities were not intellectual and cultural centers. Its planter-family leadership was generally rural and withdrawn. Its economy was agrarian and tied increasingly to a single crop. Its immigrants (the Negroes) were never assimilated, but were held apart in an arbitrary and bifurcated social structure. Its legal system depended on a punctilious, vague, and largely unwritten code of honor. And its preachments on the state's right of secession nourished a colonial mentality in the South long after the rest of America had recognized itself as a nation.

In fact, during the early years of the 19th century, despite formal political ties and intermittent economic relations, the North, the South and the West were almost completely separated regions. They floated, says Boorstin, like "fuzzy islands" in the continental main. But far beneath the surface of events, forces were working to bring them together, and in the second half of his book, Boorstin traces the sluggish growth of the American identity.

Gift of Gab. The task begins with defining America. The pursuit of a manifest destiny was anything but purposeful. Louisiana was purchased as an afterthought, the French sold West Florida to the U.S. without knowing it, the U.S. acquired West Florida without paying for it. Not until after the Civil War, in fact, could an American say what America was.

American ways of thinking and being were as fluid and uncertain as the American frontier. Boorstin explores them in an erudite and eloquent essay on the American gift of gab. With verbacious vitality, the growing American language devoured Indian, Dutch, German, Spanish, French and Negro words. Others were invented (caucus, lynch-law, squatter), improvised (sockdolager, spondulix, absquatulate), and embellished (kerflop, kerthump, kersouse). The general exuberance also burst out in political oratory and tall talk ("Bust me wide open if I didn't bulge into the creek in the twinkling of a bedpost, I was so thunderin' savagerous"). It spilled over in the invincible optimism with which new towns called themselves cities, hotel was any flea-bitten tavern, and opera house meant any public hall, with or without a roof.

Along with national geography and national spirit, there was also the search for a national polity. In the early years that polity was imperial. Established by an act of secession from the British Empire, the U.S. early acquired territorial possessions in the West and in them exercised the prerogatives of empire. The U.S. averted the threat of secondary secessions by a stroke of political genius: orderly incorporation that transformed territories into states.

To this evolving ecumenism, there remained the one tragic exception, the South, and it was the problem of the South that led at last to the supreme crisis of identity in U.S. history. Author Boorstin will presumably consider the Civil War in his final volume. If it is as good as the first two, he will have made a major contribution to the continuing elucidation of the American past.

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