Chapter 3: The Can-Do People


[Americans] treat traditions as valuable for information only and accept existing facts as no more than a useful sketch to show how things could be done differently and better; [they] seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reasons for things.
” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Overview

After being known as The Land of Opportunity, the most common observation made about the United States has to do with the famous can-do or activist spirit of its people. Americans are notorious for being resourceful, inventive, and ingenious folk who never encountered a problem they couldn t solve. While these two themes are not unrelated ” it s a lot easier being a can-do person if you live in a land of opportunity ” they represent two distinct threads in American culture. Even if the New World had not turned out to be a land of opportunity, Americans would still have become an inventive people ” because they had no other choice.

The Early American Experience

To understand the activist mentality , the notion that nothing is impossible , we need to go back in time and remind ourselves who the earliest American immigrants were and the circumstances they faced. They were Europeans, of course, and the world they knew ” reality as they would have defined it ” was the civilized society of 17th and 18th century Europe. There were governments and laws, towns and cities, churches and shops ; there were roads , canals, bridges, and conveyances; there were commerce, agriculture, trade, and banking; the people were artisans, teachers , lawyers , and tradesmen. European society in the 17th and 18th centuries was one of the most advanced in the world.

To understand American culture, John McElroy has written, one must always bear in mind that it developed from the situation of civilized men and women living in a Stone Age wilderness. Almost nothing in the cultural memory of the initial European settlers on the Atlantic coastal plain of North America prepared them for living in such a place (1999, 17). The problems and challenges facing the early settlers were not variations on a European theme but new themes altogether. In his book, O Brave New World, Howard Mumford Jones poses the obvious question: Their life, he writes , was so incredibly filled with unpredictabilities, one wonders how the Europeans survived (1968, 1999, 391). That lesson, that the old ways from Europe didn t work in America, was learned early and often; indeed, not only did the old ways not work, many of the tasks facing Americans were so completely novel that there were no old ways of doing such things. No wonder they thought of it not as a new country or a new land or even as a new continent , but as a New World.

The settlers survived in the only way they could: by rolling up their sleeves and plunging in. They may not have known how to do the tasks that faced them, but somehow they had to do them. Perhaps they had never cut down a tree before ” perhaps they didn t even have an axe ” but they knew that if they wanted to bake bread in December, then the land in front of them had better be cleared and planted by early June. The second tree went quicker than the first, no doubt, just as the second axe was a great improvement over the original, and thus it was that slowly the tanner or the teacher transformed himself into a woodsman. And the forest became a field. Through trial and error, determination, and sheer ingenuity, the immigrants adapted to their new environment, and in the process they taught themselves that there was almost nothing they could not do.

The early American experience, then ” making it up as you went along ” is the first great support for the activist, can-do mentality, and the other is the classic American theme of subduing nature. As they went about creating a new civilization from the wilderness, the early Americans discovered it was possible to manipulate and ultimately control the external environment. They cleared the forests ” taming the wilderness, they called it ” dammed and diverted streams, and, further west, they fashioned the plough that broke the plains. In each instance, the lesson was the same: they found one thing, thick forests or windswept expanses, and made it into another: gardens, pasture, cropland. Americans quickly came to believe they could dominate nature and, by extension, all external circumstances. If people didn t like the situation they found themselves in, then they simply did something about it, as the phrase has it, and changed it into something they did like. Thus was born the other fundamental element of the can-do ethos: the deep and abiding belief that people can shape their own destiny, that the way things are is not necessarily the way they have to be.

Clearly, then, Americans believe in themselves; they are not afraid of problems, don t shrink from challenges, and aren t terribly worried about what might happen. Indeed,only one thing is certain: that nothing will happen if you don t try. This is the activist mentality in its rawest, most vibrant form, that characteristic swagger or confidence (some have also called it arrogance ) that animates Americans and colors their out- look on everything they do. It s the mentality that looks instinctively for how a thing can be done, not for the reasons why it cannot; that holds that something is always worth trying and is almost never satisfied with the way things are.




Americans at Work. A Guide to the Can-Do People
Americans at Work: A Cultural Guide to the Can-Do People
ISBN: 1931930058
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 51
Authors: Craig Storti

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net