Out of the vast American spaces and from the need to travel in groups came the power of the organizer. Men living beyond the jurisdiction of government, away from the places and customs of their fathers, had to be persuaded to do their jobs. Here was a new demand for that special combination of qualities that enabled a man to persuade or cajole others to do their share for the group. Without the power or tradition or prestige of an army commander, the leader of a traveling community had to be able to get things done. He had to create an esprit de corps quickly and preserve it among a miscellaneous crowd in the face of thirst, hunger and disease, discouragement, mortal danger, and death. A host of factors combined to give the organizer a power he had seldom before held outside of military life or civil government. In traditional, settled communities, many qualities-noble ancestry, landed property, wealth, bravery, military prowess, leaning, shrewdness, or eloquence-might make a man a leader; among the transients in sparsely settled America, the leader was the persuader and the organizer.
About the Book
The third volume in Daniel Boorstin´s award-winning trilogy, The Americans: The National Experience, continues the ongoing story of the formation of the American character from the Revolution through the Civil War. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, The National Experience is not a history of singular, world-shaping men. Indeed, names like Jefferson, Adams and Grant appear infrequently in this book. Rather, this is a history of social configurations, of how institutions, customs and ways of understanding the world were shaped by the confluence of European ideas and traditions and the experience of living in a New World.
By this volume, the European influence is growing noticeably less pronounced as settlers begin to move Westward and find themselves separated from the Old World by time, space, and the new demands an unexplored land makes upon the individual and the community. Boorstin is interested in the role geography and space play in the formation of the national character. He is particularly interested in how the realities of place spur the creation of new technologies and how those technologies, in turn, influence the values, customs and habits of the individuals making use of them. Boorstin examines such phenomena as the Balloon Frame House, the frontier hotel, the railway car and the local newspaper.
The newspaper is a particularly salient example. While the vast majority of European periodicals came out of a few major metropolitan areas, such as London and Paris, the realities of frontier life-the need for information coupled with the immense distance between East Coast urban areas and Western territories-necessitated the creation of local publications. The newspaper was an important tool for the pioneers to help build a sense of community. But the number of publications and the sheer size of the rapidly-expanding country meant that the government could not exercise the kind of supervision of the press that existed in Europe and that had existed, to some extent, in the colonies. Thus, geography and technology together both helped reinforce and create the ideal of the freedom of the press. To this day, local American newspapers still thrive, much more so than they do in Europe and other parts of the world.
Boorstin´s book, then, manages to inform the abstraction of a "national character" with a lively and convincing account of the concrete realities of common experience that helped create that abstraction. He manages to bring this period of American history alive, and to relate this more intangible notion of a peculiarly American psyche to the way American life is organized and experienced today.
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