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ONE The Fabrication of Identity in Early America In the study of the American character there have been two primary positions. One has emphasized the ascendancy of individualism , with its values of self-interest and self-reliance. The other has stressed the sway of the community, with its corollaries of sociability, conformism, and endemic insecurity of self. Exponents of each have been indisposed to take seriously the claims of the other, and advocates of the only significant alternative have taken them both too seriously by setting those static characterizations in historical sequence. Consider, for instance, the recent historiography of the New England town. Almost every examination of the subject that has not affirmed an abiding communalism or an irrepressible individualism has described an evolution, or devolution, of close communal modes into more modern individuality. And on just that account such studies constitute , collectively, an advancing embarrassment. The ones among them that predicate either a constant corporate or a constant liberal inclination among the townspeople simply talk past one another, while, taken together, the ones that posit a passage from a self-subordinating to a self-seekingorientation place that passage in every generation from the founding of the colonies to the middle of the twentieth century. Darrett Rutman affirms a transformation of communal ideals and the emergence of a profusion of private purposes and practices in the very first decade of settlement. William Haller presumes the persistence of From William and Mary Quarterly, Sdscr., 34 (1977), 183-214. 21 22 ALMOSTCHOSENPEOPLE more medieval ways through the first generation and argues their abandonment only after 1660. Kenneth Lockridge insists that the ancient frame of values remained intact through the second generation but not the third. Richard Bushman postulates a pristine traditionalism clear through the seventeenth century and asserts its erosion in the Great Awakening. John J. Waters alleges a placid homogeneity through the revivals and portrays its irrevocable impairment in the period of the Revolution. Benjamin Labaree maintains that customs of corporate solidarity survived the Revolution but not the depression of the earlynineteenth century and die War of 1812. And others extend the same paradigm through the nineteenth century, into the twentieth, and indeed into our own age.l Amid differences so protracted and inconclusive, it might be wise to suppose that every side brings out at least an aspect of the truth. On such a supposition it would be less urgent to ascertain and account for the priority of communalism or individualism than to plot the pattern within which both could burgeon at once. It would then be immensely suggestive that, exactly in the years through which America was first colonized by Englishmen, both the self-awareness and self-assertion that inform the modern psyche and the coercive mutuality that marks the modern community achieved something of their subsequent scope. Even as the settlers of the seventeenth century craved self-suppressive communalism, they also sought larger liberties for themselves and drew distinctions between social role and a sense of inner identity. Like many in the mother country, they established elaborate geographies of con1 . Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965); William Haller, Jr., The Puritan Frontier: Town-Planting in New England Colonial Development, 1630-1660 (New York, 1951); Kenneth A. Lockridge , A New England Town, The First Hundred Tears: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (New York, 1970); Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Characterand the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); John J. Waters, Jr., The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968); Benjamin W. Labaree, Patriotsand Partisans:The Merchants of Newburyport, 1764-1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). For successive generations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see, for example, Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); Leonard L. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksoman America (New York, 1970); Michael H. Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840-1880 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972); Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge,Mass., 1964); W. Lloyd Warner and J. O. Low, The Social System of the Modem Factory. The Strike:A Social Analysis, Yankee City Series, no. 4 (New Haven, Conn., 1947), William M. Dobriner, "The Natural History of a Reluctant Suburb," Tale Review, n.s., 49 (1960): 399-412. [3.143.17.128] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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