THE MOVING AMERICAN

9 0 Y T H E M O V I N G A M E R I C A N G E O R G E W I L S O N P I E R S O N Vol. 44, no. 1, Sept. 1954 Each people has its secrets, and its figures of mystery. Of late I have been led to think more and more about one of the most ubiquitous but enigmatic characters of American history. I call him ‘‘The Moving American.’’ And the better I get to know him the more secrets he confides, the more answers to the great riddle of our national character. What are Americans? At this moment Russia may be the great menace, but to the rest of the world we are the unknown quantity, the number-one puzzle. The power of our economy is no longer a secret, but to our cousins in Europe it seems power in the hands of children. Where we boast a practical know-how, they see us as dollar-chasers, materialistic, money-crazy. We take pride in our democracy, but they notice chiefly its shortcomings – our color prejudices, our spectacular divorce rates, our lurid crimes of violence . To a Frenchman all Americans are wealthy; yet culturally we strike him as discouragingly middle-class, crude, and vulgar. In particular we are said to lack the attributes of the highest civilization , for compared to the parent societies of Europe ours is and has been an unartistic, anti-intellectual, and astonishingly herd- 9 1 R minded nation. The optimism of America has been unmistakable, and our idealism and generosity are freely acknowledged. Yet in the absence of an appreciation of older cultures our very humanitarianism often seems too naïve, too aggressive. Most of all they find us volatile, excitable, unstable, and contradictory. It troubles the world to contemplate a society so mass-minded and conformist in thought yet so undisciplined in action – at the same time so practical but so visionary – so conservative in many ways yet so unpredictable in foreign policy. How deal with such a tangle of contradictions? The images projected are sharp enough: Uncle Shylock and the Presbyterian preacher, Babbitt of Main Street and the Hollywood Goddess of Love, Chicago gangsters, Yankee uplifters , or bespectacled engineers – but how make of such types a family or a national character? I suggest that the American character would be clearer if they would add to this rogues’ gallery still another portrait: the portrait of The Moving American. Think of the Mayflower or a prairie schooner, a paddle-wheeler or a Stratocruiser. It doesn’t matter. For we began as explorers, empire builders, pilgrims and refugees, and we have been moving, moving ever since. In fact we have been and are still today the most mobile people on the face of the earth. Foreign travelers have sensed it. Our census takers have proved it; our poets have made it their song. The first great tide flowed west. ‘‘Westward the Course of Empire takes its way,’’ prophesied Bishop Berkeley. ‘‘Westward the Star of Empire takes its way,’’ agreed John Quincy Adams. ‘‘They play at leap-frog with their lands,’’ confessed a startled colonial observer. The settlers, reported Governor Dunmore, ‘‘acquire no attachment to Place: But wandering about Seems engrafted in their Nature; and it is a weakness incident to it, that they Should for ever imagine the Lands further o√, are Still better than those upon which they have already Settled.’’ ‘‘Americans are the Western Pilgrims,’’ wrote the perceiving Crèvecoeur – and from the Revolution to the Civil War all our pocket compasses continued to point west. ‘‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country ,’’ advised Horace Greeley. ‘‘Ioway – that’s where the tall corn grows.’’ We are ‘‘a bivouac rather than a nation,’’ trumpeted an observer in the 1860’s, ‘‘a grand army moving from the Atlantic to 9 2 P I E R S O N Y the Pacific, and pitching tents by the way.’’ Still in the twentieth century – ‘‘America is west and the wind blowing,’’ sings Archibald MacLeish. But if you would really like to remind a European, read him the...