Americans as Type A Personalities

   A little while ago, while I was driving to work one Sunday morning, I caught a part of a program on one of our public radio stations called The Cambridge Forum.  The episode that morning concerned "outlaw" and macho figures in African-American folk music.  Now, I have to admit up front that I did not catch the entire program, just about the last 20 minutes, but this essay is not intended as a critic's review of the program.  This essay deals really with just one answer to a listener's question during a Q & A session at the end of the show.

   One member of the audience asked the host why he thought that Americans were so fascinated by violent characters, and I think that any honest observer of popular culture throughout our history would have to agree that we are, whether they be characters from history or fiction: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Al Capone, John Dillinger, and so many others throughout our history.  Just recently, the star of the HBO series The Sopranos, James Gandofi, died, and the media were full of praise, not just for him as an actor, but for his character in the series, a mobster named Tony Soprano.   Now, of course, every culture has a few characters such as this, but why do they seem so prevalent in American folklore?

   There have been many answers offered for this phenomenon, and common sense tells us that there are many causes for this, but the speaker in the program offered a suggestion that I had never heard before, but which certainly plays a major part.  His suggestion was that, as America was a nation settled by immigrants, it was comprised of a far higher than normal proportion of people with Type A personalities, no matter what their original cultural heritage.  It took, he said, a special kind of personality to uproot himself and make, what at the time, was a very arduous voyage to America and start all over with life.  It was certainly NOT a journey for the faint hearted, only to those willing to take the risks, who had the drive to be willing to face the dangers involved.  He applied those same traits to his own ancestors, African slaves, even though they had not immigrated voluntarily: it required the same personality traits to survive the ordeal of slavery, particularly Middle Passage by sea.

   Now, of course there are other factors, other forces or influences, that go into the development of what in unique in the American character.  The availability of cheap or even free land, coupled with a rural population pattern that was different in most of Europe encouraged by the availability, certainly played a role.  In America the farmer, unlike the European peasant, did not live in a close community and trudge out to his widely dispersed fields every morning.  He lived on his land, often separated from his nearest neighbor by miles of intervening, contiguous farmland.  This environment would certainly mold one's character, but it would also require a previously possessed form of self-reliance in order to endure it in the first place!  The European peasant lived surrounded by his neighbors, his community.  If he wanted to thrive as an American farmer, he would either have to possess, or quickly learn, a relatively foreign sense of self-reliance.

   It may be more politically correct to want to focus on social reasons, but common sense says that we must insist on recognizing the role that personality played in developing our cultural heritage, for good or ill. 

The New Rome on the New Tiber

That phrase was one used to describe the new American Republic, the new Tiber, of course, being the Potomac River.  Perhaps it would be fitting to look again at our heritage from the Roman Republic, in our law and our from of government.  These are some of the things we inherited from Rome.

1.  The fact of a republic itself.  We are not just a nation that can be described as free; we are a republic, a res publica, a thing of the people.  The government is not founded on a religion, nor is it a monarchy where we are the subjects of a king or queen.  We create the government and the laws. 

2.  Rome gave history the first secular legal code, the Twelve Tables.  The laws were not an inherited tradition, nor did they have their legitimacy because they were approved or given by some god or gods.  In order to create a legal code, the Roman Republic established a commission to travel the known free world, examine the laws of these nations, and return to recommend a formal legal code to replace that of the monarchy.  The Twelve Tables, the original Roman law, was authoritative because the Senate and the People of Rome approved it, and for no more reason than that.  The Senate and the People said that "x" was the law, so it became the law. 

3.  From Rome, as interpreted by Marcus Tullius Cicero, we adopted the principle that power was to be divided among different branches of the government.  The beauty was that one branch could completely thwart the intent of another branch.  The Senators, for example, might want a particular law, but if the people refused to ratify it, it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.  The people could pass a law, but only the Senate could fund the law.  Without funding, of course, the law is dead.  No one branch of the government is supreme, no one branch has the right to demand the support of another.

4.  Our tradition of jury trials is also a Roman, not as is commonly thought, British, practice.  The English convened grand juries to investigate possible crimes, but the trial itself, all through the Middle Ages, was by ordeal, combat or compugation.  Romans, on the other hand, were guaranteed a trial by a jury of citizens for any criminal matter.  It is a right we treasure, and one principle objection to the treaty establishing the international court to investigate war crimes.

5.  Additionally, Rome gave us the tradition of the presumption of innocence.  The burden of proof was on the prosecutor, not the defense.  As even the Emperor Julian stated to a frustrated prosecutor when he was presiding at a trial, "How can anyone be found innocent if all you have to do is accuse him?"