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.
