BY ANDREW KLEINFELD AND JUDITH KLEINFELD
Monday, July 19, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
The American Enterprise
Everywhere, Americans are called "cowboys." On foreign tongues, the reference to America's Western rural laborers is an insult. Cowboys, we are told, plundered the earth, arrogantly rode roughshod over neighbors, and were addicted to mindless violence. So some of us hang our heads in shame. We shouldn't. The cowboy is in fact our Homeric hero, an archetype that sticks because there's truth in it.
Cowboys were of course plainsmen--Midwesterners operating from Texas to Kansas to the Dakotas. But their ideas and ideals spread across the continent to our Mountain West as well, even as far as the Alaskan West.
A few years ago, a Canadian anthropologist explained to us how different her countrymen are from Americans. She had a perfect comparison to illustrate this. She suggested that we go to the extreme western edge of Canada and have a look at two small towns named Stewart and Hyder. Stewart is situated in British Columbia, Hyder at the southeastern tip of Alaska. Though just two miles apart, these towns are very different in their "habits of the heart." If we visited them, our anthropologist friend implied, we would immediately understand the superiority of Canadian culture.
We decided to take up her challenge.
First we called up the respective town authorities. Hyder, the American town, turned out to have no town authorities--and, technically, no town. The Hyderites chose not to incorporate as a municipality, creating instead a community association--a private nonprofit corporation. Stewart, the Canadian town, is a real municipality with a traditional government.
When we phoned Stewart, the government agent refused to answer any questions until they were submitted in writing. The Hyder community association representative said, sure, she'd tell us anything we wanted to know, right now, on the phone. But to make it a fair comparison, we faxed written questions to both parties, and got written answers back.
The Canadian government official, evidently aspiring to create a faceless bureaucracy in this 700-person outpost, signed the response as "Government Agent"--capital letters but no name or sex--and explained that Stewart had a "Municipal Government incorporated under the laws of the Province of British Columbia," with a mayor and a city council of six members. As to Stewart's nearby neighbors, Government Agent from Canada said diplomatically, "I'm not sure how Hyder is governed," but expressed polite disapproval of its apparent libertarian streak.
Stewart developed very early into a regulated community, explained Government Agent, while Hyder chose to follow the path of less community and more personal freedom. Hyder is a collection of individuals first and a community second, while Stewart has a "community first" attitude, according to Government Agent. "We are generally more accepting of government's involvement in our day-to-day lives."
The Hyder representative--definitely not a Government Agent--signed her name, Caroline Gutierez, to her answers, which she sent on her personal stationery advertising her several businesses. She runs Boundary Gallery, where she is proprietor as well as artist, and Wood Bee Lumber Enterprise, as well as filling eight community positions ranging from music teacher to curator of the town museum. "I came with my family to Hyder on a summer vacation and am pleased to say I am still on vacation," Ms. Gutierez said. She applauded the very same cowboy attitudes that Government Agent disdained. Hyder, she said, was "spirited, rebellious, and independent," while Stewart was "cautious and cleaving to Mother England."
The differences in these answers were interesting enough to convince us to undertake a three-day, 1,200-mile drive from our home in Fairbanks, Alaska. We arrived first at Stewart, Canada, an orderly, well-kept town with paved streets. Then we drove off the blacktop into Hyder, USA--a mélange of disorder where at dark we could find little but a raunchy-looking bar and lodge. We stayed on the Canadian side, at the King Edward Hotel. At our lace-and-doilies Stewart breakfast spot, we found a promotional map. It showed that Stewart had a neat grid of streets and municipal facilities, but not much else. Hyder, on the other hand, with about one-seventh the population and no straight or paved roads at all, had 23 business and community enterprises.
Driving back and forth in daylight, our initial impressions of Stewart as solid and prosperous, Hyder as wild and ramshackle, turned completely inside out. Stewart is definitely much more attractive and inviting, with sidewalks, flower boxes and bicycles to borrow free at the well-staffed government tourist office. But Hyder was the confident, prosperous community. Stewart's houses needed paint. Its shops needed tourists. Its roads needed traffic. It was a semi-ghost town, bravely struggling on. With mining and logging drying up (environmentalist-orchestrated bans on logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest and the closing of Ketchikan's pulp mill devastated the lumber economy in this region), many of Stewart's businesses, elegant restaurants, and small tourist attractions (e.g., the world's leading toaster museum) had discreet "for sale" signs in the windows.
Hyder, meanwhile, turned out to be a lot more productive and enterprising than it had looked at dusk. The Hyderites had evidently found other ways to make money when the mines and mills were shut down. The pickup trucks in Hyder were newer and better, and there were a lot more satellite dishes.
The best restaurant in the Hyder-Stewart metropolitan area, we discovered, was an old school bus and tent in Hyder serving fresh fish. The proprietor had traded a snowmobile for the bus, gutted it and turned it into a kitchen. She served halibut and charcoal-grilled salmon supplied by local fishermen. She had the highest prices in town, yet her restaurant was the only one with lines.
Hyder's most visible business (aside from the bar) was the "Border Bandit Discount Store." Between two giant American flags, this emporium expressed the town's style on its sign:
Hyder Alaska--a town of about a hundred happy people and a few old s---heads.
Discount tobacco
Tax free bed & breakfast
Tax free storeboat rental
Custom importing
Pawn, buy, sell, gold
Sporting goods guns & ammo
Marine supplies
Industrial materials
Almost anything else
We chatted with a Hyder resident (retired, so he had time to talk) who was definitely among the "hundred happy people." He'd built a $2 million business in this tiny frontier town from such enterprises as selling discount appliances and charging $25 in Hyder for a carton of cigarettes that costs $50 in Stewart. People drove to his store from all over northern British Columbia and the Yukon. Hyderites, he explained, made money on "everything that's legal or close to it."
Doubtless the academics would say that Hyder illustrates the immorality of markets and the lamentable limitations of sovereignty, which prevented Canada from imposing its higher taxes and fewer commercial freedoms so close to its borders. A case history of the commercial anarchy that results from lack of government.
There was no arguing the lack of government. Not only is there no municipality in Hyder, but no border station either. Once there had been one, but the Hyderites had protested the nuisance of having to stop when they drove back and forth. And after all, no such municipality as Hyder exists--a nonexistent place doesn't need a border station.
Stewart, on the other hand, has a well-maintained government border station with numerous polite and apologetic employees staffing three shifts. Each time our Jeep passed back and forth between the two towns we answered the same litany of questions to people who quickly got to know us and our answers. We asked one of the Canadian border guards what Hyderites were like. "Free spirits. Wild. They have guns, you know." We were asked if we had any guns each time we drove back to Stewart, since handguns (a near-universal in Alaskan bear country) are contraband in Canada.
We made this trip in the first week of July. The "Canada Day" celebrations that took place in Stewart on July 1 were very vanilla. They included a "jaws of life" rescue equipment demonstration, a Name the Babies Contest, and the Annual Community Potluck Dinner in the early evening.
Three days later on July 4, Hyder spiced its national celebration with dashes of politically incorrect cayenne. There was an Ugly Vehicle Contest featuring pickups held together with duct tape and decorated with moose antlers (unlike the shiny ones in the driveways). There were parades of children with pets, toy guns and cowboy costumes. There was a Wilderness Woman Contest. Contestants raced to split wood, wash clothes, shoot a bear, flip pancakes, change a baby, and put on lipstick. The winner did it all barefoot.
Even Hyderites recognize their limits--in an earlier year's self-staged July 4 fireworks display, they had accidentally burned down their fire hall with the fire engine inside. So this year Hyder hired Canadian experts to stage the pyrotechnics. The show started around midnight, during the late evening barbecue. Stewart residents courteously joined in the fun, bringing new government trucks and a poodle.
The people of Hyder and Stewart are not nearly so different as they make themselves seem. They're friends, they go back and forth frequently, and they do a lot of the same kinds of work. It's not so much that they are different as individuals as that they choose to be different as communities.
The enterprising and economically productive Hyderites pretend they're just fooling around. Hyder's most available T-shirt shows a logger with red suspenders and a bottle of something warming, and the slogan "I've been Hyderized." The Stewartites pretend they're upright Victorians. Their most featured T-shirts display the official seal of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
It is striking how people doing exactly the same thing can portray their activities to themselves in opposite ways. Different cultural spectacles affect what citizens see and feel. In Stewart and Hyder, people mostly seek the same thing from government--money. Stewart needs jobs, and so welcomes all the customs officers and government officials and employees it can get.
Hyder also got government funding--for a 73,000-square-foot water-bottling plant on one of its mud roads, to sell Alaska Glacier Blue water from a glacier. The plant is expected to employ 40 people (not bad for a town of 100). But the people of Hyder didn't interpret their public funding as Canadians would have. The Americans saw themselves as independent and self-reliant people taking something from their government. The Hyderites saw the water-bottling plant as clear evidence of their aggressive enterprise and ability to get what they wanted through hard work together. The Canadians, on the other hand, generally see themselves as dependents of government, as sometimes grateful but sometimes resentful receivers of government alms.
Canadian sociologist Kaspar Naegele compares his country and the U.S. this way: "In Canada there seems to be greater acceptance of limitation, of hierarchical patterns. There seems to be less optimism, less faith in the future, less willingness to risk capital or reputation." American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset concludes that Canada is a "more law-abiding, statist, and collectivity-oriented society" than the U.S.
If we made a checklist of objective facts about a desirable place to live, Stewart would probably come out ahead. The Canadian way has virtues--clean paved streets, free medical care, a border station with a government presence, free bicycles. We had, after all, chosen to stay in Stewart, not Hyder. The American way, on the other hand, celebrates wildness. It celebrates common people and tolerates vulgarity. It is less interested in reprimanding iconoclasts.
But when we reacted to these two towns emotionally, instead of with checklists, Canada left us feeling flat and constrained. It was nice, but it wasn't us. When we crossed the border a couple of days later, out of the calm Canadian dusk into American neon lights, Joshua, our Yale philosophy major son, put his finger on our collective feelings. "America is thumos," he said. Thumos, an ancient Greek psychological concept, cannot be translated directly into English because it combines the qualities and emotions of passion, spirit, energy and courage. Thumos has a negative side--the anger of Achilles, or the Hyderites' reckless burning down of their own firehouse. But it is also a creative force of great and positive life powers.
Cowboys, venture capitalists, brilliant scientists, businesspeople like Bill Gates or Carly Fiorina, warriors like George S. Patton--have thumos. Modern people often ignore the role of "spiritedness." Psychologists measure intelligence, attitudes, emotions and values, but spiritedness is not a category of much academic interest. For ancient people, in contrast, spiritedness was central to an understanding of a society and the individual psyche. Socrates divided the soul into three parts: reason, thumos and appetite. Critics disdainful of America today often mischaracterize as aggressive or greedy "appetite" what should more accurately be interpreted as "spiritedness."
The role of freedom in creating prosperity has been the central discovery of economics over the past two centuries. What still tends to go unappreciated is that individual freedom has an emotional and spiritual value at least as important as its economic value. When one's activities are freely chosen and freely pursued, they create pleasure in themselves, not just through what is produced. That's why Caroline Gutierez of Hyder saw herself as "still on vacation" despite her two businesses and eight volunteer positions.
Americans enjoy the emotions freely chosen activities bring. We enjoy the autonomy and sense of authenticity, the exhilaration, the "wind in your hair" feeling of motion and freedom.
For centuries those describing our social character have identified exuberant energy and spiritedness as the most distinctive trait among Americans. "The place is so alive." "It makes you feel you can do so much more." These are common expressions among visiting observers of all ideologies.
Some individuals do not care for highly spirited people. There are quite a few American characteristics that seem unpleasant to people with different definitions of virtue. People who have a strong taste for order and hierarchy, who enjoy calm and quiet and leisure, who prefer security to risk, who take aesthetic pleasure in simplicity rather than in the bustling variety of human commerce--such people are not likely to enjoy America much. The British painter John Butler Yeats (the poet's father) spent 15 years trying to be an American. "A sort of European old-maidishness gets between me and them," he mourned. "Depend upon it, it is a mistake sometimes to have been too well brought up."
America's thumos appears most often in our pursuit of enterprise. The ancient passions for bravery in battle have reappeared in our prosaic, commercial culture. Tocqueville was quite taken with the American style of building lower-quality sailing ships, then taking over ocean commerce by sailing more of them faster, heedless of the risk of shipwreck, so that shipping could be cheaper. "Americans put a sort of heroism into their manner of doing commerce," he noted.
The place where America's national legends have been acted out has been our Western frontier. Even as the frontier has moved, we continue to use its imagery to describe ourselves, as when we refer to "homesteading on the electronic frontier." America's critics also favor Western and frontier imagery to describe us, as in the disdainful European references to "cowboys."
In every language in which we have tested this, "frontier" means something nearly opposite to its American sense. The French Larousse gives only one meaning for frontière, and that is the border between two nations--which in an oft-invaded country like France conjures up danger rather than opportunity. In Mandarin Chinese the term is bian jie or "boundary." In Cantonese, the word for frontier is huang di, which carries a negative connotation of "wilderness" or "wasteland." A frontier is a barren hardship post, not a place of opportunities, explains a Chinese colleague.
Russians have a very similar attitude toward frontiers. A Russian who discovered that one of these authors maintains his judicial chambers in Alaska blurted out, "Why were you sent?" The idea that there might be appeal in an assignment on America's Alaskan frontier seemed incomprehensible to him.
During America's expansion westward, frontier transformed into the very opposite of a boundary or limit. Its primary meaning in American English came to be a "boundless realm of possibility." Indeed some foreign dictionaries call this meaning of "frontier" an "Americanism."
The attractiveness of frontiers to Americans is demonstrated by our much more frequent use of the word. When we recently counted usages of the word frontier in business names in a number of different countries, we found that Americans use frontier in business names four times as often as the French, 15 times as often as the British, and 25 times more than the Argentines. And these numbers understate the national differences, because in other countries frontier is often used in reference to a business on the border (e.g., "State Line Liquor") to advertise businesses that leverage cross-border tax or regulatory differences.
Americans have many symbols of the Western frontier--mountain man, pioneer woman, homesteader, prospector--but our main symbol of the frontier is the cowboy. Hardly anyone needs stirrup-friendly, pointy-toed boots for his daily chores anymore, but plenty of people buy them. The cowboy best encapsulates the emotion, hostility, and fantasy of American independence.
Though detractors Marxify the cowboy into some sort of violent capitalist, the "Western" fable was actually a rebuke to the "Gilded Age." Americans did not choose as their heroes of song and image the men who financed the railroads and endowed the libraries. The Plains hero of Owen Wister's novel, "The Virginian" (a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt), had no property, no schooling, no social standing, no money and no interest in getting these things. What gave him pride was his courage, competence, self-discipline, self-reliance, physical prowess and most of all integrity and sense of justice. The cowboy, an impoverished hired hand who slept in bunkhouses or on the ground, was a figure of aristocratic honor. As Wister put it, "If he gave his word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the times." The cowboy was a knight, albeit one with no land or money.
"High Noon" portrayed a sheriff who, unable to get any of the townsmen to stand with him against brutal thugs taking over their remote town, faced them down alone, and survived only because his Quaker wife picked up a gun and sacrificed her abstract pacifism to the concrete virtue that the hero represented. "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" presented John Wayne as a military hero who, through great courage and skill, prevented an Indian war. In "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence," Jimmy Stewart played a lawyer who had no skill with a gun, happily wore an apron, and dried the dishes in the kitchen until he was forced by a sense of honor and justice to confront the villain who ruled the town by brute force. "Shane" told the story of a brave man who wanted peace but risked his life to protect homesteaders from the men who were destroying them. In all the classic Westerns the hero, by dint of great courage and competence, fights alone for justice, achieves it, and leaves without riches or fame, with nothing but honor.
Because the cowboy melded the aristocratic virtues of honor and indifference to material things with the democratic values of self-reliance, discipline, and independence, this myth appealed deeply to our national character. Freedom imposes burdens--isolation, inequality and anxiety about whether our choices are wise. The cowboy ideal stimulates in us the vigor to attempt difficult new tasks.
When foreigners see us as cowboys, they are not mistaken. As a people, we still exhibit a high degree of courage, independence, aggressiveness, competence, and spirit. Diplomatic Europeans have responded to tyranny over the latest century mostly with accommodation, like the townspeople in "High Noon." Cowboy Americans, on the other hand, have hungered to confront and defeat tyrants, in real life as in legend. Our Western experience--love of freedom, little deference to wealth and status, an idealistic drive for justice, and a willingness to be ferocious toward these ends--continues to drive much of what is best about America.
So can they call us cowboys? You bet. Because we are. Our response ought to be that of the Virginian when he was described as a son of a bitch: "When you call me that, smile!"
Monday, July 19, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
The American Enterprise
Everywhere, Americans are called "cowboys." On foreign tongues, the reference to America's Western rural laborers is an insult. Cowboys, we are told, plundered the earth, arrogantly rode roughshod over neighbors, and were addicted to mindless violence. So some of us hang our heads in shame. We shouldn't. The cowboy is in fact our Homeric hero, an archetype that sticks because there's truth in it.
Cowboys were of course plainsmen--Midwesterners operating from Texas to Kansas to the Dakotas. But their ideas and ideals spread across the continent to our Mountain West as well, even as far as the Alaskan West.
A few years ago, a Canadian anthropologist explained to us how different her countrymen are from Americans. She had a perfect comparison to illustrate this. She suggested that we go to the extreme western edge of Canada and have a look at two small towns named Stewart and Hyder. Stewart is situated in British Columbia, Hyder at the southeastern tip of Alaska. Though just two miles apart, these towns are very different in their "habits of the heart." If we visited them, our anthropologist friend implied, we would immediately understand the superiority of Canadian culture.
We decided to take up her challenge.
First we called up the respective town authorities. Hyder, the American town, turned out to have no town authorities--and, technically, no town. The Hyderites chose not to incorporate as a municipality, creating instead a community association--a private nonprofit corporation. Stewart, the Canadian town, is a real municipality with a traditional government.
When we phoned Stewart, the government agent refused to answer any questions until they were submitted in writing. The Hyder community association representative said, sure, she'd tell us anything we wanted to know, right now, on the phone. But to make it a fair comparison, we faxed written questions to both parties, and got written answers back.
The Canadian government official, evidently aspiring to create a faceless bureaucracy in this 700-person outpost, signed the response as "Government Agent"--capital letters but no name or sex--and explained that Stewart had a "Municipal Government incorporated under the laws of the Province of British Columbia," with a mayor and a city council of six members. As to Stewart's nearby neighbors, Government Agent from Canada said diplomatically, "I'm not sure how Hyder is governed," but expressed polite disapproval of its apparent libertarian streak.
Stewart developed very early into a regulated community, explained Government Agent, while Hyder chose to follow the path of less community and more personal freedom. Hyder is a collection of individuals first and a community second, while Stewart has a "community first" attitude, according to Government Agent. "We are generally more accepting of government's involvement in our day-to-day lives."
The Hyder representative--definitely not a Government Agent--signed her name, Caroline Gutierez, to her answers, which she sent on her personal stationery advertising her several businesses. She runs Boundary Gallery, where she is proprietor as well as artist, and Wood Bee Lumber Enterprise, as well as filling eight community positions ranging from music teacher to curator of the town museum. "I came with my family to Hyder on a summer vacation and am pleased to say I am still on vacation," Ms. Gutierez said. She applauded the very same cowboy attitudes that Government Agent disdained. Hyder, she said, was "spirited, rebellious, and independent," while Stewart was "cautious and cleaving to Mother England."
The differences in these answers were interesting enough to convince us to undertake a three-day, 1,200-mile drive from our home in Fairbanks, Alaska. We arrived first at Stewart, Canada, an orderly, well-kept town with paved streets. Then we drove off the blacktop into Hyder, USA--a mélange of disorder where at dark we could find little but a raunchy-looking bar and lodge. We stayed on the Canadian side, at the King Edward Hotel. At our lace-and-doilies Stewart breakfast spot, we found a promotional map. It showed that Stewart had a neat grid of streets and municipal facilities, but not much else. Hyder, on the other hand, with about one-seventh the population and no straight or paved roads at all, had 23 business and community enterprises.
Driving back and forth in daylight, our initial impressions of Stewart as solid and prosperous, Hyder as wild and ramshackle, turned completely inside out. Stewart is definitely much more attractive and inviting, with sidewalks, flower boxes and bicycles to borrow free at the well-staffed government tourist office. But Hyder was the confident, prosperous community. Stewart's houses needed paint. Its shops needed tourists. Its roads needed traffic. It was a semi-ghost town, bravely struggling on. With mining and logging drying up (environmentalist-orchestrated bans on logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest and the closing of Ketchikan's pulp mill devastated the lumber economy in this region), many of Stewart's businesses, elegant restaurants, and small tourist attractions (e.g., the world's leading toaster museum) had discreet "for sale" signs in the windows.
Hyder, meanwhile, turned out to be a lot more productive and enterprising than it had looked at dusk. The Hyderites had evidently found other ways to make money when the mines and mills were shut down. The pickup trucks in Hyder were newer and better, and there were a lot more satellite dishes.
The best restaurant in the Hyder-Stewart metropolitan area, we discovered, was an old school bus and tent in Hyder serving fresh fish. The proprietor had traded a snowmobile for the bus, gutted it and turned it into a kitchen. She served halibut and charcoal-grilled salmon supplied by local fishermen. She had the highest prices in town, yet her restaurant was the only one with lines.
Hyder's most visible business (aside from the bar) was the "Border Bandit Discount Store." Between two giant American flags, this emporium expressed the town's style on its sign:
Hyder Alaska--a town of about a hundred happy people and a few old s---heads.
Discount tobacco
Tax free bed & breakfast
Tax free storeboat rental
Custom importing
Pawn, buy, sell, gold
Sporting goods guns & ammo
Marine supplies
Industrial materials
Almost anything else
We chatted with a Hyder resident (retired, so he had time to talk) who was definitely among the "hundred happy people." He'd built a $2 million business in this tiny frontier town from such enterprises as selling discount appliances and charging $25 in Hyder for a carton of cigarettes that costs $50 in Stewart. People drove to his store from all over northern British Columbia and the Yukon. Hyderites, he explained, made money on "everything that's legal or close to it."
Doubtless the academics would say that Hyder illustrates the immorality of markets and the lamentable limitations of sovereignty, which prevented Canada from imposing its higher taxes and fewer commercial freedoms so close to its borders. A case history of the commercial anarchy that results from lack of government.
There was no arguing the lack of government. Not only is there no municipality in Hyder, but no border station either. Once there had been one, but the Hyderites had protested the nuisance of having to stop when they drove back and forth. And after all, no such municipality as Hyder exists--a nonexistent place doesn't need a border station.
Stewart, on the other hand, has a well-maintained government border station with numerous polite and apologetic employees staffing three shifts. Each time our Jeep passed back and forth between the two towns we answered the same litany of questions to people who quickly got to know us and our answers. We asked one of the Canadian border guards what Hyderites were like. "Free spirits. Wild. They have guns, you know." We were asked if we had any guns each time we drove back to Stewart, since handguns (a near-universal in Alaskan bear country) are contraband in Canada.
We made this trip in the first week of July. The "Canada Day" celebrations that took place in Stewart on July 1 were very vanilla. They included a "jaws of life" rescue equipment demonstration, a Name the Babies Contest, and the Annual Community Potluck Dinner in the early evening.
Three days later on July 4, Hyder spiced its national celebration with dashes of politically incorrect cayenne. There was an Ugly Vehicle Contest featuring pickups held together with duct tape and decorated with moose antlers (unlike the shiny ones in the driveways). There were parades of children with pets, toy guns and cowboy costumes. There was a Wilderness Woman Contest. Contestants raced to split wood, wash clothes, shoot a bear, flip pancakes, change a baby, and put on lipstick. The winner did it all barefoot.
Even Hyderites recognize their limits--in an earlier year's self-staged July 4 fireworks display, they had accidentally burned down their fire hall with the fire engine inside. So this year Hyder hired Canadian experts to stage the pyrotechnics. The show started around midnight, during the late evening barbecue. Stewart residents courteously joined in the fun, bringing new government trucks and a poodle.
The people of Hyder and Stewart are not nearly so different as they make themselves seem. They're friends, they go back and forth frequently, and they do a lot of the same kinds of work. It's not so much that they are different as individuals as that they choose to be different as communities.
The enterprising and economically productive Hyderites pretend they're just fooling around. Hyder's most available T-shirt shows a logger with red suspenders and a bottle of something warming, and the slogan "I've been Hyderized." The Stewartites pretend they're upright Victorians. Their most featured T-shirts display the official seal of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
It is striking how people doing exactly the same thing can portray their activities to themselves in opposite ways. Different cultural spectacles affect what citizens see and feel. In Stewart and Hyder, people mostly seek the same thing from government--money. Stewart needs jobs, and so welcomes all the customs officers and government officials and employees it can get.
Hyder also got government funding--for a 73,000-square-foot water-bottling plant on one of its mud roads, to sell Alaska Glacier Blue water from a glacier. The plant is expected to employ 40 people (not bad for a town of 100). But the people of Hyder didn't interpret their public funding as Canadians would have. The Americans saw themselves as independent and self-reliant people taking something from their government. The Hyderites saw the water-bottling plant as clear evidence of their aggressive enterprise and ability to get what they wanted through hard work together. The Canadians, on the other hand, generally see themselves as dependents of government, as sometimes grateful but sometimes resentful receivers of government alms.
Canadian sociologist Kaspar Naegele compares his country and the U.S. this way: "In Canada there seems to be greater acceptance of limitation, of hierarchical patterns. There seems to be less optimism, less faith in the future, less willingness to risk capital or reputation." American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset concludes that Canada is a "more law-abiding, statist, and collectivity-oriented society" than the U.S.
If we made a checklist of objective facts about a desirable place to live, Stewart would probably come out ahead. The Canadian way has virtues--clean paved streets, free medical care, a border station with a government presence, free bicycles. We had, after all, chosen to stay in Stewart, not Hyder. The American way, on the other hand, celebrates wildness. It celebrates common people and tolerates vulgarity. It is less interested in reprimanding iconoclasts.
But when we reacted to these two towns emotionally, instead of with checklists, Canada left us feeling flat and constrained. It was nice, but it wasn't us. When we crossed the border a couple of days later, out of the calm Canadian dusk into American neon lights, Joshua, our Yale philosophy major son, put his finger on our collective feelings. "America is thumos," he said. Thumos, an ancient Greek psychological concept, cannot be translated directly into English because it combines the qualities and emotions of passion, spirit, energy and courage. Thumos has a negative side--the anger of Achilles, or the Hyderites' reckless burning down of their own firehouse. But it is also a creative force of great and positive life powers.
Cowboys, venture capitalists, brilliant scientists, businesspeople like Bill Gates or Carly Fiorina, warriors like George S. Patton--have thumos. Modern people often ignore the role of "spiritedness." Psychologists measure intelligence, attitudes, emotions and values, but spiritedness is not a category of much academic interest. For ancient people, in contrast, spiritedness was central to an understanding of a society and the individual psyche. Socrates divided the soul into three parts: reason, thumos and appetite. Critics disdainful of America today often mischaracterize as aggressive or greedy "appetite" what should more accurately be interpreted as "spiritedness."
The role of freedom in creating prosperity has been the central discovery of economics over the past two centuries. What still tends to go unappreciated is that individual freedom has an emotional and spiritual value at least as important as its economic value. When one's activities are freely chosen and freely pursued, they create pleasure in themselves, not just through what is produced. That's why Caroline Gutierez of Hyder saw herself as "still on vacation" despite her two businesses and eight volunteer positions.
Americans enjoy the emotions freely chosen activities bring. We enjoy the autonomy and sense of authenticity, the exhilaration, the "wind in your hair" feeling of motion and freedom.
For centuries those describing our social character have identified exuberant energy and spiritedness as the most distinctive trait among Americans. "The place is so alive." "It makes you feel you can do so much more." These are common expressions among visiting observers of all ideologies.
Some individuals do not care for highly spirited people. There are quite a few American characteristics that seem unpleasant to people with different definitions of virtue. People who have a strong taste for order and hierarchy, who enjoy calm and quiet and leisure, who prefer security to risk, who take aesthetic pleasure in simplicity rather than in the bustling variety of human commerce--such people are not likely to enjoy America much. The British painter John Butler Yeats (the poet's father) spent 15 years trying to be an American. "A sort of European old-maidishness gets between me and them," he mourned. "Depend upon it, it is a mistake sometimes to have been too well brought up."
America's thumos appears most often in our pursuit of enterprise. The ancient passions for bravery in battle have reappeared in our prosaic, commercial culture. Tocqueville was quite taken with the American style of building lower-quality sailing ships, then taking over ocean commerce by sailing more of them faster, heedless of the risk of shipwreck, so that shipping could be cheaper. "Americans put a sort of heroism into their manner of doing commerce," he noted.
The place where America's national legends have been acted out has been our Western frontier. Even as the frontier has moved, we continue to use its imagery to describe ourselves, as when we refer to "homesteading on the electronic frontier." America's critics also favor Western and frontier imagery to describe us, as in the disdainful European references to "cowboys."
In every language in which we have tested this, "frontier" means something nearly opposite to its American sense. The French Larousse gives only one meaning for frontière, and that is the border between two nations--which in an oft-invaded country like France conjures up danger rather than opportunity. In Mandarin Chinese the term is bian jie or "boundary." In Cantonese, the word for frontier is huang di, which carries a negative connotation of "wilderness" or "wasteland." A frontier is a barren hardship post, not a place of opportunities, explains a Chinese colleague.
Russians have a very similar attitude toward frontiers. A Russian who discovered that one of these authors maintains his judicial chambers in Alaska blurted out, "Why were you sent?" The idea that there might be appeal in an assignment on America's Alaskan frontier seemed incomprehensible to him.
During America's expansion westward, frontier transformed into the very opposite of a boundary or limit. Its primary meaning in American English came to be a "boundless realm of possibility." Indeed some foreign dictionaries call this meaning of "frontier" an "Americanism."
The attractiveness of frontiers to Americans is demonstrated by our much more frequent use of the word. When we recently counted usages of the word frontier in business names in a number of different countries, we found that Americans use frontier in business names four times as often as the French, 15 times as often as the British, and 25 times more than the Argentines. And these numbers understate the national differences, because in other countries frontier is often used in reference to a business on the border (e.g., "State Line Liquor") to advertise businesses that leverage cross-border tax or regulatory differences.
Americans have many symbols of the Western frontier--mountain man, pioneer woman, homesteader, prospector--but our main symbol of the frontier is the cowboy. Hardly anyone needs stirrup-friendly, pointy-toed boots for his daily chores anymore, but plenty of people buy them. The cowboy best encapsulates the emotion, hostility, and fantasy of American independence.
Though detractors Marxify the cowboy into some sort of violent capitalist, the "Western" fable was actually a rebuke to the "Gilded Age." Americans did not choose as their heroes of song and image the men who financed the railroads and endowed the libraries. The Plains hero of Owen Wister's novel, "The Virginian" (a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt), had no property, no schooling, no social standing, no money and no interest in getting these things. What gave him pride was his courage, competence, self-discipline, self-reliance, physical prowess and most of all integrity and sense of justice. The cowboy, an impoverished hired hand who slept in bunkhouses or on the ground, was a figure of aristocratic honor. As Wister put it, "If he gave his word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the times." The cowboy was a knight, albeit one with no land or money.
"High Noon" portrayed a sheriff who, unable to get any of the townsmen to stand with him against brutal thugs taking over their remote town, faced them down alone, and survived only because his Quaker wife picked up a gun and sacrificed her abstract pacifism to the concrete virtue that the hero represented. "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" presented John Wayne as a military hero who, through great courage and skill, prevented an Indian war. In "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence," Jimmy Stewart played a lawyer who had no skill with a gun, happily wore an apron, and dried the dishes in the kitchen until he was forced by a sense of honor and justice to confront the villain who ruled the town by brute force. "Shane" told the story of a brave man who wanted peace but risked his life to protect homesteaders from the men who were destroying them. In all the classic Westerns the hero, by dint of great courage and competence, fights alone for justice, achieves it, and leaves without riches or fame, with nothing but honor.
Because the cowboy melded the aristocratic virtues of honor and indifference to material things with the democratic values of self-reliance, discipline, and independence, this myth appealed deeply to our national character. Freedom imposes burdens--isolation, inequality and anxiety about whether our choices are wise. The cowboy ideal stimulates in us the vigor to attempt difficult new tasks.
When foreigners see us as cowboys, they are not mistaken. As a people, we still exhibit a high degree of courage, independence, aggressiveness, competence, and spirit. Diplomatic Europeans have responded to tyranny over the latest century mostly with accommodation, like the townspeople in "High Noon." Cowboy Americans, on the other hand, have hungered to confront and defeat tyrants, in real life as in legend. Our Western experience--love of freedom, little deference to wealth and status, an idealistic drive for justice, and a willingness to be ferocious toward these ends--continues to drive much of what is best about America.
So can they call us cowboys? You bet. Because we are. Our response ought to be that of the Virginian when he was described as a son of a bitch: "When you call me that, smile!"
