From "The Last American Man"

This is the incredible story of Eustace Conway.


For those who find this characterization of "The American Man" odd or offensive, remember that the mortality rate for the first Virginia settlers was something like 98% for the first few years. Thus, those that remained were of the sturdiest stock available. They didn't survive by playing Sudoko or badminton but by biting and killing their way to reproductive maturity. This kind of brutality is almost entirely lost on us in the Northeast, but it's nonetheless a vital bloodline of the country. We ignore it at our peril.


Here is my favorite quote from the introduction:

"The problem was that, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and was transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There, he shed his cosmopolitan manners and became a robust and proficient man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man.

This was a particular kind of man, this wilderness-bred American. He was no intellectual. He had no interest in study or reflection. He had, as de Tocqueville noticed, "a sort of distaste for what is ancient." Instead, he could sterotypically be found, as the explorer John Fremont described the Über-frontiersman Kit Carson, "mounted on a fine horse, without a saddle and scouring bare-headed over the prairies." Either that, or whipping his mighty ax over his shoulder and casually "throwing cedars and oaks to the ground," as one extremely impressed nineteenth-century foreign visitor observed. In fact, to all the foreign visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the American Man was a virtual tourist attraction in his own right, almost as fascinating as Niagara Falls or that ambitious new railroad system or those exotic Indians. Not everybody was a fan, of course. ("There are perhaps no people, not even excepting the French, who are so vain as the Americans," griped one British observer in 1818. "Every American considers that it's impossible for a foreigner to teach him anything, and that his head contains a perfect encyclopedia.") Still, for better or worse, everyone seemed to agree that this was a new kind of human being and that what defined the American Man more than anything else was his resourcefulness, born out of the challenges of wrenching a New World from virgin wilderness. Unhindered by class restrictions, bureaucracy, or urban squalor, these Americans simply got more done in a single day than anyone had imagined possible. That was the bottom line: nobody could believe how fast these guys worked."

Clearly this take on American productivity was written before the Detroit Union Era. When Obama says that no one works harder than Americans do, I always scratch my head. Seriously? How can they work so hard when they're all obese and on 2 dozen medications? I figure what motivates hard work is hunger - like the kind they have, say, in, oh, I don't know. . .China? Or any other country looking to claw its way out of desperate poverty? How can the fat, unionized American worker compete with that? What the hell was Obama talking about?

But I guess he was resurrecting the old frontiersman myth to try and inspire us anew. But when I look at the unionized stagehands at Carnegie Hall who make low six-figures for moving music stands two times in an hour, I have to wonder how far along this line of reasoning is really going to bring us into the 21st Century. It was one thing when the rest of the world was riven by warfare and destitute with disease and poverty. But now, we will have to call on something other than distant memories to allow us to compete. I'd bet on the hungry guy over the fat guy any day.

From Fredrick Jackson Turner

"In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history."

First stabs

Some of you may know that my ongoing cause celebre has been youth suffrage, coupled with abandonment of child labor laws and compulsory schooling. I have many paragraphs strewn around google docs and Micro Word on the subject, but they have yet to congeal into a concrete paper.

To me, this is the most important topic of the day, though it is admittedly quite far from the mainstream awareness. Since most people in America went to school and were not allowed to work for compensation or vote, it requires some imagination for them to perceive the value of something so far from their experience. Unfortunately, the public is not well known for its powers of imagination, Obama's messianism aside.

Still, I think it is important to make rational points on behalf of what I believe is the silver bullet to many of America's problems, including the national debt, global warming, medicare, and gang violence in our inner cities.

That's a pretty weighty docket of problems, but I am certain that over a generation or two, they could largely be addressed by giving a voice to the only people who have a genuine interest in their positive outcome. in the case of gang violence, that would be the young people themselves who are getting killed, and in the other cases, the young people who will grow old enough to bear the brunt of the latent catastrophes their parents are creating.

In fact, that is the point I would add to the argument below: that self-interest is what rules American democracy- period. The interest of a 6-year-old born today, who can reasonably be expected to live for another 90 years are other than the interests of his father who might live another 30 or 40 at most. The long term impact of economic and environmental irresponsibility will be tangibly felt by the child but not likely by the father. Long term stability, therefore, should be the province of the young, who are going to live through the long term, not the old, whom death will spare the punishments for their profligacy.


I have heard only one other public voice share my concern, and this short post moved me to force some of my thoughts into a bullet point reply. You'll find my summary below.

Some points:

1. Being informed is not a pre-requisite for voting in America. Having interests is, and children have interests. There are people who vote by making pretty patterns with the levers on the ballots, and their votes count as much as yours do.

2. You can’t give parents an extra vote for their children, because parents’ interests and children’s interests are often at odds- think long term debt vs. short term market gains, or global warming impacts, etc.

3. Kids appear uninterested in politics because they have no power to influence politics. I have no interest in the private jet market, because I have no power to purchase a private jet.

4. Most likely kids would vote to repeal mandatory schooling and child-labor laws which restrict their ability to exercise their will and power in the world. When you treat somebody like a child they will act like one (Uncle Tom = Uncle Junior). Right now children have responsibilities (like homework) but no freedoms as a result. This is equivalent to tyranny over a minority and should not be allowed in a democracy.

5. All arguments that seek to deprive children of voting were applied to slaves and women in previous centuries and were all proven false once those groups were given power to affect their lives.

6. Just want to iterate that being an informed and educated voter is not essential in a democracy. People can be quite informed (Brooks and Dionne) and still come to opposite conclusions. It’s not about being right, it’s about having desire. And even if being right were a valid consideration, millions of senile, uneducated, old people can vote but an informed 17 year old can not. Even on those terms, this is not a just state of affairs.

7. And even assuming intelligence is a valid concern, while all young people might not be intelligent, a natural leadership would arise from those who are. Not all women or blacks (or environmentalists or WASPS) are intelligent either, but their interests can be wrangled by bright leaders within their own community. There are plenty of children who would be capable of representing for their fellows in lobbying government. This is particularly true in poor black and latino communities where these young politicians (for lack of political power) become gang leaders and express their leadership in violence rather than in debate. These poorer communities would benefit the most from youth suffrage, as they already have powerful leaders who have no other outlet to seek their own interests other than gunplay and crime.

8. Finally, engaging the generation that is closest to the future and future trends, who is fluent in the technology that will be running our lives a generation off, would be a huge boon to our community. Shunting these kids into schoolroom dungeons is the biggest waste of resources in the country. I want that 6 year old programmer developing aps for my iPhone, investing in stocks, and retiring at 40 to become a philanthropist- not memorizing multiplication tables and poetry that he doesn’t like or understand.

End of lecture.
D