The Promise of American Life | Page 5

the
"Letters of an American Farmer." This book was written by a French
immigrant, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur before the Revolution, and is
informed by an intense consciousness of the difference between
conditions in the Old and in the New World. "What, then, is an
American, this new man?" asks the Pennsylvanian farmer. "He is either
a European or the descendant of a European; hence the strange mixture
of blood, which you will find in no other country....
"He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our
great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new
race of men, whose labors and prosperity will one day cause great
changes in the world. Here the rewards of his industry follow with
equal steps the progress of his labor; this labor is founded on the basis
of self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children,
who before in vain demanded a morsel of bread, now fat and

frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields, whence
exuberant crops are to arise to feed them all; without any part being
claimed either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord....
The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must
therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary
idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed
to toils of a very different nature rewarded by ample subsistence. This
is an American."
Although the foregoing is one of the first, it is also one of the most
explicit descriptions of the fundamental American; and it deserves to be
analyzed with some care. According to this French convert the
American is a man, or the descendant of a man, who has emigrated
from Europe chiefly because he expects to be better able in the New
World to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. The conception implies,
consequently, an Old World, in which the ordinary man cannot become
independent and prosperous, and, on the other hand, a New World in
which economic opportunities are much more abundant and accessible.
America has been peopled by Europeans primarily because they
expected in that country to make more money more easily. To the
European immigrant--that is, to the aliens who have been converted
into Americans by the advantages of American life--the Promise of
America has consisted largely in the opportunity which it offered of
economic independence and prosperity. Whatever else the better future,
of which Europeans anticipate the enjoyment in America, may contain,
these converts will consider themselves cheated unless they are in a
measure relieved of the curse of poverty.
This conception of American life and its Promise is as much alive
to-day as it was in 1780. Its expression has no doubt been modified
during four generations of democratic political independence, but the
modification has consisted of an expansion and a development rather
than of a transposition. The native American, like the alien immigrant,
conceives the better future which awaits himself and other men in
America as fundamentally a future in which economic prosperity will
be still more abundant and still more accessible than it has yet been
either here or abroad. No alteration or attenuation of this demand has

been permitted. With all their professions of Christianity their national
idea remains thoroughly worldly. They do not want either for
themselves or for their descendants an indefinite future of poverty and
deprivation in this world, redeemed by beatitude in the next. The
Promise, which bulks so large in their patriotic outlook, is a promise of
comfort and prosperity for an ever increasing majority of good
Americans. At a later stage of their social development they may come
to believe that they have ordered a larger supply of prosperity than the
economic factory is capable of producing. Those who are already rich
and comfortable, and who are keenly alive to the difficulty of
distributing these benefits over a larger social area, may come to
tolerate the idea that poverty and want are an essential part of the social
order. But as yet this traditional European opinion has found few
echoes in America, even among the comfortable and the rich. The
general belief still is that Americans are not destined to renounce, but
to enjoy.
Let it be immediately added, however, that this economic independence
and prosperity has always been absolutely associated in the American
mind with free political institutions. The "American Farmer" traced the
good fortune of the European immigrant in America, not merely to the
abundance of economic opportunity, but to the fact that a ruling class
of abbots and lords had no prior claim to a large share of the products
of the soil. He did not attach the name of democracy to the improved