Books: Growth of Identity

THE AMERICANS: THE NATIONAL EXPERIENCE by Daniel J. Boorstin. 517 pages. Random House. $8.95.

"What then is the American, this new man?" Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville asked the question, historians have been trying to provide an answer—sometimes political (Clinton Rossiter), sometimes economic (Charles A. Beard), sometimes sociocultural (Perry Miller). Latest to make the attempt is Daniel Boorstin, Harvard-trained professor of American history at the University of Chicago, who acknowledges many centers of motivation, supplements his studies with insights drawn from psychology, sociology, political science, economics and literary criticism.

He is writing a trilogy; the first volume, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, won the Bancroft Prize. In it Boorstin protested what he considered an overemphasis on the European origins of American identity, went in search of the uniquely American in America. Now, in the second volume of this enormously rich and suggestive survey, he considers the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, and seeks to trace in the earliest records of the nation the traits that have dominated its later history.

Technology of Haste. Boorstin approaches the problem region by region. In New England, he finds, adaptation required a monumental psychological change. Poor in natural resources, the New Englander exploited his native resourcefulness. "New England," ran the popular taunt, "produces nothing but granite and ice." So energetic New Englanders, making an economic virtue out of a geographical necessity, harvested their rocky hills and frozen ponds, virtually created the markets for their products, shipped granite to Savannah and New Orleans, ice to Persia, India and Australia. The same restless and ingenious spirit drove New England manufacturers who developed specialized machines to replace unspecialized men, ensured the prosperity of the mobile American who could "make anything, do anything, go anywhere."

Many went west. Author Boorstin styles them the "Transients," finds in the story of their trundling, urgent progress the paradigm and impulse for much of later American life. Because they explored an unknown world, mutual assistance was a necessity. Law was invented as needed, government sprang up from the grass roots of democracy, and leadership fell to the organizer, whose powers of persuasion could cajole conflicting interests into cooperation. Because land went to the first man who settled it, the Transients were always in a hurry, and the nation committed itself with almost religious fervor to a technology of haste.