Word: boorstins
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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...
Islands in the Main. The unhappy exception to the expanding national experience, says Author Boorstin, was the South. Its cities were not intellectual and cultural centers. Its planter-family leadership was generally rural and withdrawn. Its economy was agrarian and tied increasingly to a single crop. Its immigrants (the Negroes) were never assimilated, but were held apart in an arbitrary and bifurcated social structure. Its legal system depended on a punctilious, vague, and largely unwritten code of honor. And its preachments on the state's right of secession nourished a colonial mentality in the South long after the rest...
...fact, during the early years of the 19th century, despite formal political ties and intermittent economic relations, the North, the South and the West were almost completely separated regions. They floated, says Boorstin, like "fuzzy islands" in the continental main. But far beneath the surface of events, forces were working to bring them together, and in the second half of his book, Boorstin traces the sluggish growth of the American identity...
American ways of thinking and being were as fluid and uncertain as the American frontier. Boorstin explores them in an erudite and eloquent essay on the American gift of gab. With verbacious vitality, the growing American language devoured Indian, Dutch, German, Spanish, French and Negro words. Others were invented (caucus, lynch-law, squatter), improvised (sockdolager, spondulix, absquatulate), and embellished (kerflop, kerthump, kersouse). The general exuberance also burst out in political oratory and tall talk ("Bust me wide open if I didn't bulge into the creek in the twinkling of a bedpost, I was so thunderin' savagerous...
...this evolving ecumenism, there remained the one tragic exception, the South, and it was the problem of the South that led at last to the supreme crisis of identity in U.S. history. Author Boorstin will presumably consider the Civil War in his final volume. If it is as good as the first two, he will have made a major contribution to the continuing elucidation of the American past...