Word: frontier
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...improve people's lives. If he can turn his "new covenant" rhetoric into reality, he has the chance to personify the type of mood swing ushered in by the rough-riding progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt in 1900, the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and the New Frontier of John Kennedy...
...rich landowner, was expelled from college, spent some years in the Navy, then discovered, in his early 30s, that he could write. Though he never lived in the wilderness, the Leatherstocking tales -- The Last of the Mohicans and four companion volumes -- cover 60 years of frontier life, from the French and Indian Wars to the settling of the Great Plains...
...virtues of the books, surprisingly, is a keen sense of how men and women lived in early American society, or on its margins. The Pioneers describes the growing pains of a frontier town in upstate New York in the 1790s, in which religious sects jockey for advantage and the law turns bully. The Prairie depicts a pioneer clan named Bush, whose family values include squatting and kidnapping. The new nation may have been led by paragons like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; Cooper's characters were the nation they led. It is our first group self-portrait...
There is also human nature, which, as Cooper's tales present it, is a sorry thing. Sophistication doesn't improve it: the bloodiest deed in the Leatherstocking tales, a frontier My Lai, is the responsibility of a French aristocrat. Nor does the simple life guarantee innocence. Cooper's blackest villain is an Indian, his second blackest a hermit trapper who hunts scalps for bounty. The scene in which the trapper, scalped himself and dying, fears he may go to hell, is one of the most powerful Cooper ever wrote, and it owes its power to ethical earnestness as much...
Americans, by contrast, tinker endlessly with their patchwork of entitlement programs aimed largely at the poor. The failure to make a French-style commitment has much to do with the reverence Americans have for self-reliance. They cling to a new-frontier notion of rugged individualism, forgetting that those who actually braved the alien territories of the Wild West traveled in groups of families, not alone. Through the agrarian era into the modern one, Americans have continued to regard the nurturing of families as a personal issue rather than a public concern. "We have this notion," says research psychologist Arlene...