Word: frontiersman
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...today's complaint was fashionable. The ruling elite saw office as an end in itself, wrote the educator Horace Mann. For those men, he said, the question was "Where can I be -- not what can I be." Jackson shared the public's disdain for this complacency and championed the frontiersman's ideal, the equicompetence of most men to most tasks. Like Perot, Jackson had wide support in all sections of the country (which sets both men apart from most third- party candidates, who have essentially represented various extremes...
From the quiet frontiersman to the modern urban loner, the archetypal American is someone whose most sacred territory is the portable enclosure of the self. But if "Mind your own business" has long been a prime tenet of the national philosophy, "Let it all hang out" is now running a close second. It's hard to find a national consensus on confidentiality in a nation of tell- all memoirs, inquiring pollsters and talk shows -- not to mention televised Senate hearings -- whose participants air explicit sexual details that would have caused earlier generations to blush and turn away...
...perfectibility on earth ("the pursuit of happiness" -- their own personal happiness). That expectation, which can make Americans charming and unreasonable and shallow, is part of their formula for success. But it has led Americans into absurdities and discontents that others who know life better might never think of. The frontiersman's self-sufficiency and stoicism in the face of pain belong now in some wax museum of lost American self- images...
...train ride in the western hemisphere. It was 1881 when he took over construction of the trans-Canadian railway, a project that consumed several fortunes, 4 1/2 years of agonizing labor and an untold number of lives. "Since we can't export the scenery," he once said, expressing a frontiersman's thirsty love of the land, "we'll have to import the tourists...
Both critics have a point; Cooper's characterization of Natty Bumppo, the sharpshooter who boasts, "What I can see, I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquitoe's eye," shuttles uneasily from stolid frontiersman to animated cartoon. Yet the surrounding Delaware, Iroquois and Sioux are presented for the first time as complex beings with heroic as well as villainous traits. It took another century to amplify the efforts of Cooper, whose unacknowledged voice can still be heard in romantic protest literature and films. If his works now seem closer to scenarios than to novels...