People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character

"The People of Plenty" is one of the most interesting books I have read in the past two years: informative, instructive, entertaining, challenging, provocative. The book deals with the effects of economic abundance on the American national character as a relationship between history and the behavioral sciences. It is organized in two major parts. Part I outlines the concept of national character from the viewpoints of the historian and behavioral scientist. Part II is about how economic abundance has shaped the American character. To begin with, if Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is correct that "History is to a Nation what Memory is to an individual", national character is the changing memory of a nation. This is no new assertion, but the author argues that popular generalizations of national character are incorrect. They weave traits and habits in there descriptions, and so they "show how badly the true analysis of national character will be hindered if historians, like the blindmen who examined the elephant, mistake the part for the whole" (p. 13). The problem is that nations are made up of people, and people's characteristics are cultural, political, economic, historical, and so on. Rather than nation units defining character, national character may be conceived as a national culture expressed as a political unit called a nation. Previous explanations of national character, and here the author sweeps the canvas as only a historian can do, have been flawed. Many paid little attention to what character actually is, or "how they would define the `nation' as the unit to which the character is attributed" (p.20). The historian's generalizations of character have ranged all over the place, from such things as that (a) character is God-given (chosen nations); (b) character is driven by environmental factors like technology; and (c ) character is a genetic disposition like race. For the behavioral scientist national character stems from any number of behavioral factors: psychological traits, group propensities brought about by socialization, and so on. From the literature the author gathers that the American character is a measure of success. Success, "the American measures as his own worth by the distance which he occupies; he esteems high current income more than the possession of long-accumulated wealth. Mobility and change are natural by-products of his quest for success, and departure from the patterns of the past is a matter of course" (p.48). This passage suggests that "the American character is a large measure of group responses to an unusually competitive situation" (p. 60) - an early indication of the hypothesis that national character is a function of economics - the subject of the second part of the book. Abundance leads to the American character, but abundance is simultaneously a function of human and nonhuman factors, with human factors being more important and less exhaustible. Hence, the national bounty of a nation increases with human

This is one of the seminal books on understanding what it means to be an American, and on what makes our character distinctive, if not utterly unique. Potter was a remarkable professor of American History at Stanford, where his final lecture in my Junior year taught me what the phrase " the crowd lept to its feet" meant. Among other remarkable traits, Potter never once uttered that or any other cliche in those lectures or in this extraordinary book. The work of a giant, engaging and accessible to almost anyone.