Toughness in the American character

The ‘American character’ has fascinated successive generations of American and non-American commentators alike ever since the middle years of the 18th century. Nowadays, as in the past, few are without an opinion, if not their own pet theory, on the subject. Rupert Wilkinson claims, not unreasonably, that an essential ingredient of the American character, and one which owes as much to the mythologising as to the reality of the American past, is ‘toughness’. This quality, or set of qualities and values, Wilkinson argues, forms the essence of an influential, if somewhat equivocal ‘tough-guy tradition’. Although, as he points out, this tradition is by no means universally approved of by Americans, toughness has come to comprise ‘a cultural force with which virtually all Americans have to deal’. Professor Wilkinson devotes a chapter apiece to three closely related themes: the forces that have shaped ‘American ideals of toughness’, the interplay between ‘strenuous producer’ and ‘indulgent consumer’ values, and the complex relationship between ‘ideals of self-reliance and self-assertion and the pressures and attractions of modern organisation’. His fourth and final chapter compares ‘American toughness’ with ‘toughness elsewhere’, the ‘elsewhere’ being principally Britain and Australia.

...the attitudes and aspirations, the self-reliance, self-assurance and self-assertion, that together comprise the main ingredients of present-day American ideals of toughness reflect a complex and somewhat contradictory interplay between various aspects of the American past and the manner in which successive generations have chosen, or been persuaded, to interpret and to mythologise that past. The thesis is that three main themes have intertwined to shape and define ‘the American concern with toughness’: ‘a plain man, anti-courtier tradition that goes back to Tudor and Stuart England; a complex of frontier myths and images; and the tension in a business society between striving and self-indulgence’.

source http://www.lrb.co.uk/v07/n08/betty-wood/black-white-and-female