Real Americans

One of the first national icons was Daniel Boone -- uneducated, adventurous, a man of action rather than intellect who, in his buckskins, couldn't have been more different from the typical Englishman and who, historian Richard Slotkin has written, was the perfect model "when the newly independent nation was looking for some self-image appropriate to its stature and ideology." Boone was a NASCAR frontiersman.

It wasn't long before the equation of rustic-with-real permeated the culture, from the "Leatherstocking" novels of James Fenimore Cooper early in the 19th century right through to the novels of Henry James, who wrote about honest American innocents swindled by European connivers, late in the century. And then as now, politicians felt obligated to demonstrate their rusticated roots or else be accused of aristocratic arrogance, America's cardinal sin. That's why a well-off railroad attorney named Abraham Lincoln was promoted as a penniless bumpkin rail splitter, and why even Daniel Webster made it clear to opponents that he was born in a log cabin.

But it was Andrew Jackson, a Democrat, who converted "common man" appeal into a political movement and gave the rustic-as-real definition power. Jackson understood American resentments. He understood that ordinary Americans fought condescension (and class divisions) by reveling in the very behaviors that elicited that condescension from their social and economic betters. And he understood that most Americans liked to define themselves as much by what they were not as by what they were, what they hated as much as what they loved. One of his campaign slogans in 1828 boasted that the election pitted "John Quincy Adams who can write" against "Andrew Jackson who can fight."

Frankly, the idea of who is a real American hasn't changed much since then, though it did take a detour. Industrialization and urbanization attacked the very roots of the old Boone/Jackson idea of backwoods authenticity. As more and more Americans left the farm for the city, as more worked on assembly lines, as more immigrants came from overseas, they no longer resembled Natty Bumppo. Real Americans were now as likely to wear blue collars as plaid shirts and overalls (not to mention buckskins) because real Americans were quite simply those who were not unreal Americans -- elitists, snobs, intellectuals, socialists and other categories of cosmopolitan strivers.