What Is An American? The Ethnic Origins of “American Individualism”
Which ethnic groups wrote the playbook on American Individualism in the “nation of immigrants”?
“I believe…in America.”
These are the first words spoken in 1972’s The Godfather directed by Francis Ford Coppola based on the novel by Mario Puzo.
Widely considered to be one of the most influential American films of all time, most armchair analyses of the three movies that comprise The Godfather Saga focus on its exploration of crime, masculinity, family dynamics and so forth.
However, at its core, The Godfather is about The American Dream.
Its plot focuses on how individual immigrants and their families can come to the United States in dire poverty and, through a set of learned behaviors and social alignments, “join the American mainstream”.
Indeed, much of the first act of The Godfather 2 is expressly about Michael Corleone’s attempt to “legitimize” his illegal economic gains by funneling his family’s newfound power into the American political apparatus.
But where did this “rags to riches” playbook derive from?
How do families come from different cultures and almost immediately live out the “rugged individualism” so often preached in discourse about The United States?
And as a ‘nation of immigrants’, which specific ethnic groups “wrote this playbook” that everyone now follows?
In today’s article, let’s explore the origins of the “playbook of individualism” that many immigrants like The Corleones take on when they land upon American shores.
An American Is An Individualist
In his 2019 book Burdens of Freedom: Cultural Difference and American Power, political scientist Lawrence M. Mead says “no other country shows (the individualist) temperament so strongly” as America.
In Mead’s words, Americans more than any other group see life as a “project” and thus “take action largely to fulfill personal goals and values, (and) if necessary changing the world to do so.”
Polling bears out this reality as well.
Even in comparison to similarly individualist Western European countries, Americans massively rank higher on the belief that:
- Success is within my control.
- I must work hard to get ahead.
Therefore, whether we’re tracking The Godfather Saga’s dramatic arc of the Corleone rugged self-belief mixed with a diligent (albeit criminal) work ethic to succeed in the American system…
Or whether we simply agree with the three-quarters of Americans who believe that a person must “work hard to get ahead”…
We are on solid footing to say that a core part of being American is being an individualist.
An Open Secret
So, where does American individualism come from?
The short answer is that American Individualism as a “way of life” comes in large part from the political and familial cultures of the major ethnic groups that first arrived at this nation.
In particular, the political ideologies, social organization, and familial dynamics of Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany helped form what we now simply term “American rugged individualism”.
Eight signers of the Declaration of Independence were born in another country, primarily England. And while, unsurprisingly for the time, naturalization was restricted to white persons, it was easier to become an American than any other citizen of a developed nation.
Only two years’ residency were required and there were no restrictions based on religion, skills, or wealth.
George Washington, the nation’s first president, stated that “The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.”
First To Market
England’s intellectual tradition deeply pervaded the early “American mindset”.
America was the first major power to make individualism an explicitly political value, although the political concepts came largely from British philosophers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill.
The Declaration of Independence itself is essentially a “greatest hits” of Locke’s philosophy, with even the “life, liberty and the…” construction that we know coming from Two Treatises of Government by John Locke a full 12 years earlier than the writing of the Declaration.
However, history tells us that declarations and constitutions are only worth the paper they’re printed on if their civic values and ideas are supported by matching social and cultural mores of a critical mass of the nation’s citizens.
From the start, democracy was baked in the political culture that would create these United States.
For example, the Jamestown model of early colonial government had a general assembly where all male property holders had an equal say.
This “equal say” precedent would be used over the course of American history include more and more citizens including African-Americans, women, and many others. Compare that with countries that even today do not fairly enfranchise millions of citizens.
The US Constitution was thus as much a creation of peculiarly American culture as a shaper of it.
Where Did They Come From?
Along with rich farmland, the promise of individualist freedom attracted the kind of immigrant who would make America the crucible of invention and innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries.
As economist Johan Norberg notes in his book Open: The Story of Human Progress:
“Protestants from Britain, Germany And Scandinavia were now joined by Irish Catholics escaping hunger, and intellectuals and activists from all over the world who fled persecution.”
Culturally, the two key groups who mainly created America as a “behavior and mindset” were Americans who descended from:
- Great Britain and Ireland
- Americans descended from Germany
(Notably absent here are Americans descended from The Netherlands — including the only “ESL” American president Martin Van Buren all the way up to The Rockefeller and Roosevelt dynasties.)
The Elastic Brilliance of American Individualism
Although over the centuries, American “culture” has grown to include the unforgettable additions of more and more ethnic groups…
Most notably:
- African-Americans
- Jewish-Americans
- Italian-Americans
- Asian-Americans
And many others…
The “playbook” on How To Get Ahead In America was already written.
The massive success of these groups relied primarily on a hard-working, self-believing attitude that has been a defining characteristic of American public life.
Upon Emancipation, blacks immediately elected the first African-American congressmen, senators and governors.
Thinkers such as Booker T. Washington began to preach a work-hard individualist attitude of economic mobility.
Martin Luther King, Jr. consistently invoked the Declaration of Independence and Constitution as being “promissory notes” to freedom that needed to be fulfilled.
Jewish-Americans were so successful in utilizing the American education system that the dominant WASP culture had to create surreptitious Anti-Semitic precedents such as the “legacy system” in order to try to halt Jews’ progress.
The most successful 21st century immigrant group, Asian-Americans are more likely than any other non-white group to say the best way to reach “equality” in the US is to work within the “current system”.
Thus, the How To Get Ahead Playbook of American Individualism is a template that has proved incredibly elastic over the centuries and still continues to work for many to this day.
England and America: Brothers From Another Mother
The first American census was taken in 1790. This was after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
In that year, the census records that 83 percent of the European-descended population was of English ancestry.
Thus, almost all of the founding fathers and all U.S. presidents up to the 1829 inauguration of Andrew Jackson were of primarily English descent.
It was British cultural values and ideas that laid the ideological foundation for these United States. Psychologist Richard E. Nisbett in The Geography of Thought notes:
“The Protestant Reformation, beginning in Germany and Switzerland and largely bypassing France and Belgium, added individual responsibility and a definition of work as a sacred activity…These values were all intensified in the Calvinist subculture of Britain, including the Puritans and Presbyterians, whose egalitarian ideology laid the groundwork for the government of the United States.”
The British philosopher who mainly influenced the founding fathers was John Locke (whose surname, interestingly, is defined by Wikipedia as Scottish of Germanic origin).
One of Locke’s main ideas that informed the American nation was self-ownership, echoing Niccolo Machiavelli’s 1531 discussion on the topic in Discourses On Livy.
In The Second Treatise of Civil Government — from the same series that inspired the US Declaration of Independence — Locke writes “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself”.
Even today, current American cultural discourse is still often framed in a similar manner.
Abortion and LGBTQ+ rights are consistently discussed around the concept of the freedom to decide what to do with ones body (in Locke’s terms “own person”). Debate on 21st century policing practice centers often around treatment of “black and brown bodies”.
Thus, centuries later, how Americans petition their government and wider society for freedom through self-ownership utilizes the same framework of individualism set at America’s founding.
Scottish, Irish, Scottish-Irish
Following a slew of primarily English-descended early Presidents, America elected Andrew Jackson in 1829.
Jackson himself was Scots-Irish, and notably despised the English due to his experiences in the American Revolutionary War.
Following the two-term tenure of Andrew Jackson, the immigrant groups from the British Isles that had the most impact on the creation of these United States were, in terms of raw numbers and ideological influence, Scots-Irish, followed by Irish Protestant, then Irish Catholic.
It is almost impossible to overestimate the impact of Scots-Irish descendants on the American landscape.
A full seventeen U.S. presidents — from Jackson right up to Barack Obama, whose mother has Irish and German ancestors — claim at least partial Scots-Irish descent.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ulster Protestants emigrated from Ulster in northern Ireland to America. Their American descendants are known as “Scots-Irish.”
They originally lived in the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England in the seventeenth century, which makes their American descendants culturally distinct from the whites who came from the Scottish highlands and southern England.
The other main strand of English culture transplanted to America is broadly categorized as “Celtic” and, as Sowell notes in Black Rednecks & White Liberals:
“The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless search for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.”
Thus even much of the “hillbilly culture” that pervades major regions of the American South finds its roots in the culture of the British Isles.
As for the Irish, it can be argued (and we will do so in future articles) that the template that shaped American assimilation for all immigrants has its roots in how Irish-Americans culturally integrated over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.
About 4.5 million Irish immigrated to the United States specifically 1820 and 1930 with a massive increase being spurred on by 1845’s Irish Potato Famine.
Between 1820 and 1860, Irish people accounted for one-third of all immigrants and by the 1840s, they comprised nearly half.
With the passing of time it has been easy to forget the Nativist riots, racial unrest and even economic and educational integration that Irish-Americans had to go through in order join the mainstream…
However their history is a key part of the development of American ethnic integration.
Germans vs. Germany
From 1840 to 1880, the largest group of immigrants to America were Germans. And, not only were Germans the majority of immigrants, but they were also the most successful and possessed, in many ways, the core virtues that would come to define the American nation.
The entire Midwest region and large swaths of the state of Pennsylvania are densely populated by Americans with German forbearers.
It is largely this group who built the “Industrial United States”, which means that, without Americans of German descent, America might not have been able to help the world win World War Two against Nazi Germany.
But the most important contribution from German settlers in America was, arguably, the “work hard to get ahead” mindset that became a fundamental part of American individualism.
Sowell writes:
“German farmers, wherever they were located, tended to build fences and huge barns for their livestock, and to feed them there during the winter….Germans cleared frontier land by both chopping down trees and laboriously removing their stumps and roots, so all the land could be plowed thereafter.”
The traditional list of “Prussian virtues” includes thrift, fortitude, religious tolerance, industriousness, justice, straightforwardness, and toughness.
These are the very essence of the “hard work” mindset that 3/4ths of current Americans poll as believing in.
American business is inextricably connected to German-American’s work ethic, with titans such as Walt Disney, John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk all claiming at least partial German ancestry.
Many 20th century US Presidents have German ancestors, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, and even Barack Obama.
Put simply, it is impossible to envision the near-ubiquitous commitment to hard work in America without the influence of German immigrants.
The Secret of Our Success (and Failure)
We can thus see how the different cultural strands of the main settler groups in America weaved a new national culture that would change the world.
At its founding, America had the highly revolutionary and legalistic English. We then had the “assimilation template” of the Irish. We added the work ethic of the Germans.
Counter-intuitively, we also had the opposite values in the Celtic English who created the Southern culture of the United States. Their seemingly negative traits arguably provided a counter-balance that unleashed the creative potential of the fledgling nation.
All these forces came together to create a unique political document, the Constitution of the United States, that forged the American individualist mindset.
Then, three centuries later, as immigration has diversified over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries to include the enfranchisement of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jewish Americans, and many others…
We continue to see the beautifully elastic nature of American individualism on display.
Knowing this, the next time you’re watching The Godfather, you may just have an inkling to murmur in unison with the opening lines of the film…
“I believe in America”.
— Co-written with Kevin Baldeosingh
