Middle-Class Americans

One Nation After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think (Viking, 1998) is Alan Wolfe's concise and telling critique of recent descriptions of the United States as a country where the center cannot hold. Instead of portraying the United States as the site of bitter and unending culture wars, Wolfe's book presents an American public bound together in fair equanimity by a commonly held sense of moral responsibility leavened with tolerance for the weaknesses and differences of others.

The book is an exercise in suburban psychology that Wolfe based on interviews with over 200 middle-class Americans, with the overall conclusion of the work being that Americans are far more tolerant than we are generally given credit for being.

There are lingering elements of what might be seen as Puritan ideas about morality (using the term in a literal rather than simply a derogative sense) in what Wolfe finds. The Americans he talked to can be quite harsh in judging their own behavior, believing that they have an obligation to be as good as they can possibly and perhaps just a little bit better. And yet they are in general willing to be fairly tolerant of other people's behavior, even when that behavior is something that they themselves would not pursue. They are even in general fairly tolerant of people who violent their own moral standards, understanding that it is more important to have those standards than always to be able to meet them. Wolfe notes and spends a fair amount

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rand-new idea, a revelation that no one else has ever had. This is both annoying and endearing, although perhaps the endearing element is stronger by the end. Following on the principle that in scholarship as in developmental biology ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, Wolfe's study in many ways mirrors a style of anthropological text that was popular in the 1920s and '30s and which was called the national character study. This sounds insulting, to suggest that Wolfe's work is so far behind the cutting edge. But while there are some problems with Wolfe's book, this is certainly not one of them. National character studies came about for precisely the same reason that Wolfe's own book came about, which was that anthropologists were seeking a way to explain what makes people in a culture similar to each other. It remains one of the essential questions of anthropology (and of human nature) and one of the reasons that it may well have gone out of style in anthropology it that national character studies pose questions that are simply unanswerable. That Wolfe has waded in fearlessly to answer precisely such questions is admirable. In a way, what Wolfe is trying to discover is what makes Americans American. What makes us recogni

Category: Psychology - M