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DANIEL BELL
nature. In Jefferson's deism, God was not a transcendental being but
a "Workman" whose intricate design was being unfolded on the
American continent. The achievement pattern was envisaged as an
"endless future," a life of constant improvement. Education meant
preparation for a career rather than cultivation. When Samuel
Gompers, the immigrant labor leader, was asked what labor's goal
was, he gauged the American spirit shrewdly in answering, simply,
"more."
Hand in hand with achievement went a sense of optimism, the
feeling that life was tractable, the environment manipulable, any–
thing possible. The American, the once-born man, was the "sky–
blue, healthy-minded moralist" to whom sin and evil were, in Emer–
son's phrase, merely the "soul's mumps and measles and whooping
cough." In this sense the American has been Graham Greene's "quiet
American," or, to Santayana, "inexperienced of poisons." And for
this reason Europeans have always found America lacking in a sense
of the esthetic, the tragic, or the decadent.
American achievement and masculine optimism created a buoy–
ant sense of progress, almost of omnipotence. America had never been
defeated. America was getting bigger and better. America was always
first. It had the tallest buildings, the biggest dams, the largest cities.
"The most striking expression of [the American's] materialism," re–
marked Santayana, "is his singular preoccupation with quantity."
All of this was reflected in distinctive aspects of character. The
emphasis on achievement was an emphasis on the individual. The
idea that society is a system of social arrangements that limits the
range of individual behavior was an abstraction essentially alien to
American thought; reality was concrete and empirical, and the
individual was the moral unit of action. That peculiar American
inversion of Protestantism, the moralizing style, found its focus in
the idea of reform; but it was the reform of the individual, not of
social institutions. To reform meant to remedy defects of character,
and the American reform movements of the nineteenth century con–
centrated on sin, drink, gambling, prostitution, and other aspects of
individual behavior. In politics, the moralistic residue led to black–
and-white judgments, and if anything was wrong the individual was
to blame. Since there were good men and bad men, the problem
was to choose the good and eschew the bad. Any defect in policy
