Professor Allen C. Guelzo, at Gettysburg College, might have an answer:
America has always been the nations of theory, not practice; it would built around ideas (even upon a "proposition") from the moment the first idea-haunted Pilgrim stepped off onto Plymouth Rock.
America, as a nation, started with ideas. In the Old World, in Europe, the events of history were studied, and general principles were gathered by induction. In America, before we got started, we first set down, in thought and in writing, our guiding principles. Our history is a debate about those principles - what they mean and how they ought to be applied - and so we are fundamentally a nation of ideas. This trend goes all the way back to the earliest years of the founding of America. The
Puritans possessed a university-trained leadership and organized themselves found a university-trained clergy, sunk deeply in theology and medieval scholasticism.
These earliest settlers of Massachusetts wove a seamless progression of thought from academic (mathematics, logic, physics, chemistry) to sociopolitical principles organized in their founding documents. Thus Harvard University was founded six years after the Puritans founded the city of Boston; all this activity emerged from a text, the "Mayflower Compact," the central idea of which is:
Having undertaken, for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honor of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
Not only had
the Puritans founded Harvard College only six years after settling Boston,
but they shortly afterward founded other colleges and universities, and Puritan leader Jonathan Edwards was the president of Princeton University after it was had already been established by an earlier generation of Puritans.
To be sure, the Puritans were far from perfect, and capable of mistakes, despite their intellectual and academic skills. The first attempt at organizing the Plymouth colony nearly destroyed it, so badly was it designed. On the other hand, the faults of the Puritans are sometimes exaggerated: they did not possess the irrational superstitious fear and loathing of alcohol which some historians attribute to them; on the contrary, they brewed beer, made wine, and consumed both regularly.
In any case, they formed the basis for the ideology of the American Revolutionaries: Locke's political treatises would not have fueled the American Revolution had not the Puritans laid the foundation for their reception. Jonathan Edward's collected works (twenty-six volumes) contain ethical treatises which led to an atmosphere in which the morality of England's imperialism was questioned.
Between the day that the Puritans founded Harvard and the day Edwards began preaching stretches an entire century in which New Englanders wrestled mightily with the impact on the intellectual world of Cartesian epistemology and Newtonian science.
The active intellectual life of America was absorbing these latest developments, sometimes faster than the countries in which they took place. But intellectual life in America would encounter a roadblock:
the revolutionary upthrust of Pragmatism at Harvard after the Civil War. Nothing could represent a more dramatic intellectual break with the moral philosophers' pursuit of truth, hard-wired into the natural order of things, than Pragmatism.
The American intellectual tradition will suffer in these decades, as reason and logic are rejected, and random passions are followed. Academic life tormented by
the fundamental premises of Pragmatism - that no truth exists apart from satisfaction, that no nation or principle is worth dying for, and that all human inequities are merely problems awaiting the application of intelligence.
The first premise reduces life to something very like hedonism; the second deny any rational contemplation of values; and the third enslaves human reason in the service of in impossible Romanticist quest for an impossible utopia.
The darkness which Pragmatism cast on the life of the American mind was lifted by two very different, but simultaneous, phenomena: first,
the rise of a neo-orthodox religious critique (especially as championed by Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1950s) and the persistence of the seriousness with which theology was conducted as an intellectual enterprise in America,
and
the emergence, in violent fashion, of the New Left in the 1960s.
These two social movements were not only different from each other, but opposed to each other. Yet together, they revealed the intellectual inadequacy of Pragmatism:
both were a puzzle to Pragmatists, because there was no reason they could see for the dogmatic outlook behind both to even exist.
These two survivals, desperately unalike in all respects except the single conviction that there is an unmistakable pattern written into human experience and history, suggest that the moral philosophers' instinct was truer than Pragmatism ever imagined, and that Americans want more from ideas than the Pragmatic assurance that ideas are merely tools for experimentation.
A nation founded on ideas doesn't mean a nation which finds itself in harmonious unity: on the contrary, the more seriously one takes ideas, the more heatedly one will debate about them.
When Jefferson asserted that "we hold these truths to be self-evident," he assumed that not only were there truths, but that everyone was compelled to acknowledge their existence. Lincoln believed that the American order was founded on a "proposition" - not an experience, and certainly not on race, blood, ethnicity, or any of the other Romantic irrationalities.
We may speak of Lincoln's objection to Pragmatism, even though he slightly antedated it. In his opposition to Pragmatism,
he denounced slavery as ethically wrong, as a violation of natural law and natural theology - and would admit to no compromise with, and no scaling back of, his Emancipation Proclamation.
More than anything, to be American is to have an idea and attempt to transform that idea into reality. It is a search to discover the way things ought to be.
