What makes America different?

Extract

If we ask what differentiates most Americans from non-Americans, if we want to define American culture qua outlook and values transmitted by family, school, associates, etc., which perpetually underlie these peoples’ approach to problems, moulds their intelligence and stirs their will-power, we must consider their past and their environment, as well as the living molecules of that culture itself. The very question may seem to be inappropriate, but not to a foreigner who has lived here for an appreciable time.

There were planned programmes of corporate English settlement in North America, not unlike the traditional pattern of human migration. But by far the greatest number of settlers came to America either as nuclear families and individuals, or, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, as distinctive sub-groups which had deliberately differentiated themselves from their earlier national ethos. Among these latter were the English Congregationalists or neo-Calvinists and the German Mennonites. Such groups set up townships or village colonies which for a time— and in a few cases up till now retained a corporate character. But they were different from all earlier migratory enterprises in that the dominant factor that formed them as groups and brought them to the the new lands was religion, and a very particular kind of Christianity. They came because they had been persecuted at home, and they looked for a place where they could establish their own versions of the city of God on earth in peace and freedom from their enemies. Thus the word or concept ‘freedom’ was written on the sails and in the hearts of many of the early European immigrants.