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The Immigrant Experience and American Character: Margaret Mead's And Keep Your Powder Dry
| Article
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18051 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
4,250 Words |
| Author
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Nathan Glazer
Nathan Glazer is professor of education and sociology at
Harvard University and coeditor of The Public Interest. His
most recent publication is The Limits of Social Policy
(Harvard University Press, 1989). |
Margaret Mead's And Keep Your Powder Dry, was published in 1943, in the middle of World War II. It is as much a book about the war, and how to win it, as it is a study of American national character. Her aim was to use her insights, which to her were the results of the most advanced social since of the time and of her studies of primitive cultures, to develop lessons as to how to win the war and how to build a world without war.
She had spent most of the years between 1925 and 1939 on field trips to the South Seas, to New Guinea, to the Admiralty Islands, and she carefully lists in her first footnote her various trips to the field (1925-26, Samoa; 1928-29, Manus Tribe, Admiralty Islands; 1930, and American Indian tribe; 1931-33, New Guinea; 1936-38, Bali; 1938, New Guinea again; 1939 Bali again) her references are almost all to her own work - the three books she had already published, the many articles and talks she had given - and to other pioneers in the development of the idea of national character. Some had been brought into war work, as she had been, analyzing the character structure of our enemies (and allies who might become enemies). And so there are references to Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, Gregory Bateson (the latter two her husbands as well as coworkers), and to other figures of what now seems a heroic, if somewhat dated, age of social science - Harold Lasswell, Erich Fromm, and Erik Erikson.
Retuning to it after forty years, I find that the theme that in my mind had chiefly characterized it, and the reason I still remembered it, in reality plays a somewhat modest role in the book. This theme is the significance, for American character, of the fact that we are all immigrants and descended from immigrants, which was
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