American Manners by Neil Harris

Like the word culture, manners possess both a broad and a narrow meaning. On the one hand,
manners can refer to forms representing courtesy and cultivation. On the other hand, they
include ordinary usages, customs, and characteristic ways of doing things. American manners
have been the concern of both the dancing master and the ethnographer.
It is the tension between a normative sense of appropriate behavior and a descriptive
affirmation of what manners are that makes the subject complex. In trying to define the
presence of an American way of doing things, commentators have invariably sought to
discover if that style obeyed established forms to determine whether, in short, Americans
were simultaneously distinctive and polite. The possibility of being both has often seemed
improbable.

Manners in America

As a problem in American life, manners have existed as long as the nation, and even longer,
for colonial societies often resemble purified versions of their mother cultures. Their
commitment to European values expressed itself in many ways religious practices,
educational institutions, and legal system among them but none more so than by
perpetuation of conduct that enshrined gentility as an ideal and deference as a social
instrument.
As Norbert Elias, has reminded us in his seminal texts, civility was a recent achievement in
Europe itself. A pleasing manner, proper dress, refined table habits, careful personal hygiene,
disciplined language, repudiation of cruelty, special consideration shown to females, the aged,
and children these ideals had been nourished by Renaissance courtiers and nobleman and
were dispersed as general guides through the rise of an urban and normally commercial
middle class. In America, as in Europe etiquette soon entered religious and civic instruction,
its texts devoured by the socially ambitious and the economically mobile.
With time, the nondeliberate and almost unconscious shift of manners that evolved during the
early years of settlement was supplanted by the self-conscious changes that accompanied
independence. Manners became in the years of 1776, a national problem and, some argued, a
national achievement.
A rich literature of social analysis and a vast store of anecdotal data developed. Underlining
both were some fundamental issues, and from them, I select a few that can serve as useful
illuminants.

Equality and Class

The first issue, which dominated social documentary between the Revolution and the Civil
War, grew out of the conflict between political democracy and traditional forms of authority.
At the heart of the American Revolution was a repudiation of divinely based political
sovereignty. This was followed, within a few decades, by a new religion of social
egalitarianism as well. Of course, it was possible to believe that all men were created equal
without believing that all men were equal. The persistence of slavery, of legal handicaps of
women, and various kinds of social differentiation demonstrated that. Clubs, associations,
family alliances, ethnic and religious origins and ancestral status continued to be important
centers of value for many Americans.
Simultaneously, a coexisting ideology insisted that one mans chances and opinions were as
good as anothers. Many pondered this views impact on the rich intricacies of address by
which people had historically signaled deference to superiority, whether that superiority
rested on wealth, office, age, sex, or gentle birth.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, journalists, novelists, philosophers, and politicians
analyzed stagecoach conversations and steamboat romances, behavior in hotel lobbies and at
dining tables, the language of parents to children and the treatment of parents by children, the
responses made by tradesmen to customers and by servants to masters, the way people gave
directions or asked questions or greeted strangers or acknowledged differences of opinion.
Almost any act or gesture could be taken as portentous.

Friendly observers admitted that Americans were freer with strangers than European practices
permitted, but acknowledged that such easy curiosity was different from insolence. Americans
did chew and spit almost everywhere, but their respect for women was generally beyond
reproach. Indeed, American gallantry was claimed as a miraculous intervention of voluntary
restraint. Some visitors bridled at the difference American females received from
uncomplaining men, who gladly gave up everything from seats in crowded horsecars to the
best places at the dinner table. A few pointed to the new power women censors seemed to
possess; prudery so controlled art and language that even casual references to the body could
excite immediate indignation.
Concern about the feminization of American culture was voiced also by opponents of social
democracy, who suggested that egalitarianism produced a herd like acquiescence in arbitrary
social rules and an unnatural fondness for titles, distinctions, and foreign noblemen. Not
anarchy but a series of petty social prohibitions could cut the social landscape into a mass of
mutually exclusive sectors. The paradoxical coexistence, then, of belief in radical democracy
and an unusual punctiliousness about social codes could be produced by the same cause:
reluctance to recognize traditional authority in assigning hierarchies of honor and respect.

Parvenus, Aristocrats, and Ordinary Folk

The consuming interest ante-bellum American took in politics, their incessant and forceful
sense of patriotism, and their high degree of self-promotion all increased the sense that
manners and democracy were intimately related. The ways in which family life, domestic
service, and public behavior reflected the political system never ceased to interest social
observers. However, as democratic forms congealed in America after the Civil War, and as it
became clear that the experiment in collective authority had become a permanent and
powerful nation-state, another set of issues shaping national manners developed to
complement the first. This involved the growth of wealth in America, the development of an
unprecedented level of material profusion, and corresponding delight in commodity display as
the fulfillment of the good life.
The struggle for material success and the presence of considerable affluence had, of course,
excited commentary before the Civil War. The label of materialism was employed by many
foreigners and by American political leaders who warned, during the 1840s and 1850s, that
consuming could produce a melancholy, self-absorbed people, dull, coarse, and insensible to
the graces of life.

As the United States developed into an urban-industrial society after the Civil War, the
reconciliation of wealth and public virtue became even more difficult. Unheard of levels of
income were attained by individual captains of industry, skillful professionals, innovative
merchants, and the fortunate owners of mineral-rich properties. Within a few decades the
country was transformed from an underdeveloped backwater to a primary world economy
with enormous productive capacity and extensive markets for manufactured goods. Once
identified in foreign eyes with political radicalism, Americans could now be associated with
wealth and increasing conservatism. Growing contrast of life style between rich and poor
occasioned a series of harsh debates in the late nineteenth century, but abroad there was a
tendency to identify unusual wealth with America as a whole.
Increasing wealth had obvious connections with manners. Focusing upon the coarse behavior
of parvenus was one way for traditional elites to respond to challengers. In ancient Rome, in
feudal Europe, in the new nation-states of modern period, the manners of the urban
bourgeoisie, the rich merchants, and the ambitious tradesmen were mocked by those with
gentler birth. Tensions between establishments and upstarts formed staple themes for comic
literature.
According to press reports, urban congestion and commuting, city hotels, restaurants,
shopping, and mass transit were also affecting American manners, and not for the better.
Middle-class journals at the turn of the century and letters-to-the-editor columns of major
newspapers were filled with complaints of rudeness in daily relations, coarser speech,
diminishing respect for the needs of women and the elderly, and broad range of incivilities.
An urban service multiplied along with travel opportunities and new entertainment forms,
Americans had solve problems at home they once associated only with foreign settings
tipping, for example. Etiquette writers advised how to behave when on streetcars or crowded
sidewalks, how to treat clerks at the new department stores, how to conduct oneself at the
theater or in restaurants.

Mass Culture and American Chauvinism

At about this time, the themes of wealth and democracy were reinforced by still another
feature of national life that emphasized the role of manners: the expansion of mass
communications. As a result of rapid industrialization, innovative advertising, and new
distribution methods Americans had assembled an arsenal of promotional campaigns that
promised to Americanize the rest of the world. By 1918 European empires, their boundaries
redrawn, their economies weakened by war, their political system challenged by radicalism,
could resist less effectively than ever. No American export was better distributed than motion
pictures. American actors and actresses, supported by American furniture, dress, automobiles
and mannerism, flooded Europe in the 1920s.
Films and advertising campaigns in magazines and on billboards specified how typical
Americans were meant to look and interact. By 1929, image industries had become an
American specialty, their managers skillful in projecting values that could appeal to a large
constituency. Given the ambivalence with which American manners were viewed historically,
suffering from multiple disadvantages of youth, democracy, materialism, and ethnic
heterogeneity, it was ironic that Americans had become the worlds pedagogues. Films
covered a wide variety of genres romance, comedy, mystery, western, melodrama, historical
romance but almost all contained scenes that explored fundamental human experiences and
rituals attached to them. Millions of viewers saw how actors walked, dressed, ate, kissed,
quarreled, prayed, talked, and traveled how they entered rooms, paid bills, expressed
condolences, behaved at parties. While influences between screen and audience were
reciprocal and determining impact is difficult, the detail was breathtaking and riveting.
Millions of foreigners were told that this was how Americans acted and interacted.
The mixture of reality and fantasy that was Hollywood exploited fan magazines and giant
publicity machines to encourage a religion of the stars. Personality cults developed around
consumption habits and styles of deportment. These were supplemented by immense
advertising campaigns, which used illustration, photography, and words with great
imagination. Advertisers were eager to affect manners. Soap and cosmetic manufacturers
sought to depict the dangers of poor grooming more effectively than the etiquette manuals of
an earlier day. Auto makers, food purveyors, and clothing stores all tried to accustom buyers
to the symbolic meaning of brand names and model years, arguing that appearance and
success were closely linked and could be served best by carefully attending to the advertising
message.
As films and vaudeville and comic strips attracted their patrons, concern about the impact of
mass media on traditional moral values surfaced. Simultaneously there were angry attacks on
the libidinous tendencies of modern art. In fact, however, mass communications were
controlled and ordered without and direct assault on existing morality, and although the
authority of traditional manners loosened, Americans continued to devour etiquette manuals.
It was during the 1920s and 1930s that Emily Post became synonymous with a standard of
deportment, and she was not he only figure to grow wealthy and famous by offering advice on
public behavior.

Alienation and Revolt

In the America of the 1960s and 1970s, however, the role of manners and civility provoked
still another set of controversies. An affluent America dominated world communications
systems. The American tourist returned to Europe in the 1960s in greater numbers than ever
before and penetrated areas new to mass travel in Asia and Africa. Earlier suggestions of
informality were strengthened by colorfully clad tourists according to tradition, sunglassed,
gum-chewing, and camera-holding wandering through historic shrines with enthusiasm
punctuated by fatigue. As television programs were added to the magazines and films as
cultural exploits, fears of Americanization increased. American slang, fast foods, clothing,
and social rituals were soon duplicated on practically every continent of the world. Along
with these popular modern artifacts came a perceived moral permissiveness, a reshuffling of
standards of deportment that had roots throughout the world but was furthered by American
politics and by mass media in particular.
These changes resulted from series of revolts against authority and from revolutions in
consciousness. Guilt about national power and wealth, doubt about foreign policy directions,
and resentment of social and legal inequities were fed in America by the political
assassinations of the 1960s, by riots in urban centers, by rising of pollution and disorder, and
by challenges to almost every extant social code. Invention of the pill and improvement of
contraceptive devices coincided with doubts about the legitimacy of any form of sexual
censorship. The result was a sexual revolution that acted to legalize previously pornographic
material and legitimated most types of sexual activity. Courtship patterns and gender manners
were revamped, and sexual role models were hastily reexamined. Women demanded legal,
economic, and cultural changes to acknowledge their full equality, and this had a powerful if
unclear effect on daily manners.
Dress and public behavior mirrored and encouraged these transformations. Once striking
gender differences now blurred. Unisex fashions became popular. Women turned to slacks
and pantsuits. Many men abandoned the formality of hats and ties in favor of clothing that
was more colorful, revealing, and idiosyncratic. Jewelry and cosmetic aids added to male
preening. Both sexes wore jeans, now an international uniform.

Among evidence of changing norms was the spread of drug culture, no longer confined to the
desperately poor and alienated but reaching far across economic categories. Despite punitive
legislation, enforcement authorities could not control the lucrative market. Like the
prohibition of alcohol a generation earlier the drug trade was linked both to organized crime
and to complex set of political and economic interests. Use patterns helped heighten
insecurities about casual encounters in urban areas and produced bewildering, sometimes
dangerously disoriented forms of public behavior.

The apparent corruption of American manners by violence, uncertainty, and a permissive

ethic was counterbalanced, however, by other qualities. Trends were not destinies; in many
parts of the country the changes seemed small. Foreigners reported that American friendliness
and relaxed informality were still impressive. Social voluntarism and sympathy for those in
need continued at high levels. Public meetings and political rallies, even amidst sectarian
bitterness, were orderly and peaceful, with some major exceptions like the 1968 Democratic
Convention. American sports crowds were proverbially more restrained than foreign
counterparts. Most American audiences were polite to performers. American tourists, more
numerous, diverse, and sophisticated, shed some of the stereotypes that had hounded them
since the first era of mass travel.
There were also major gains in civility during these decades. Law and custom combined to
end many discriminatory and demeaning social practices. During the 1960s and 1970s the last
vestiges of overt radical discrimination in public places were assailed. During the same
period, women began to demand an end to unequal treatment in many customs and
ordinances.

After all, art, entertainment, news, and travel have become internationalized in much of the
world. Encounters on streets or highways, at airports or supermarkets, in factories or cinemas
or schools or universities may reflect the logic of the specific institution rather than the
national environment. Patters of contemporary social interaction can be said to mirror the
shape of postindustrial society and technology, not simply territorial boundaries.