Ways of Looking at America and Controversial Issue

¶ … America and controversial issue

According to historian Frederick Turner, America is by nature a 'pioneering' nation. It is distinctly different in its worldview from Europe, given that it has been founded upon the ideals of newness, expansiveness, and the drive to move forward. Americans are practical, self-reliant, and tough. Turner also suggested that Americans innately 'crave' the frontier to realize the full scope of their ambitions. Americans are hardy, and feel they can overcome any challenges. They disdain hierarchies based upon aristocracy, and instead value a person's merit and ability to rise to a challenge. In contrast, Oscar Handlin stressed America's identity as a nation of immigrants. Founded by people seeking refuge from persecution, Handlin saw the forging of the American character as something difficult, as it required bringing together people of vastly different cultures, all of whom had overcome tremendous challenges to arrive in America.

Americans who take the view that government should 'get off our backs' are likely to embrace the Turner model of America. This idealizes Americans as people who 'don't take handouts' and don't need the government to 'tell' people what do to (such as if they can use guns). It seems to have an approving view of expansionist foreign policy and stresses American exceptionalism. It also stresses the homogeneity of American religious and civic values. In contrast, Handlin's model of America suggests that race and class conflict is embedded into the American soul. People who believe in greater government social intervention prefer Handlin's concept of America, because it suggests that it requires a great deal of active reworking of the current social environment to heal the damage that has been wrought by the conflicts between different populations over the course of American history. It deemphasizes American exceptionalism, suggesting that America is not free of the conflicts of race, class, and ethnicity that plagued Europe for so long.

Question B

Both the women's movement and the temperance movement were extremely controversial because they challenged conventional conceptions of how Americans should govern themselves at home as well as in civic life. Women's activists demanded that women be granted the right to vote, and also stated that women should retain control over their persons and autonomy when they married, and should not become vulnerable to their husband's excesses. Opponents to the movement saw women as more feeble in mind and body than males, and stated that women needed a male to care for them. The male was the 'head' of household and above the woman, just as God was the lord over man. Many women's rights activists were temperance activists, arguing that women and children were more often the victims of male drunken brutality. Women needed to be empowered to care for themselves if abandoned by a spouse, and women needed to be protected from the cruelties of drunken men according to the law. "Women's commitment to prohibition and close ties with the Women's Christian Temperance Union also produced many opponents to the woman suffrage movement (Weatherford 1998). The liquor industry feared that if women voted, prohibition laws would be passed, which would make it illegal to make or sell alcoholic beverage... Immigrants also opposed woman's suffrage for similar reasons."(Smithneek, n.d.).