The dean of students approached a professor up for tenure and offered some friendly advice about joining one committee or another, saying how it would look good when the vote came up. The professor — a large and intimidating man — stepped toward the dean and asked, almost menacingly, “Are you threatening me?”
They were both World War II veterans, and the dean had seen many of his friends killed during his combat years as a Flying Tiger. He was not intimidated. But he was quite surprised. “No,” he replied, “I’m trying to help you.” The professor joined some committees and got tenure, and thus in his late 40s had job security for the first time after a trail of firings from California to Colorado to North Carolina.
The professor was my father, the most instinctively rebellious person I have ever known. I never heard the above account from him, but rather from the dean, many years after my father died. I was not surprised. In fact, I smiled a little in recognition. Another observer once described my father as a maverick, but that was putting it politely. On many occasions my father nearly destroyed the family through one variation or another of his hell raising. It was a deeply personal disposition he took to his grave.
Aversion to authority is hardly an American invention, though no doubt there is a unique American variation upon the theme. The nation was born in rebellion, the casting off of the colonial yoke. It was a conservative rebellion, as far as such uprisings go, and almost immediately there were new norms demanding conformity. Early nonconformists often headed west to escape the constraints of the new society.
“Maverick” was derived from Samuel Maverick (1803–1870), a South Carolinian transplanted in Texas who once let some of his cattle roam free. Maverick the man was not particularly iconoclastic, but his unbranded cattle gave rise to his namesake. The frontier context for the coining of maverick is predictable. Despite oceans of ink criticizing Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis, the fact that we’re still discussing it over a hundred years later must indicate some substance to the idea.
Turner argued that the east-to-west movement into the western frontier had uniquely shaped the American character. He ignored the fact that Native Americans had lived everywhere in North America for millennia. He neglected to emphasize the earlier arrival of the Spanish, who came north from Mexico and preceded Turner’s focus of settlement by centuries. He dismissed the French (who also preceded the Anglos), whose geographical orientation followed a northeast-southwestern arc in association with the St. Lawrence and Mississippi river systems. He forgot about the Russians whose place names still designate many parts of Alaska, but who also reached as far south as the Russian River in California.
Still, Turner was quite perceptive when it came to Anglo-America and a great deal of 19th century continental European immigration. In some ways the influence of the western frontier upon American self-perceived individualism was but one culmination of a long (if discontinuous) cultural legacy going back to the Greeks and their championing of the solitary hero. A more immediate mainstream American source was England.
Much has been made about “American Exceptionalism,” famously going back to John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in which he described the Puritans’ New England destination as a “city on a hill” where he anticipated their new society would become an example to the world. But what about English Exceptionalism? After all, this had developed for centuries and was undoubtedly fostered by island geography. In fact, “island” and England share a common etymology [<OE iegland].
In Modern Japan: A Historical Survey (1986), Mikiso Hane cited a comparison between continental China and France with the island nations England and Japan. The former he described as “missions,” the latter as “clubs.” Learning the language and customs of a mission won an outsider at least a significant degree of acceptance. Nothing would win an outsider admittance to a club. No end of Koreans and Irish would support this interpretation. But our focus here is more the English propensity toward individualism.
According to Alan Macfarlane’s Origins of English Individualism (1978), this propensity goes back to at least the 13th century, if not before. He attributes much of the physical and social mobility of the English to a deeply rooted market economy (contradicting much of Marx’s theories in the process). Economic independence obviously can be conducive to other forms of independence. Particularly pertinent for my father’s much-despised Calvinistic upbringing (the early impetus for so much of his rebellion that would follow), was the East Anglia region of southeastern England.
It is difficult to say why the English of East Anglia developed such a storied history of rebellion, often versus London authority. Probably it is more romantic than historical to attribute this trait to Scandinavian settlement and the 9th century establishment of Danelaw. But later this was the area that gave rise to the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. During the following century Lollardy found refuge in East Anglia and other parts of southern and eastern England. Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe, who translated the Latin Bible into English, and anticipated many of the anti-authority impulses Martin Luther would later bring to fruition.
Crucially, by the 1600s, East Anglians developed strong commercial ties with the Dutch, just over 100 miles away across the lower reaches of the North Sea. In the 18th century they also began adopting the advanced techniques of the Agricultural Revolution that the Dutch and Flemish had pioneered earlier. The Protestant Reformation did not find enthusiasm for Anglicanism (i.e., the Church of England) in East Anglia, but rather the more iconoclastic Calvinism in the form of Puritanism.
Transplanted in America, the Puritan East Anglians and their Pilgrim neighbors from the East Midlands (abutting East Anglia to the north) gave rise to the fabled Yankee culture of North America. If we define ourselves by what we rebel against, then the Puritans bore this out with their establishment of a harsh, quasi-theocratic authority that did not tolerate nonconformists like Anne Hutchison (1591–1643) or Roger Williams (1603–1683). Puritans even mutilated and occasionally killed Quaker evangelists who had the temerity to venture north into Massachusetts.
As David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed (1989) illustrates in rich detail, the East Anglians were but one of four major English folk groups to populate the eastern areas of the future United States. The East Anglians were a disproportionately literate group for their time, and recognized reading (especially Scripture) as a necessary aspect of their religion. Their rebelliousness was well-reasoned according to their worldview.
A different sort of aversion toward authority arrived with a much larger 17th century migration from the Irish Sea region. As Fischer demonstrates, many of these people had deep roots in a warrior ethos that valued stealth, courage, and a personal sense of justice — qualities often associated with the American frontier, which is exactly where the Irish Sea peoples migrated. By the time they arrived the Eastern seaboard and piedmont lands had long been spoken for, so they headed for Appalachia and the trans-Appalachian “backcountry,” a disparaging term chroniclers of America later changed to the more glorious “frontier.” If Irish Sea peoples already generally distrusted institutions (religious, governmental, and educational), the backcountry and Indian fighting certainly intensified those cultural traits. The mythic independent American frontiersman began his legend.
According to John Higham’s classic book, Strangers in the Land (originally published in 1955), mid-19th century Romanticism witnessed a rebirth of the Anglo-American connection regarding aversion to overbearing authority. This involved the popularity in the United States of Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799), which claimed a uniquely English genetic predisposition for political freedom. Anglo-Americans, not quite the vicious nativist WASPs of a later generation, glorified their ancestral heritage, now re-manifesting itself in decidedly undemocratic and racist notions of Manifest Destiny. A nation already borne of conquest, the last half of the 19th century saw freedom for white Americans juxtaposed by the contradictory imperial domination of non-white peoples at home and abroad.
Insofar as America has been a Protestant nation, that cultural disposition has also contributed to an eternal strain of rejection of authority, for one church authority is perpetually rejected only to establish another, sort of like fractals in physics. The original Protestantism (Lutheranism) split very quickly into various strains of Calvinism and Anabaptism. American Puritans became well established in New England during the 17th century, but by the 18th century a new generation rejected Puritan authority in favor of Arminianism and / or the emotional appeal of the Great Awakening. Numerous branches continued to form. Noted offshoots of the 19th century included multifarious versions of Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, et cetera. Today the American and Southern Baptists might as well be separate churches, for they disagree over fundamental things like female ministers.
Of course Protestant history in America and elsewhere has not been as simple as eternally branching lines of Protestant fractals. But there does seem to be an inherent questioning of authority derived from its very beginnings. In a way, atheism seems to be one perfectly logical conclusion of the Protestant trajectory. True, such rebellion at least partially defines itself by what it has rejected. But isn’t a-theism also an ultimate protest against (religious) authority?
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An acquaintance from mainland China once asked me why, in American movies, it was always the solitary hero who single-handedly fought the villain and saved society. She was, of course, referring to movies like Rambo, Dirty Harry, Die Hard, and all their sequels. In Japan they have a saying, “the nail that sticks up will be nailed down,” indicating that individual ostentation is not acceptable. When I studied Chinese in Taiwan during the 1980s I wanted to live with a local family, but the veteran school counselor talked me out of it. I was surprised at his discouragement, but after twenty years of observation he was convinced that Americans in particular should not try to live with Chinese families. “They do not understand your concept of privacy,” he explained. “They will want you to be with them at all times. They will insist upon helping you with your studies, even if they do not speak pu-tong hua (the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, rare in Taiwan outside of our school). If you want to explore the city by yourself they will feel insulted.” I followed his advice and remained in the international student dormitory.
All these accounts reinforce the common perception that East Asian societies are more gregarious than Western individualistic societies. John D. Greenwood expressed reservations about this archetype in his 2003 essay, Individualism and Collectivism in Moral and Social Thought. Solitary individualism and gregarious conformity are at least ambiguous concepts not so neatly divided into a dichotomy, nor are they necessarily mutually exclusive or culturally defined.
But whatever truths or falsehoods this familiar depiction contains, certainly the myth of the American maverick exemplifies the solitary, defiant, and free individual. The loner that shows up so frequently in the genre fiction and movies of the Western has an approximate East Asian counterpart, though it is often steeped in the ancient philosophy of Daoism or the subsequent school of Buddhism heavily influenced by Daoism (called Chan in China, San in Korea, and Zen in Japan). Frequently these stories appear in martial arts lore wherein the solitary master retires to a cave and shuns society, having reached an elevated level of spirituality. But the solitude of the Asian martial arts master is a reflection of high consciousness, not rebellion against authority. So obviously the maverick in American culture draws upon a different cultural tradition.
There has, in fact, been much disagreement about the extent of American propensity toward self-sufficiency and groupthink, as Richard L. Rapson indicated in his 1967 compilation, Individualism and Conformity in the American Character. Observers like Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Jean de Crevecoeur (1735–1813), Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) and of course Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) saw individualism as a main if not defining trait of Americans. Critics such as Edward Dicey (1832–1911), James Bryce (1838–1922), and D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) saw Americans more as conformists. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized the paradox of both coinciding in American society. Obviously there must be some mixture in all societies, and the interest lies in the details.
The American maverick has served as a vicarious fantasy for those constrained by the usual limitations of the human condition. The latter is what Henry David Thoreau described as the “quiet desperation” of most men, and for that depiction Wallace Stegner criticized Thoreau as an elitist who misunderstood universal limitations that confronted the vast bulk of humanity. In any case, the maverick has major escapist appeal in the United States. More momentous is attempting to live the myth with, say, an adopted Texan accent, affected swagger, and a macho unilateral approach to foreign policy. But that is another story.
The American maverick populated the dime novels of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, Hollywood westerns and the western turned urban, usually in the personages of renegade policemen like Dirty Harry. The 1952 film High Noon was an epitome of the lone hero, and the avalanche of criticism it received from John Wayne and various McCarthyites must have stunned its makers with charges that the film was somehow un-American. Critics objected to the cowards who had left the hero Gary Cooper alone, but the lone hero himself was an exemplary western American.
Perhaps a major line of rebellious activity in American history is what we might call “righteous” rebellion. This would be resistance to all perceived injustice, whether political, economic, or social. To a major extent, it is how the nation began. Following the more famous preamble, Thomas Jefferson catalogued a long list of injustices in the Declaration of Independence. The Founders were not really radicals, but rather reasonable men who sought a transfer of power. Although Jefferson once wrote that the tree of liberty needed periodic watering with the blood of revolution, this did not become a major theme in subsequent American life. Even Jefferson changed his mind once the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror got under way.
Not all righteous rebellion was successful of course; both the Whiskey and Shay rebellions failed, though advocates in both claimed reasonable economic grounds for their revolts. In more recent times, the Civil Rights Movement very definitely falls into this category of reasonableness. This sort of rebellion is often civil, always righteous, and never really seeks to destroy the entire system it criticizes. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said in his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, he and many others merely sought to have the United States “live out the true meaning of its creed,” not destroy that creed nor adopt a new one. This is classic “reform from within” and merely seeks to rectify egregious flaws inside the system.
Along these lines, fans of the Enlightenment find recurring satisfaction in many of the philosophes’ conclusions. As Carl J. Friedrich observed in his 1958 essay, “Authority, Reason, and Discretion,” Enlightenment era philosophers sought a “reasoned” authority in rebellion against unreasoned authority, which (in their context) often meant monarchies’ self-serving Divine Right of Kings dogma.
On a less grand scale (of the petty righteous or self-righteous variety) is the common replacement of one norm for another among pseudo-iconoclasts. In this situation so-called nonconformists end up conforming to a different norm, such as often happened during the 1960s and 1970s Counterculture. Hair styles and clothing became visible badges of belonging; the wrong appearance meant exclusion, a change in appearance in ostracism. That so many hippies went on to collect their trust funds, join the Republican Party, and otherwise adopt the bourgeois lifestyle they had once so vehemently denounced only further illustrated their comparatively superficial rebellion. More recently, a similar phenomenon has arisen among self-proclaimed “anarchists” who (ironically) organize in order to conform to a common ideology.
The replacement of one norm with another even contaminates that icon of American individualism, the Westerner. After all, what was the “code of the West” but a system glorified in direct contrast to the eastern seaboard’s code? In the West a man was a real man, took the law into his own hands when necessary, joined his buddies to lynch someone once in a while, preferred killing Indians to the eastern molly coddling idea of putting them on reservations (“it’s a Western thing, you wouldn’t understand,” sort of mentality), drank, gambled, whore-mongered, and dueled as he pleased.
Of course, the larger irony in the myth of Western independence has been what scholars like Patricia Limerick and others showed us many years ago: the arid West has been the region most dependent upon the government (particularly the federal government) from the outset. Imagine the West without all its government-financed projects: no hydroelectric dams, no massive irrigation systems, no drinking water supplies for cities, no highway system to span the vast spaces unpopulated with people (thus missing a property tax base), no government grazing subsidies, no federal timber sales or mining incentives, et cetera.
But there is another interesting strain of true aversion to authority, which we might call “principled” rebellion. Principled rebellion does not attempt to reform a legal, political, or social system from within, but genuinely rejects a form of authority altogether. This is usually in defiance of perpetrators of dogma, especially ideologues masquerading (as they invariably do) as legitimate authority (i.e., the ad veracundiam fallacy). Perhaps most often, principled rebellion is directed against religious authorities, but not necessarily. In recent decades it could be directed toward any number of politically correct mantras.
For example, all sorts of hypotheses in the field of psychology defy common sense, much more so deeper scrutiny, and regularly contradict one another when (for instance) experts testify for opposite sides in a courtroom trial. Human nature will likely never lend itself completely to the scientific method of inquiry, and thus rejection of this “authority” has great potential for being well-reasoned. For another example, educational fads come and go and support an veritable industry of bureaucrats. Remember the “new math” of the late 1960s? Why was Newton’s 17th century “old math” so important to Einstein? Unfortunately, various American educational establishments often fail to understand timeless ancient wisdom regarding learning and teaching, such as the Chinese observation: “The teacher can open the door, but the student must walk through it.” Such an observation, all by itself, nullifies a great many education industry gimmicks and fads, which instead tend to get recycled decade after decade.
In both of these cases, the iconoclast senses an unreasoned authority and identifies and rejects it as such.
Without question, religious faith has provided countless millions with a great deal of emotional well-being, a personal sense of security, and useful moral codes. But a certain kind of iconoclast (often the mystic) sees all religious authority as ultimately a result of political appointment and unreasoned at even a theocratic level, and therefore illegitimate. Instead, unreasoned authority opens the door to power that can exploit superstition and manipulate the ignorant and fearful. One of Marx’s few genuine insights was in depicting institutionalized religion as an opiate of the people.
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For the solitary iconoclast, “political maverick” might sound like an oxymoron. But insofar as there are or were such people, John McCain of the 2000 presidential campaign was as much a maverick as he was not during the 2008 campaign. In 2000 he tried to sever the Republican Party from the religious right, perhaps most famously in his criticism of Bob Jones University. This genuinely rebellious stance contributed to his failure (albeit a noble one), tellingly in South Carolina, bastion of the Republican Establishment at that time. Perhaps some mavericks would have broken with the party at that point and died an obscure, if proud political independent. Instead, McCain made amends with the party and, in the process, destroyed his maverick status. By 2008 he was a parody of the maverick, having made some kind of peace with the religious right. Sarah Palin constantly repeating the (by then) purely rhetorical use of the word only exacerbated a once-genuine Republican Party dissent into mere triviality.
Questioning authority has always been a vital aspect of American democracy. As Mark Twain once wrote, “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.” But a major problem with questioning authority in the United States has been a widespread anti-intellectual aspect. Questioning authority for its own sake immediately becomes a boring, mindless conceit. Concerning this, Americans would do well to look to one of the very inventors of questioning authority in Western culture, the Jews of the ancient rabbinical tradition. Here, religious devotion cannot be separated from intellectual inquiry and mental discipline. Clearly such an approach would seem to mitigate the foolishness of self-righteous, impotent moral outrage based in ignorance, one of the common fountainheads of American rebelliousness since the 1960s. To be sure, there were serious righteous rebels of the 1960s, like Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden (both with gifted abilities); but also street dramatists like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin who, in the final analysis, seemed to contribute very little, or at least very little that endured.
Another source of superficial rebellion of late has arisen from what ultimately amounts to middle class hypocrisy. Invariably those who romanticize the rebel are those who grew up in secure, conventional circumstances. Those who grow up with genuine rebellious circumstances are more prone to learn fear, insecurity, and distrust — all the natural products of an unstable environment. Middle class American kids generally grow up comparatively privileged, comfortable, and secure. They constituted the common background of the an early twenty-first century wave of self-described anarchists found especially in Colorado, California, and Oregon.
What people often call rebellious, revolutionary, or even riotous often indicates desire for a new order, not the end of order altogether. What true revolutionaries usually want is power. If they acquire power, then they immediately become the new authority. Certainly they do not desire anarchy in a literal sense. In fact, the quaint Americans who advocated anarchy a generation ago were merely among the more disenchanted with their present social order. Much of the advocacy seemed superficial. They enjoyed the comforts of their surroundings, advocated the collapse of the state while relying upon its fruits, denounced the police until they were victims of crime, hung out in capitalistic taverns and coffee houses while pretending to be revolutionaries. As the federal trials of 2006–2007 in Eugene, Oregon, demonstrated, most came from solidly middle class backgrounds.
If press accounts were accurate, among the eco-arsonists sentenced to federal prison in 2007 was Kevin Tubbs, a former college student, turned Springfield, Oregon, homeowner. Kendall Tankersley was preparing for medical school. Daniel G. McGowan and Suzanne N. Savoie had volunteered for various charities that aided the poor, activities that have conspicuously characterized the privileged bourgeoisie since the Victorian era reconstituted noblesse oblige. Jonathan C.M. Paul had inherited so much money that, before sentencing, he had already paid a quarter-million to one of the insurance companies that had compensated for one of his arson fires. At least these and other activists cannot be charged with the more passive version of limousine liberalism. But they still fall into the privileged post-war pastime that has amounted to little more than the street theater of make-believe radical politics. For the bona fide radicals, just think of the Bolsheviks, participants in the Mao Zedong’s Long March, or those on the suicide mission that was the Tet Offensive.
Of course in an ultimate sense there is no absolute individuality any more than there is any absolute freedom. The maverick is mostly a myth. We are socially dependent creatures no matter how many cloaks we create to obscure our ties; no matter how many steps removed we are from those we depend upon for the products and services that enable our very survival and otherwise benefit our daily lives. Homo sapiens are a social species, unlike solitary species like tigers. Given these limitations, those with an instinctive iconoclasm are quite rare. They are more often loners than not. Unfortunately, the genuine maverick thus often becomes a misanthropist. This was the story of my father, whose youthful wit degenerated into angry cynicism and then chronically bitter criticism. Perhaps rebelliousness is better suited to youth for an entire host of reasons; naiveté, spiritedness, inexperience, lack of responsibility, et cetera. In an aging or elderly person, rebelliousness too often becomes an affectation, or worse. Born fools often die as such, as sort of a Young Soul counterpart to the Old Soul.
Even by his early forties, heavy drinking and cigarette smoking began showing signs of destroying my father’s health, which contributed to his foul disposition and associated violence. We kids learned to be inconspicuous lest we incur an unmerited beating, but we could not escape all of them. Even if you believe in corporal punishment, a parent being hungover and irritated is hardly just cause. But young rebels tend to make notoriously bad parents. After all, if your personal philosophy is premised upon rejecting authority, what are you going to do when you have authority as an aspect of your responsibility? As biographer Robert A. Caro has demonstrated so profoundly, possession of power often reveals deep things about its possessor.
It was a shame that the old man never gained any modicum of peace in his personal life. But those who romanticized his rebellious behavior were also prone to dismiss his dark side and also romanticize it accordingly. Among some of his associates, there was even some familiar dynamics of “blame the victim” of his abuse. Such is the lure of romanticism, I suppose.
Years ago, an editor balked when I submitted an essay describing somewhat parallel behavior in my father’s ex-best friend, Ed Abbey, who had actually abandoned some of his early children. Upon one occasion, a grown son from Abbey’s second marriage hitchhiked 400 miles to Tucson to see him, only to have his father shut the front door in his face. As a veteran hitchhiker myself (over 9,000 cross-country miles), I vicariously felt his pain. I was once in Tucson facing a 1,500 mile return journey to Oregon. There’s nothing quite like the loneliness of the long distance hitchhiker. A return journey, when you know exactly how much distance lies before you, can evoke such despair that it seems like only cosmic will power will save you.
Anyway, the clownish editor responded that Abbey had merely “marched to the beat of a different drummer.” The quoting of Thoreau’s cliché was bad enough, but the lack of insight into obvious narcissism and irresponsibility was intolerable — and yet predictable, coming from someone who lived very comfortably in one of the most expensive cities in the nation. After all, such places tend to be bastions of the sort of armchair rebelliousness that remains central to the romantic tradition.
Copyright © Will Sarvis, 2008; revised and re-posted March 2022. All Rights Reserved.