For more than a century, Hollywood and advertising have been the twin engines of American identity. Generations of boys found their blueprints for manhood on the silver screen, as girls looked to magazine models. Sitcoms enshrined the family’s form, right down to the color of the picket fence; and even love came packaged with a script, from meet-cute to the grand gesture and happily-ever-after.
Hollywood tells these stories because they sell tickets, not because they’re true. But America didn’t always get its sense of self from the same place it got buttered popcorn. Once, the national ethos came not from theater kids and Mad Men but from settlers, planters, and frontiersmen, who lived liberty and self-reliance as everyday truths.
It was the Industrial Age that made America a superpower. And in that furnace, the modern American was forged, hauled into reality by the men and women who dragged timber, tarred roofs, welded steel, and shoveled coal—the backbone of American industry: the blue-collar worker.
Just as early settlers planted the seeds of liberty, blue-collar workers poured the moral concrete for the American house. And what did that mean? Rain or shine, finish the job. Your work is your reputation. Worth comes not from affirmation or pity but from being useful. Strive to be hammer-ready, hardworking, plainspoken, and humble. At the republic’s dawn, the independent farmer, owning and working his land, also stood as a cornerstone of American identity. Jefferson praised this agrarian vision, imagining a nation of small, self-sufficient farmers, while Hamilton argued for an urban, industrial economy.
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