THE AMERICAN CHARACTER

An unabashedly patriotic look at 40 Americans who exemplify the nation’s principal virtues.

Like many others, Ruesterholz believes the United States occupies a privileged place in the history of nations, a beacon of liberty and innovation for others. “America has inspired more freedom in more places than ever before; that is a reason to be proud,” he writes. “By encouraging hard work and rewarding success, America is home to unprecedented wealth. Today, Americans are worth over $130 trillion, an unrivaled sum. We have a history of innovation and invention from airplanes to rocket ships and smart phones to search engines.” To show the greatness of the United States, he profiles 40 admirable citizens from diverse realms. In this collection, James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn join activists like Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and captains of commerce like Steve Jobs and Andrew Carnegie turn up along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Ruesterholz’s choices are not always the obvious ones: Along with more famous names, he discusses the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked by terrorists on 9/11, who rose up against their attackers, showing how the “darkest of evils brought out the moral courage of seemingly ordinary citizens.” Each of the eight sections in his book focuses on a defining trait of the country: “resilience, daring, faith, fairness, sacrifice, drive, industriousness, and innovativeness.” The profiles are brief—typically only a couple of pages apiece—which tends to result in less-than-searching accounts that stick to well-known information.

Ruesterholz writes in a breezy style that evinces an optimistic and infectious good cheer: “Simply put, it is better to do and fail than to live life on the sidelines, cynically criticizing the doers.” And if the individual profiles amount to biographical snapshots, collectively they reveal the dizzying diversity of America’s luminaries; for all the author’s unconcealed partisanship for America as a whole, his apolitical cast of characters transcends ideology. A kind of kaleidoscopic history of the nation emerges through the profiles, bringing into sharp relief the challenges it has faced, including war, internal strife, and economic deprivation. At times the author’s optimism overwhelms the possibility of a more balanced, nuanced account, both of the individual subjects as well as America in general. Steve Jobs was a marvelous innovator, but he was also a man of questionable integrity, a fact his profile omits. Ruesterholz nods to America’s flaws: “No nation is perfect, but what defines America is our constant striving to be more perfect, to live up to our ideals, and to be a land with more opportunity for more people than anywhere else on Earth. In their own way, each of these forty individuals helped to advance America and enrich our culture. Anyone who can learn from and model the great attributes of these men and women will lead a successful life.” He tends, however, to gloss over his subjects’ imperfections. He rightly notes that countless Black Americans have risked their lives “to protest segregation and unjust laws and to fight for racial equality” without noting that their country established those unjust laws in the first place. The author has a right to celebrate the accomplishments and virtues of the nation—but excluding its accompanying vices paints a tableau more sanguine than true.

An account of American greatness undermined by its relentless cheerleading.