If you would win over a crowd of Americans, use the term rugged individualism; they will salute it like the flag. Why not?
Everyone always says that rugged individualism is the backbone, and the jawbone, of America; that a country as grand and sturdy as this could only have been built by the self-propelled and self-interested strivings of wild-eyed nonconformists, each fur-laden Daniel Boone pursuing his independent errand into the wilderness. The term is fairly precise. More aggressive than mere individuality, less narcissistic than the "me" decade, it does not refer to people who live in health clubs or on roller skates, or to the hotly cultivated yuppies who have come to mean so much to themselves. The "rugged" saves "rugged individualism" from shabbiness by implying not merely solitary but courageous action. Look. Here comes America. Davy Crockett, Thomas Edison, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford. Those fellows built a nation with their hands.
Of course, the picture is pure hokum, and everybody knows it. The West was won by wagon trains, the East by sailing ships, and they all had plenty of passengers aboard, by necessity working together. "In history," Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin explained, "even the great explorer had been the man who drew others to a common purpose." Try to imagine an individual so rugged he could raise a roof beam on his own.
In the matter of the nation's soul, the impulse was collective from the start. Our so-called Protestant ethic would appear to endorse rugged individualism as the engine of hard work, but in fact the Puritan fathers were mainly concerned with individuals as contributors to a social compact. From John Cotton's The Way of Life (1641): "If thou beest a man that lives without a calling, though thou hast two thousands to spend, yet if thou hast no calling, tending to publique good, thou art an uncleane beast." From John Winthrop (1630), the first American to see the new land as a "City upon a Hill": "If thy brother be in want and thou canst help him, thou needst not make doubt what thou shouldst doe; if thou lovest God thou must help him."
Such sentiments cannot surprise modern Americans who see in their own lifetimes far more evidence of a tame, cooperative society than an open zoo of unclean beasts. For all its apostrophizing of the open road, most of the nation dutifully drives at 55 m.p.h., willingly undergoes searches before boarding planes, humbly douses cigarettes from time to time. Even those who storm against gun control require the collectivism of lobbies to make their individual stands. The term rugged individualism was coined by Herbert Hoover only a decade before the onset of Big Government and of a war where victory depended on America's sense of belonging to the world. Behold two rugged individuals of popular culture, the Lone Ranger and Sam Spade, helping the weak and troubled, and keeping communities stable and intact by enforcing the law. How rugged can you get?