Reflection+on+American+Individuals

The American as an individual is another concept that I have been grappling with over the course of the year. When I think of the individual, I normally think of it as something to be celebrated. The American individual to me is an idea that at least previously elicited pride. Through reading The Grapes of Wrath and other works, I understood and appreciated some of Jim Casy’s ideas, and was forced to reconsider many of my notions about the individual. As I explored in my final paper, I think that individualism is an inherently American concept. It is connected with the state of our democracy, the importance of self-interested in our society, and the fascination with “being an individual” and someone who sticks out from the crowd. On this page I gave two differing looks at American individualism, Jim Casy’s, which views acting as an individual as “busting the holiness,” and John Quincy Adams’s, which celebrates the idea of the individual and the power it holds in American society. The Ralph Waldo Emerson essay on “Self-Reliance” to some extent espoused the idea of being a nonconformist, in order to be a self reliant person. The Walt Whitman poem “I Hear America Singing” is to me, a celebration of the different people and individuals that make up America. A celebration of the fact that each American has their own song and in combination, this is perceived as America. I used a photograph of Abbie Hoffman, who by conventional terms is considered an individual, as well as the art of Andy Warhol, whose vibrant pop-art works are distinctive and can be considered “different.” The idea of being different as being an individual is another perspective on what it is to be an American individual that I have heard several times. I ended with a Tom Hayden quote that I greatly enjoyed from The Port Huron Statement in that we all must have our own way of doing things. “Having a way of one’s own” is to me being a critical aspect of being an individual and the photograph beneath it was used to complement this quote. It’s an image of solitude and somebody who is clearly doing his own thing.

On the Outskirts