44 I Can Read You Like a Book
the colonies. Enough of them held a belief that the fledgling country
needed to allow common people an opportunity to succeed—so the
message hit the streets.
With its independence, the United States established a unique
culture that consisted of disparate groups, each of which assimi-
lated in its own way. We have often referred to this as the melting
pot. The melting-pot concept implies that, slowly as they cook in
the fires of a national heat, the characteristics of “typical” change
based on the percentage of the population each group represents.
Each person entering the country assimilates to his or her new
home and decides exactly how to fit in.
Southern planters and Northern industrialists, each with their
own distinct ideas about what it meant to be American, were the
super-typical. These ideas were shared by enough of the respec-
tive population to lose more than 600,000 American lives during the
war between the states. Do I believe that the super-typical merely
ordered these people to fight? No. No more than I believe the aver-
age Southerners lived similarly to Scarlett O’Hara. These people
had come to identify with very different pictures of what it meant
to be American, and the Civil War was the occasion to reconcile
those two pictures. This is hard-fought social norming.
As a result of this conflict, the freedman emerged as a new
class of American citizen. Particularly in areas where they had
been slaves, these people were treated as the sub-typical. The
Americans who had gone to war and lost that war would vilify