r was obliged to be all kinds of a
rough mechanic. The business man was merchant, manufacturer, and
storekeeper. Almost everybody was something of a politician. The number
of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly
large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge, planter,
merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most of
these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who
persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting
standards to his work, was out of place and was really inefficient. His
finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than
did the current careless and hasty product, and his higher standards and
peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of
his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which
naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and
uncritically to current standards.

It is no wonder, consequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with
distrust and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards
of achievement. Such a man did insist upon being in certain respects
better than the average; and under the prevalent economic social
conditions he did impair the consistency of feeling upon which the
pioneers rightly placed such a high value. Consequently they half
unconsciously sought to suppress men with special vocations. For the
most part this suppression was easily accomplished by the action of
ordinary social and economic motives. All the industrial, political, and
social rewards went to the man who pursued his business, professional,
or political career along regular lines; and in this way an ordinary
task and an interested motive were often imposed on men who were better
qualified for special tasks undertaken from disinterested motives. But
it was not enough to suppress the man with a special vocation by
depriving him of social and pecuniary rewards. Public opinion must be
taught to approve of the average man as the representative type of the
American democracy, so that the man with a special vocation may be
deprived of any interest or share in the American democratic tradition;
and this attempt to make the average man the representative American
democrat has persisted to the present day--that is, to a time when the
average man is no longer, as in 1830, the dominant economic factor.

It is in this way, most unfortunately, t